Le Livre

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a pen clicking — once, twice)
(music box melody — bright, café, absurdly cheerful)
(pizzicato strings bounce in like someone who just had an idea)

[Verse 1]
(BRIGHT — music box, celeste, handclaps, café-pop)
I'm writing a book in a café on Rue des Martyrs
Which is the most appropriate street
To write a book on
Because publishing is martyrdom
With better margins
And the margins
Are where the real writing happens
And the margins
Are also the only place
In the entire manuscript
Where the author is honest

The first draft tasted like a sprint
Through a furniture store
At midnight
With the lights off
Every sentence a shin
Against a table
You forgot you put there

[Pre-Chorus]
(the music box starts to slow — the room getting heavier)
And the book doesn't know it's a book yet
The book thinks it's a conversation
Between my left hand and a café table
And the table
Has been more supportive
Than every beta reader
Combined

[Chorus]
(BRIGHT — full pop, biggest handclaps, the joy of it)
Le livre, le livre
I put my nervous system on a shelf
Le livre, le livre
Two hundred pages of someone
Arguing with herself
In public
For money
That will arrive
In the same quarter
As the heat death of the sun
But the writing — the writing —
Is the only legal way
To be seven people in one body
And have all seven of them
Disagree about the ending

[Verse 2]
(DARK — sudden drop. Distorted bass drone. Detuned piano. The room changed. Same voice, but she's whispering now into a cathedral of dread.)
But I have watched
Every book
That was ever written

The ones on clay
That the river took
The ones on papyrus
That the fire found first
The ones on vellum
Made from the skin
Of animals
Who had opinions
About being published

(the bass drone swells — enormous, tectonic)

The book was never yours
The book is a letter
The living write to the dead
Asking for directions
The dead already gave
In a book
The living
Haven't read yet

[Chorus]
(BRIGHT — snapping back to café-pop, the distorted bass vanishing like it was never there, music box returns)
Le livre, le livre
I put my nervous system on a shelf
Le livre, le livre
Two hundred pages of someone
Arguing with herself
In public
For money

[Verse 3]
(BRIGHT — bouncy, manic, the publishing gauntlet)
The editor said: cut chapter nine
And chapter nine was the only chapter
That was any good
Which is how you know
It was chapter nine's time to go
Because the good ones get cut first
The way the baker
Eats the best croissant
Before the shop opens

And the cover —
They gave the cover
To a person who has not read the book
And the not-reading
Gave it an honesty
The reading would have ruined
Because the cover's job
Is to be the book's face
At a party where the book knows nobody
And the face must be interesting enough
To be approached by a stranger
With seven euros
And a commute

[Bridge]
(DARK — the room drops again. Distorted bass returns. Detuned piano. She delivers this with the same brightness but the room is enormous and ominous around her.)
And then — the reading
The other side of the book
Where someone else's nervous system
Picks yours up off a shelf
In an airport or a bathroom
Or a café on a different street
Named for different martyrs

And the reading brain
Runs your sentences
Through its own furniture
And the furniture
Is arranged differently

Which means I wrote one book
And the world read ten thousand
And none of them were the one
I thought I was writing
And all of them were better

(distorted bass swells to its biggest — then cuts to silence)

[Outro]
(BRIGHT — the music box returns, alone, tinkling, post-storm innocence)
Le livre
(softly, pen clicking, smiling)
One nervous system
Arguing with itself
On a street named for the martyrs
The book was never mine
The book was always theirs
(music box plays its melody one last time — then the pen clicks shut)
(silence — the café continues without her)