All summer I’ve been drinking frappe, the instant cold coffee that modern Greeks love to mix and drink, though truth be told they are more likely to drink freddo (made from espresso, not instant Nescafe) than frappe these days. The other day, to mark the official end of summer, I made a Greek coffee. [Turkish, to be precise.] Making this coffee means tuning out for about five minutes. It needs my complete attention. The amount of water is measured first. I choose the coffee cup. Do I want a single dose or a double. I fill the cup with water and then pour the water into the briki. I light the gas stove, place the briki on top and add two teaspoons of Greek coffee and half a teaspoon of sugar. I stir slowly, carefully, the coffee doesn’t want to be forced. I reduce the flame. The coffee doesn’t want to forced. It likes to boil slowly. It will rise, slowly. It likes a slow stir so that luscious kaimaki can form. I have to watch it. This is not instant coffee, the pot will not ring when ready. It is not an espresso machine, it will not stop when it fills the cup with the measured dose. This coffee will spil over if I don’t focus, if I don’t ignore everything else that is going on in the world and focus on it completely.

But this is hard. I’m a multi-tasker. Thanks to collaborative technology I can do numerous things at once. But Greek coffee brewing is a traditional task, it cannot be quickened. Or can it? Last year, for the first time, a couple of our patrons ordering Greek coffee asked: ‘Do you make it with a briki?’ ‘Of course!’ I’d answer, and think, ‘Idiot!’ Greek coffee is coffee brewed in a briki! Duh! It goes without saying. Er. Wrong. I also discovered last year that cafes around Greece are now making Greek coffee in an espresso machine. Horror! Forcing Greek coffee? Oh, the violence of the espresso machine! This year, EVERY customer asked me if we make our Greek coffee in a briki. I told them that we did and we spoke of the shameful cafes that make Greek coffee in coffee machines. Machine-made coffee is undrinkable. More than that, unthinkable!

So, returning to my task at hand. The slow task of brewing this traditional coffee. It has become one of the only tasks that I do without interruption and it has taken all of my energy to perfect. At first, I’d put the briki on the fire and go off and do something only to find that the water had boiled and was spilling over. I then managed to discipline myself to remaining poised over the briki until I’d added the coffee and sugar and stirred the coffee, only to find that I’d lost myself again, thought of another task and gone off and forgotten the coffee only to return and find the thick-grained substance to have spilled out and over everything, turning off the gas fire in the meantime.

I still forget myself when I make the coffee, but when I am able to sustain concentration, for those few minutes, it is truly an act of excellence. To sustain focus on the one task, to watch every moment of this coffee: the initial plop of coffee and sugar, the slow stir dissolving it into the water as the water warms and softens, the slow heaving boil becoming some other substance rich and full, the tiny bubbling readiness of it all, and finally the rising of it, up and up and up until it reaches, ready now, the top of the briki. It’s all an exercise I try to perfect. It sounds trite, I’m sure, but I try to focus on the coffee brewing task, a task (like so many other mundane tasks) we often surrender to machines, and when I do that it seems that time slows down. Taking longer to do a thing, seems to make time slow down. And when that happens I seem to discover knew things, or remember things I’d forgotten.

In his novel, Slowness, Milan Kundera writes:

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

It is true. Slowness reconnects me with tradition. Everything in the past was slower. Going slower, slowing things down, remembering traditional recipes for coffee and food, gardening, growing our own vegetables, all this slows things down, and is almost a backwards movement. That’s why it is linked with memory. Traditional tasks occupy the body and free the mind. The mind tunes out, becomes vacant for a while, and then is filled up again, with thoughts of the past. Memory is charged. Or at least, it seems that way to me. In any case it is an interesting experiment, and that is all.

We live in a technological society, not a traditional one. We are technology, everything we do (except when we take time out to make Greek coffee!) is technological, hence fast. Speed is what we are about. And we only feel alive when we are doing many things, quickly.

Kundera, again:

Speed is the form of ecstasy the technological revolution has bestowed on man.

He’s echoing Paul Virilio’s dromolgy thesis that speed is the essence of our techno-enriched lives.

It is violent. Like forcing Greek coffee through an espresso machine.