ephemera: Tea

mysterous monks and flower petals

I love the idea of tea. I love the idea of a hot cup on a cold day, the mug warming my hands and the feeling of the hot liquid spreading inside. For me, tea has always been a solitary thing. Coffee is more social. I go out for coffee, even if I don’t order it whatever it is we’re doing is still “going out for coffee” kind of like kleenex has become a catch-all for tissue no matter what brand you buy. But tea, that’s something I do by myself, swaddled in a blanket and watching the cursor blink accusingly on the screen.

Tobacco reached the Christian world along with the revolution of the Renaissance and the Reformation, when the Middle Ages were crumbling and the modern epoch, with its rationalism, was beginning. One might say that reason, starved and benumbed by theology, to revive and free itself, needed the help of some harmless stimulant that should not intoxicate it with enthusiasm and then stupdfy it with illusions and bestality, as happens with the old alcholic drinks that lead to drunkeness. For this, to help sick reason, tobacco came from America. And with it chocolate. And from Abyssinia and Arabia, about the same time, came coffee. And tea made its appearance from the Far East.

Fernando Ortiz, cited in Local Histories/Global Designs by Walter Mignolo.

Like most of you I have a cupboard full of teas that I have stored for years and never consumed. I’ve got all manner of herbal and flavoured teas that languish, containers stacked in dark cupboards, while I drink Tetley. That’s my brand, Tetley tea in the round bags which I know is a marketing gimmick but still. And their flip top boxes, which is also marketing. The gremlins of Madison Ave.

I decided that I would begin to work my way through all these teas that I have. Not buying another box until I’ve finished what I’ve got and, since we’re talking about things that don’t last I’m going to spend some of these essays telling you about the tea that I’m drinking and what connections these teas create with the world outside.

First up is monk’s blend. I don’t know where I got it or how long it’s been in my cupboard. It’s a loose leaf tea made of three black teas along with calendula and safflower petals. At least when I look at the various websites the pictures of the tea described in those terms most closely match what I have in my cupboard. These websites I’m reading talk about “crisp notes of apple and malty finish” or a “dynamic combination of vanilla and grenadine.” The vanilla thing tracks. If I think about the flavours in this tea I can taste the vanilla. Not sure about the apple, grenadine, or that malty finish which makes me think of malt vinegar. The tea doesn’t taste anything like that.

One website calls it a “mysterious blend” that it was, perhaps, created by Tibetan monks and infused with universal life energy which may be a reasonable way to talk about caffeine. I do like to start my day with a nice cup of universal life energy. It’s beautiful copy, apparently Franciscan monks also drank this blend to stay awake during long periods of meditation. The writer even speculates that Buddhist and Taoist monks drank it too. I don’t know about that, that’s a lot of monks across a wide geography. On the David’s Tea webpage their Monk’s Blend (now called Buddha Blend) is a mix of white, green, and oolong teas inspired by tea blends enjoyed by monks in rural China.

Is rural China a euphemism for Tibet? I suppose it would make sense that a large corporation like DavidsTea would use that kind of euphemism rather than admit that Tibet is it’s own place.

So what do we make of this mysterious tea, consumed by meditating monks which arrived in the west to wake us from our theological stupor? This tea connected in our imagination if not in reality with mystical Tibet and it’s hidden world of monks and bells and prayer flags. These descriptions make me think of Tsering Yangzom Lama’s book, We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies which I’ve written about before. It is a fictional memoir of Tibet narrated in part by Dalma who was born in a refugee camp but is now living in Toronto. She laments:

All my life I’ve wanted to study my people. Our history, ideas, and literature. But I’ve never known how to make it happen. How can I study Tibet without access to it? So I’m left with one narrow corridor: I must find a way to do it in the west, within your world.

How is that even possible? How can we possibly know another place so long as we remain, even just mentally, within the colonial center? So long as we subscribe to western ideas about progress and civilization, so long as we insist on strategies to maintain these ideas that other and isolate. What do we truly know of it unless we listen to those who exist within that place. This monk’s blend tea, this mix of black teas and petals made mysterious by associating it with a country and a people made mysterious, made strange and other so that we don’t have to think about them as people like ourselves.

And how mysterious can it be when transnational corporations like DavidsTea are making it by the ton?