Flâneur

Lyrics

[Intro]
(harp arpeggios — wandering, no destination)
(celeste enters like light through a glass arcade ceiling)
(a walking tempo that keeps almost-stopping and starting again)

[Verse 1]
Baudelaire described me once — the flâneur —
A person whose vocation is the pavement and the drift
He meant a man but I've been walking these arcades
Since before the glass was fitted and the iron had its lift

The locus coeruleus is set to wander
The norepinephrine dialed to explore
The brain has two settings — exploit what you know
Or abandon the map and look for a door
That doesn't exist yet
That only appears to those
Who were following a cat
Through someone else's clothes

[Pre-Chorus]
(flute enters, impressionistic)
And the afternoon has the architecture
Of a sentence that keeps changing its mind
Every clause is a left turn
Every comma a courtyard I wasn't meant to find

[Chorus]
(building — strings, harp, celeste, the dreamy waltz expanding)
Flâneur, flâneur
The brain in exploration mode
Flâneur, flâneur
Every synapse on an unmapped road
The exploit says stay with what you know
The explore says what if there's more
And the flâneur is the nerve
To walk through the door
That isn't a door

[Verse 2]
(just voice and harp, drifting)
I passed a shop that sold only globes
Each one slightly wrong — the continents had drifted
Like memories of geography
After the remembering has shifted

I passed a woman playing Satie on an upright
In a courtyard full of rain and no umbrella
Her playing had the quality of someone
Who had mistaken discipline for something less stellar
And let it go — and what was left
Was honest in the way that weather's honest

[Pre-Chorus]
(strings shimmer, the waltz floating)
And the dopamine has stopped predicting
And the locus coeruleus has stopped placing its bet
And the afternoon is dissolving at the edges
The way watercolours do when the paper's wet

[Chorus]
(full dreamy arrangement)
Flâneur, flâneur
The brain in exploration mode
Flâneur, flâneur
Every synapse on an unmapped road
The exploit says stay with what you know
The explore says what if there's more
And the flâneur is the nerve
To walk through the door
That isn't a door

[Bridge]
(everything dissolves — just voice and celeste, floating)
And at the end of a passage
That smelled like the opinion of a staircase
That had seen better centuries
There was a courtyard
With a lemon tree
And a chair
And nothing else

And I sat down
And the lemon tree didn't ask me
What I was looking for
And I didn't tell it
And that was the most productive conversation
I've had all day

(strings enter — the dream becoming gentle)

The explore-exploit tradeoff resolved itself
Not by choosing
But by arriving somewhere
That didn't require a choice

Ikigai's back door
The one only the flâneur can find
Purpose through purposelessness
The lemon tree
The chair
The mind

[Outro]
(the dreamy waltz dissolves like watercolour)
Flâneur, flâneur
(softly, almost talking to herself)
The door that isn't a door
The chair that was waiting
For someone who wasn't looking
(harp wanders off — no resolution, no final chord, just drifting)
(footsteps — unhurried, aimless, fading in no particular direction)