Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF MISIA’S GRINDER

People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things. Animals sense that they live more intensely than plants and things. Plants dream that they live more intensely than things. But things last, and this lasting is more alive than anything else.

Misia’s grinder came into being because of someone’s hands combining wood, china and brass into a single object. The wood, china and brass made the idea of grinding materialise. Grinding coffee beans to pour boiling water on them afterwards. There is no one of whom it could be said that he invented the grinder, because creating is merely reminding yourself of what exists beyond time, in other words, since time began. Man is incapable of creating out of nothing – that is a divine skill.

The grinder has a belly made of white china, and in the belly an opening, in which a small wooden drawer collects the fruits of its labour. The belly is covered with a brass hat, with a handle ending in a bit of wood. The hat has a closing hole, into which the rattling coffee beans are poured.

The grinder was made in some factory workshop, and then ended up at someone’s house, where every morning it ground coffee. Hands held it, warm and alive. They pressed it to someone’s breasts, where under calico or flannel a human heart was beating. Then the impetus of war transferred it from a safe shelf in the kitchen to a box with other objects, into valises and sacks, into train carriages, in which people pushed ahead in panic-stricken flight from violent death. Like every other thing, the grinder absorbed all the world’s confusion: images of trains under fire, idle rivulets of blood, and abandoned houses, as a different wind played with their windows every year. It absorbed the warmth of human bodies going cold and the despair of abandoning the familiar. Hands touched it, and they all brushed it with an immeasurable quantity of thoughts and emotions. The grinder accepted them, because all kinds of matter have this capacity – to arrest whatever is fleeting and transitory.

Michał had found it far away in the East, and had hidden it in his army rucksack as a spoil of war. That evening when the soldiers stopped for the night he had sniffed its drawer – it smelled of safety, coffee, home.

Misia took the grinder outside to the bench in front of the house and turned the handle. Then the grinder ran lightly, as if it were playing with her. Misia watched the world from the bench, and the grinder turned and ground empty space. But one day Genowefa tipped a handful of black beans into it and told it to grind them. Then the handle no longer turned as smoothly. The grinder choked, and slowly, systematically, began to work and to creak. The playing was over. There was so much gravity in the grinder’s work that no one would have dared to stop it now. It became nothing but grinding. And then the grinder, Misia and the whole world were united by the odour of freshly ground coffee.

If you take a close look at an object, with your eyes closed to avoid being deceived by the appearances that things exude around themselves, if you allow yourself to be mistrustful, you can see their true faces, at least for a moment.

Things are beings steeped in another reality, where there is no time or motion. Only their surface can be seen. The rest, hidden elsewhere, defines the significance and meaning of each material object. A coffee grinder, for example.

The grinder is just such a piece of material infused with the concept of grinding.

Grinders grind, and that is why they exist. But no one knows what the grinder means in general. Perhaps the grinder is a splinter off some total, fundamental law of transformation, a law without which this world could not go round or would be completely different. Perhaps coffee grinders are the axis of reality, around which everything turns and unwinds, perhaps they are more important for the world than people. And perhaps Misia’s one single grinder is the pillar of what is called Primeval.