Addenda: On The Mysticism of Coffee

This article, on the Sufi uses of coffee as mystical rite, might prove to be interesting. Two things strike me immediately, however:

1) The sleep-defying character of the coffee addict seems to pierce the veil separating days. If you maintain constant consciousness long enough to bridge the previous day's sunset with the next day's sunrise, the night/day dichotomy appears all the more arbitrary, and the distinction bewteen days losing meaning. In a sense, one steps off the wheel of time (or human at least), replacing the cyclical sunrise/sunset view with the gradualistic perspective of constantcy.

2) Coffee's ability to keep the exhausted wide awake proves its role as zombie-catalyst: those would otherwise be "dead" asleep are kept artificially vivified to accomplish who-knows-what dark work. Yet it doesn't just ground them in typical waking consciousness, for its metabolic-jolt seems to reach beyond the person, in its quest to accomplish, see, and pierce through more than is typically possible.