Lamento

Belonging is where thought goes to die and other considerations from the latter half of 2025.

Dear reader,

Publishing on screens these days feels, to me, like fucking a corpse, writing on/into a vacated body.

Disgusting? Exactly.

It’s not you, it’s me. Or at least how the screen has trained us both to read and write toward belonging. To see or offer to be seen only what will leave us unaltered, which - given the impossibility of sightful unchangeability - requires that we either blind ourselves, harden ourselves, or both.

I don’t particularly care to do that. Instead…

I’m learning to sing Opera and Gregorian Chant and to practice Tai Chi (though I refuse to buy the shoes; I’m maxed out on cult memberships for this lifetime). I’ve been having a lot of fun lately mailing physical writing that I can never refer back to and have no record of (sometimes I even draw pictures tehehe). A third sentence would complete this paragraph, but the rest of my “free” time is spent driving my kid around and attending to other domestic duties.

All of the above, upon reflection, is an exercise in relinquishing control. I remember the first time I sang with enough force for the sound waves to bounce off the walls (I watched them quiver) and vibrate back through me. It was Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna, based on the Greek mythological account of Ariadne’s abandonment by Theseus (after she saved his bitch ass from her monster half-brother, the Minotaur). “Lasciatemi morire,” she sings from the seashore of a remote island, upon waking to find herself alone and the ship gone. “Let me die.”

My teacher, Jane, had had me bend from the hips and inhale as I unfolded myself a couple counts before my first note. My own voice unnerved me. I wanted both to never do that again and to do it every time. The latter, ironically, a path to the former. How can desire be both confirmation of possibility and an impediment to its realization?

Anyway, below are several frightfully incomplete thoughts from my Notes app and 3D notebooks and some recent-ish photos (truly unprecedented).

i.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, because of the logic underlying that question: that there is a category of people who should be protected due to some quality or another from the harsh realities of life. Which would also suggest that there is a category of people who are rightfully unprotected in the absence of that quality.

Everyone is trying to pass for belonging in whatever has been modeled for them as the protection-worthy category. Not realizing that it’s the passing (which we are all doing, some more convincingly than others) that fuels the suffering insofar as the key to passing is to, at minimum, accept and, equally if not more commonly, to insist upon the unworthiness of the other.

The answer to “why is this happening to me” is always “precisely because I believe it shouldn’t be.” Because the flip side of why is this happening to me is always why isn’t this happening to them instead. Haven’t I done enough to insulate myself from such outcomes?

I’m not talking about some Theosophical what-you-think-is-what-you-get bullshit. The fix be the fix.

Popping hulls at an Ojibwe wild rice camp demonstration at Lake Itasca. The older gentleman leading the camp said I was the perfect size to dance on the rice - if only I had the moccasins. He wasn’t trying to flatter me, but I was flattered.

ii.

I’m scared of my manuscript. Perhaps because it has the word “man” in it.

iii.

[Or…] Have you ever considered that it’s not the bad thing happening to the good people but the good people happening to the bad thing?

That the bad thing in the hands of bad people can only ever be a bad thing but that the bad thing in the hands of good people can be neutralized, by the choice made by the person happening to it to not let the bad thing turn them out. But part of choosing to happen to the bad thing and not let it happen to you is also not believing yourself a “good person”, singular, better, because of that choice.

From a chaotic (as one should be) antique shop in a quaint Wisconsin riverside town. The owner told us that if we didn’t have cash, we could send him checks. Idk, guys. Feel like those rural Conservatives might have something we could learn from there.

iv.

Potholes as stigmata…

v.

Narcissism. When someone has been told they’re wrong so much when they knew they were not that their ability to know when they actually are wrong has been chronically impaired.

vi.

Is tomorrow really another day, Scarlet?

vii.

Once you realize how distorted your view of yourself is it becomes much easier to acknowledge how distorted your view of others must be. I’ve been with me 24 hours a day 365 days a year for 32 years and [51.5] weeks. I could find innumerable soundbites that confirm the best and worst of my character. Are any of them truly representative of who I am?

A-a-agnus De-e-e-iii…

“Y’all know what this is / It’s a [Confirmation], bi—” Never mind.

viii.

Belonging is where thought goes to die.

ix.

At the time of the French Revolution, only an estimated 10-15 percent of those whom we’d now identify as French spoke French, then the language of the elite - the Right (the French Revolution, its leaders themselves elites, is the source of these political identities/placements). How does accessibility lend itself to erasure? Did my French ancestors even speak French?

Zoom in to see the earring that I lost that evening. RIP.

x.

Everybody wants to be a melancholic, but nobody wants to be melancholy. Bums.

xi.

What if the way to be closest to our ancestors isn’t to do exactly what they did, standardizing their imagined habits, but to figure it out as they had to. Or at least to stop pretending that we’re not figuring it out. Which I think is often a way of trying to defend them, from accusations of ignorance or savagery or lack of civilization. “I know” as a way of proving that “they knew.” And if we don’t know then neither did they. But what’s really wrong with that, with not knowing, with them not having known? Who told us that was something to be ashamed of? What makes us think there’s any brand of ancestor who was doing anything other than figuring it out as they went?

This photo was very popular on the dating apps. Thanks, RP.

Take care, and if you’re about that snail mail life, please share your mailing address :)

Bye for (a very long) now,

Lydia