Cafes and Grand Narratives

Cafes are starting to function as grand narrative observatories again

This essay is part of the Protocol Narratives series

The mathematician Paul Erdos thought of his work as turning coffee into theorems. I’ve often thought of my work as turning coffee into grand narratives. Specifically, coffee consumed in cafes (I think this was also true of Erdos — his gang of Hungarian mathematicians did a lot of their best work in cafes). Coffee consumed at home or in an office doesn’t do the trick. The environment is too controlled, closed, and predictable. It doesn’t offer a mild-psychotropic-augmented window into the wider world beyond domestic and corporate walls.

Cafes have recently started working for me again, after several years where they weren’t. I’ve found a cafe near my new apartment in Kirkland where I find I can get creative and do some coffee-to-grand-narrative processing again.

In Hollywood between 2020-23, I’d still go to cafes on occasion, but it was usually just for the exercise, or to meet people, or to do some practical and mundane getting-things-done type workflow wrangling. For nearly 3 years, the coffee-to-grand-narrative machine was broken. I couldn’t brainstorm. I couldn’t make mind maps. I couldn’t write in cafes.

For a while. I was worried this had to do with my own age and declining grand-theorizing energy. I’d sit there with my coffee, and stare at a blank notebook page, fully intending to think Big Thoughts,™ but end up making a list of admin chores instead. Had I run out of ideas and thoughts worth sharing?

Now that it’s starting to come back, I think I understand what actually happened. The machine broke because cafes in normal times are local windows into prevailing grand narratives. The invisible ley lines of the magic that makes the world go around in any given era flow through cafes, where they become just slightly visible. But through the pandemic, this function broke down. The ley lines ran dry.