**************** A note to the reader: In these (web)pages (as in life) there are many absences. Erasures. Gaps in the narrative; holes in the plot. (Nooks and crannies in the craft, if you are more playfully and gastronomically inclined.) So if you find yourself reading something herein that feels incomplete, or half-baked, or in need of major elaboration or revision,(or, or, or, or) — know that I, too, am painfully aware of this feeling. I’m working on it. (Aren’t we all?) Yet ghosts of the silenced abound. You have been warned. **************************************
If “you” insist on thing-ing patterns into “self” and “other,” rife with ever-increasingly-complex constellations of identity markers
then “my” name is Lissette (pronounced Lee-SET; they/she/ki pronouns — see how complicated this process of identity-marking is already getting?)
***
Perhaps as a sort of sorting reflex, oftentimes human people will ask me, “Where are you from?”
“… No, really, where are you from?”
…
Since human people often get exasperated when I say “You choose,” here are some alternative responses:
- this song (which my father would play for me as a small child and which I now play religiously on repeat when I need to keenly hyperfocus on thing): Tiny Geometries.
- every-thing-and-no-thing (in a “the Tao that can be tao-ed is not the Tao and yet everything is the Tao tao-ing” sort of way, simultaneously Void and-yet-also everything betwixt and between Void); (perhaps, depending on who’s asking) a being made up of matter and beyond-matter (an inter-and-intra-being, a highly unstable category of constant becoming with others, liable to morph as soon as participatory bodies of stuff — the space between sub-atomic particles, nuclei and their valences, mitochondria, hair follicles, igneous bedrock — inter-and-intra-act with each other); a loosely held together human being (mostly non-human DNA mixed with organic and synthetic molecules) of Native American, African, and European descent (in the last 500 years, anyhow — thanks transatlantic settler colonialism!); non-binary Latiné/x/a person/woman of color (depending on on how queer-friendly you are); first-generation United States of American (child of Latin American immigrants), first-generation college graduate (woot woot Oberlin), raised by working class/low-income-for-the-USofA-family); neuroqueer1 (bipolar, AuDHD 2, different-bodied);an art-science scholar and practitioner in Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS); multilingual, multicultural Unitarian Universalist and agential realist (thank you, Karen Barad, for their transdisciplinary work in quantum physics, feminist technoscience, and consciousness 3), who strives to imbibe everything until ki implodes into nothing, which therefore takes us back to the beginning of this list.
- .
- .
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- dance. the verb, not the noun.
Also,
I am YOU.
And you are ME.
Funny thing, identity.
***
For those who’d like a more standardized bio:
I was born and raised in Miami, Florida, a bioregion of Turtle Island that has been transformed from Everglades wetland to teetering metropolis, facing evermore socio-ecological turmoil. A child of Latin American immigrants fleeing war and poverty, I grew up somewhere between Disney World Floridian fantasies and complicated post-colonial realities. I have also spent human years (at least semi-) present in Not-the-other-Miami-in-Ohio-but-a-different-city-in-Ohio, OH; Osaka, Tokyo, Yokohama, and Fukushima, Japan; Upstate New York + City; and New Orleans. Now you can try to spot me scurrying around Virginia Beach, Virginia with my human mate and many, many plants.
Contact: lissette.lorenz@gmail.com
Lissette Lorenz 