Of Tea And Morning Rituals

A new year. A new semester. I am back in my cramped apartment in Austin after a fairly disastrous MLA. For those of you unfamiliar with the banal rituals of American academia, MLA is an acronym. Modern Language Association. That's what it stands for. We meet once a year in January-- the literary scholars, teachers and instructors of literature – mostly in a cold, northern city-- to talk about books in a language that would probably elude most writers who wrote those books in the first place. But this annual conference also doubles up as a venue for interviews for teaching and research jobs in academia. I was one of the lucky ones. Even in the midst of this recession, a gradually vanishing market of tenure-track jobs, I had been able to bag three interviews. And, I had tanked them. For reasons that would require a whole different essay to write about.

 A new year. A new semester stretches before me. An unfinished dissertation. And I have tanked three interviews. I run in my fingers through the pages I have written. Read a line here, a paragraph there. What is the story I am telling here? Is it a story at all? Or is it just my commentary on stories others have told? In this effort to explain, tear apart and glue together others' stories, I fear that I will lose track of my own. And in the midst of it all, I begin to take note of the process of making my morning tea. Obsessively. I wake up around 5 A.M., the world outside my window still dark except for a porch light or two. Although in the predominantly Latino working-class apartment complex I live in, life has already begun: pick-up trucks are roaring right outside my kitchen window, horns are blaring impatiently as drivers wait for their work-partners to emerge from their respective apartments. Pretty soon, I will slip into my blue flannel dressing gown, sit on my bed sipping on the tea, read some poems before scribbling a few lines myself. That year, between the month of February and March, I had written twenty two poems. All of them written, two or three lines at a time, while sipping in my morning cup of tea. Before sunrise.

      

 And that time, when I sipped on my tea, read and wrote, the time that never stretched more than thirty-five minutes, was also the time when I had felt most like myself. I would have written most human, but that would be a little too dramatic. So, I would leave it at most myself. Here I am, my fingers wrapped around the warmth of the ceramic that has been heated up by the heat of the tea, and I am reading. Reading not because I need to explain something to my students. Not because I would have to add a paragraph of literature review in the third chapter of my dissertation. I am reading because something in me tells me I still can empathize with someone else's story. I am reading because I still have not forgotten how language can make and break. I am writing not because I would have to please my committee members. The two or three lines I would etch on the pages of this notebook would not fetch me a job. In these poems, I do not have to be the responsible scholar. Here, I can be loud, angry and destructive.

But what holds together this morning ritual of mine are not the books I read. Or the lines I write. Or my attempts to “feel human” beyond the regimes of paid work. After all, what can be more human than the schedules of wage slavery as well as the feelings of boredom and exhaustion that come with it?

What holds this morning ritual of mine, dear reader, is this cup of tea.

In fact, this ritual begins with my very act of making that cup of tea. The way I divide it up into smaller tasks-- washing the tea kettle, filling it up with water, putting it on the stove to heat up, throwing in the tea leaves, putting the lid back on, watch the water change color, slip in a spoonful of sugar into the tea-cup. Of all these things, what I love most to watch is how the water, when in contact with the tea leaves and the fire, change color. From a shade of no-colorness it becomes brown-- the color of mahogany. It is during these moments of watching the shadelessness of boiling water acquire this deer-brown that I make myself confront something very very simple. Yet mysterious.

That things change. But they rarely change when left alone. And even as I write this line, I hear a voice inside my head: of course things change by themselves. Haven't you seen those old houses by the roadside falling apart under the weight o the banyan saplings growing through them? In the same way, if I leave this bag of tea leaves on my kitchen counter, it will change. In all probability. It will grow mold, will be reduced to half by the itinerant roaches and bugs, and eventually will cease to exist. But that is hardly the change I want to see. For the change to be anything close to what I want to see, it is me who will have to work on it. These two hands that I have, will have to scrub the surface of the tea kettle, will have to take hold of the metallic cold of the spoon, dip it into the bag of tea leaves, fill the kettle with water, switch on the stove. These two hands. These ten fingers.

The semester before I was applying for academic jobs for the first time. I was writing cover letters, trying to list my accomplishments in prose. I was trying to sum up my teaching philosophy, while being aware of the fact that I am chasing after the impossible. After all, every class I have taught so far had demanded a new set of rules. Every student I have come across so far had asked for an individualized pedagogy. Yet, here I was trying to sum up those very things that cannot be summed up in three neat paragraphs. The same thing with my writing sample. Every sentence I have written so far for my dissertation seemed repetitive, derivative. But it wasn't supposed to be that way: all I had to do was to choose the best twenty pages of my dissertation and get it out. That's what every instruction manual says. But even as I sifted through the good hundred and fifty pages I had written so far, I could not trace the best. All I had before me were this stale prose, run-on sentence after run-on sentence, big words and citations of what others had said before me. During those moments, I would often wonder: are all academic writings supposed to be derivative, after all? Since these philosophical ruminations are not exactly conducive to meet strict deadlines, I spent six hours putting together an application packet when in other conditions three hours would have been suffice.

On top of that, I was teaching and trying to make some progress on the dissertation. Which meant I was perusing stacks and stacks of academic articles and books, trying to figure out the one original thing I might have to say from among them. In the midst of it all, I thought, if I really have any poems or stories brimming within me, they surely would have pushed through me and forced their ways into paper. Isn't that what creativity is supposed to be? Spontaneous and beyond any regimes of time and discipline? Consequently, I did not try to set up a time which would be reserved just for that-- my writing. I wrote only one poem that semester. And even that one, lacks teeth and claws.

 Obviously, I wasn't using my fingers too much that semester. Not in the way that would have made a difference to my life as a writer. No, I did not have any tea ritual, or any such small ritual for that matter. I gulped down my tea in the midst of several other activities-- while dressing up for the day, grading student papers, tying my shoelaces. And when I made tea, I rarely watched the process. I put the water to warm in the teakettle while I brushed my teeth. I threw in the tealeaves and let them brew while I sliced fruit for lunch.

Something did change when I began to pay attention to the boiling water, the tealeaves brewing in them, and their final transformation to this liquid brown concoction. When I begn to see how my two hands, these ten fingers relate to the ingredients and objects involved-- the teakettle, tea leaves, water and heat. And when I would sit down to write, none other than these hands would write on white paper, transform this empty notebook into an archive of my emotions, aspirations, imagined existences-- articulated in forms, rhyme schemes, stanzas. For more than two months, when I had felt hopeless about the fate of my professional work, was facing the prospect of imminent unemployment, yet could not find enough conviction in it to go on trying, it is the very mundane act of making my first cup of tea, witnessing the process of the brewing of tea leaves change the color of boiling water, that reassured me of the deliberate nature of most creative activities.