SUMMER FLANEUR – 50 Gms

“You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I ?”…….

As much as words of Robert Graves put aside the idea of love, to confront how we fear its ‘running out’, pointing out the naivety of thinking about love as the glue for togetherness, in his poem ‘Counting the beats’, it also summarizes the relationship we have to our cities and neighborhoods. A togetherness that exists beyond the changing meaning of love, accommodating all the emotions ranging from apathy to a joy that is “Not there but here, (He whispers) only here, As we are, here, together, now and here, Always you and I”.

Einstein’s relativistic principle describes the relationship of the celestial saunterers and the space that they occupy in a single line “Matter tells space how to curve and space tells matter how to move.” More than its insightful brilliance, just like Robert Graves, notice the elegance with which they both escort out the notion of a required force (or love) as a prerequisite for togetherness.  Waiting to be found, still somewhat obscure, is a profound revelation, very much like the gap you don’t see, in the constellation where once a star used to be – “Of course, its ‘If no more love, then, only you and I’! Of course, its ‘I tell you how to curve, You tell me how to move’ – Gravity, love may be of consequence but aren’t why we are together!”. And of course, we are most together in movement, both with ourselves and those we circle around.

Obvious, is not how one would choose to describe the poetic-relativistic observation, neither in the movements of the celestial saunterers, nor in the ‘togetherness’ of flânerie, as we move through the space around us, we call our neighborhoods and cities, in the simplest act of walking. A flaneur is a walking heart that doesn’t know what it doesn’t have so it looks everywhere; anywhere; seeing spaces as something to be perceived; thereby creating ‘places’ out of spaces, through movement, by investing meaning and finding meaning in return. But obvious or not, the fact that space itself curves while you walk the streets would indeed explain how, after a while, when your steps begin to make their own decisions, you end up tracing curves to both nowhere and everywhere in the city.

Walking, whether in the city or in the woods, is the most obvious and obscure thing in the world; walking that wanders so readily into (and out of!) philosophy, landscape, allegory, curiosity, nostalgia and heartbreak. Mary Oliver walked as she wrote, bowing often to the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, hearing them whisper “it’s simple, Stay a while”, jotting down in her little notebook “…and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often.”  Lauren Elkin in her book ‘Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London’ leaned against lamp posts and restaurant walls as she found meaning, and as it should be with meaning, when found, needs to be marked, else it’s lost; She writes:

“Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.

Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home. There’s a small pleasure in seeing how well I’ve come to know the city through my wanderings on foot, crossing through different neighbourhoods of the city, some I used to know quite well, others I may not have seen in a while, like getting reacquainted with someone I once met at a party”.

Sometimes I walk because I have things on my mind, and walking helps me sort them out. “Solvitur ambulando, as they say”.

“Solved by walking” indeed! Strange are the places where the inner voices become audible. Like, where Baudelaire first found significance walking with his own yearning; a togetherness in the fleeting beauty of the mysterious and alluring passante, passing him by, marked in his poem ‘À une passante : To a Female Passerby’, from Les Fleurs du Mal, (who is thought to have been a woman of the night).  Baudelaire can barely gauge her: she is too fast (but at the same time, statuesque). He is least concerned, who she might actually be. For him, she embodies the fleeting nature of beauty, longing, mystery and charm, that is both significant and sufficient even if momentary and not born out of deliberation.

Much in the passion of Baudelaire’s flânerie, and his momentary but significant and sufficient passante we list this Yabukita too, though a little more we were, in search and anticipation of the chocolate its brew contains, becoming Flaneurs ourselves, having sauntered the curves of Yabukita’s streets previously, in Desiderata and Spleen, themselves. Both full of wisdom and multitudes but nonetheless Baudelarian!  Aroma of chocolate cake crust is what you first notice of the Flaneur, from the dry leaves to the brew itself and as if the space itself curves to deliver the chocolate to your palette, you can’t help but ‘walk slowly’. Hints of woodiness, caramel and even coconuts, radiate unassumingly to complement the chocolate with a floral reminder to ‘Bow often’.

As for the aftertaste, you will hear it whisper ‘stay awhile’!

And if you find an unexpected ‘edge’ to the flaneur, a kind of mild offence to being led by its descriptive sensibilities, it will simply be its Baudelarian expression reminding you, once again to “Be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish. So as not to be the martyred slaves of time” and a little bit of us, who keep finding simplicity in teas and its expressions, only to trace it back to it’s chaotic and complicated origins. We know, you bear it too.