I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.
—R. Buckminster Fuller
Many authors have worked in cafes. The writer scribbling in a notebook, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee or whisky in the corner of a bar or brasserie is a familiar trope. David Mamet summarized the allure of writing in crowded public spaces in his Writing in Restaurants. Gurdjieff penned his thousand-page opus Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson in the Cafe de la Paix in Paris. On a much humbler scale, I wrote most of the several hundred Esteemed Reader columns in some cafe or another in the Hudson Valley over the last 30 years.
Today I am sitting at a counter in front of a window overlooking a swollen stream running through the center of the town. The flowing gray-green water gathers into turbulent foam as it goes over rocks. The foam takes the shape of fractals, branching out in microcosmic similitudes, as one sees in illustrations of the Mandelbrot Set. The stream is a stream because it has banks with water flowing between. Yet the stream is not the water, or more precisely, the stream is not composed of the particular water that is apparent in any moment. Rather the stream is a stream because new water spills between the banks in a continuous flow.
The stream appears to be a thing, and indeed the word is a noun. Yet the thing is only a thing because it is a process in motion. The moment new water ceases to flow, or the water is dammed or overflows the banks, the stream becomes something else—a pond or a marsh, or is simply absorbed into the soil as irrigation.
I think this is why I appreciate writing in cafes. A cafe is a cafe only because a stream of people flows through. They stop at the counter or at a table, exchange words and emanations, take in and transform food, and move on. At the same time as people enter in front, the raw materials enter the cafe through the rear. The cooks prep and combine ingredients into recipes, transforming them into dishes with sauces and heat. In this sense, the cafe is also a process, inasmuch as it is a thing.
In physics, we are presented with the paradox of light being both wave and particle. And indeed, every recognizable thing can be understood both in terms of its material and vibrational aspects. In the life of the body, 50 billion cells are born and die every day but are held in a pattern of life imposed by an implicit “recipe,” pattern, or vibration.
I recall a Hawaiian explaining how the Polynesians were able to find the Hawaiian Islands, so minuscule in the vastness of the Pacific. He told me they navigated the ocean in their outrigger canoes using the water currents, rather than the land, as reference. This technique was verified by Thor Heyerdahl who traversed thousands of miles of ocean on his raft, Kon-Tiki, in the middle of the 20th century. In other words, these navigators followed the flow, or vibrational pattern, of the current rather than navigating between fixed objects.
Though linguists argue the fine points, it is clear that several Native American languages eschewed the use of the noun and instead understood everything as a verb, which is to say as a process in motion. In this sense, a stream “is streaming,” a tree “is treeing,” and a horse “is horsing.” The closest and most consistent word in English is “being.” A being is being, a process—not a thing.
It seems to me that a part of the malaise of meaningless that faces humanity in the current epoch stems from a bias toward the particulate aspect of things. We believe that the particle or thing-ness of the world is what makes things real, perceptible, and measurable because this is the lens through which we have been trained to perceive. The result is an objectification of everything.
To see the world as an interplay of innumerable dynamic interconnected processes reveals the magnitude of a mystery. Being unmoored from objects as reference points can be overwhelming if not terrifying. Nevertheless, I think growing our worldview beyond the prevalent but primitive views of reductionism and atomism will open new portals to harmony within nature and humanity.
This article appears in May 2023.
