one I used to walk around in my dream.
In this dream, I'm in a hospital bed,
and it's like a scene from a movie
you've seen a million times.
The doctor is holding a small pink bundle,
and he leans over the bed, and he hands me the bundle.
It's a girl, he says.
Isn't she beautiful?
Look, and wrapped in the bundle,
I see the little face of my dog,
a small rat terrier named Lola Belle.
And no one says anything like,
you know, this is not a human baby.
You just gave birth to a dog.
But I'm so happy.
I put my head to her forehead and look into her eyes,
and it's almost a perfect moment,
except that the joy is mixed with quite a lot of guilt,
because the truth was,
I had engineered this whole thing.
I had arranged to have Lola Belle sewn into my stomach
so that I could then give birth to her.
And this had been really hard to do.
Lola Belle wasn't a puppy.
She was a full-grown dog, and she had really struggled.
And she kept barking and trying to get out,
and the surgeons kept trying to push her back in
and sew things up, and it was really a mess.
And I felt really bad about it,
but it was just the way, you know, things had to be.
Anyway, I kissed her on the head,
and I said, hello, little bonehead.
I'll love you forever.
I'm standing in the room where she was dying.
She's talking in a high, new voice
I've never heard before.
Why are there so many animals on the ceiling now, she said.
What are the very last things you say in your life?
What are the last things you say
before you turn into dirt?
When my mother died, she was talking to the animals
that had gathered on the ceiling.
She spoke to them tenderly.
All you animals, she said.
Her last words, all scattered.
Different trains, places she'd always meant to go.
Don't forget you're in the hospital.
We kept saying.
She holds up her hand, thanks so much.
No, the pleasure is all mine.
She tries again.
It's been my privilege and my honor
to be part of this experiment,
this experience with you and your family,
and it's been, tell the animals, she said.
Tell all the animals.
Is it a pilgrimage?
Towards what?
Which way do we face?
Thank you so much for having me.
As a child, I was a kind of a sky worshiper.
This was the Midwest, and the sky was so vast.
It was most of the world.
I knew I had come from there,
and that someday I would go back.
What are days for?
To wake us up?
To put between the endless night?
What are nights for?
To fall through time into another world.
I live in downtown Manhattan,
next to the West Side Highway.
In September 2001, after the Trade Center fell,
everything was covered with white ash.
For months, lines of trucks moved up the highway,
carrying the twisted metal debris from the towers.
Out at the end of the pier,
there's a strange Assyrian-looking building,
and during this time, FBI speed boats
began to dock out there.
It was the beginning of the time
when cameras began to appear everywhere,
and everything was so loud and such a mess.
I tried to get out of town as much as I could,
and I decided to go to California,
up to the Northern Mountains, with my dog Lolabelle.
Now, the idea was to take a trip
and spend some time with her,
and do a kind of experiment
to see if I could learn to talk with her.
Now, I'd heard that rat terriers
could understand about 500 words,
and I wanted to see which ones they were.
It was February, and the mountains
were covered with tiny wildflowers,
and such a huge, tall sky,
and a very thin, pale blue air.
And hawks circling.
Every morning, we walked down to the ocean,
which took most of the day.
And what happened was, more or less,
beauty got in the way of the experiment.
It was just so beautiful up there
that I forgot the whole project, really.
It just slipped my mind.
Most days, the walk to the ocean took several hours,
and we would just goof around,
and lie down, and have snacks of carrots.
Now, rat terriers are bred to protect borders,
so Lolabelle was always on the job.
She would trot in front of me on the trail,
doing a little advance work, a little surveilling.
Now, occasionally, out of the corner of my eye,
I'd see some hawks circling this very lazy way,
way up in the sky.
And then one morning, suddenly, for no reason,
they came swooping down right in front of me,
dropping down through the air,
their claws wide open, right on top of Lolabelle.
And then they swooped back up, and dropped back down,
and I realized that they were in the middle
of changing their plan.
This little white thing,
that had looked like a tiny white bunny from 2,000 feet up,
was turning out to be just a little too big
to grab by the neck.
And they were making their calculations, figuring it out.
And then I saw Lolabelle's face,
and she had this brand new expression.
First was the realization that she was praying,
and that these birds had come to kill her.
And second was a whole new thought.
It was the realization that they could come from the air.
I mean, I never thought of that.
A whole 180 more degrees
that I'm now responsible for.
It's not just the stuff down here,
the dirt, the paths, the roots, the trees,
but all this too.
And the rest of the time we were in the mountains,
she just kept looking over her shoulder,
and trotting along with her head in the air,
her eyes scanning the thin sky,
like there's something wrong with the air.
And I thought, where have I seen this look before?
And then I realized it was the same look
on the faces of my neighbors in New York
in the days right after 9-11,
when they suddenly realized,
first, that they could come from the air,
and second, that it would be that way from now on.
And we had passed through a door,
and we would never be going.
What is the name of those things you see
when you close your eyes?
I think it's phosphenes, the reddish patterns,
the little stripes and dots and blurry little lines
you see floating around when you close your eyes.
And no one really knows what they are, or what they're for.
Sometimes they seem to be brought on by sound,
or random electrical magnetic firing.
Sometimes phosphenes are called prisoner cinema,
some kind of eternal, plotless, avant-garde animated movie.
Or maybe they're just screensavers,
holding patterns that just sit there
so your brain won't fall asleep.
When Lola Belle got old, she went blind.
She wouldn't move.
She froze in place.
The only place she would run was on the edge of the ocean,
because she knew there would be nothing to run into there.
And so, she went running, full speed,
into total darkness.
Around this time, her trainer, Elizabeth,
decided to teach Lola Belle to paint.
And so Lola Belle began making several paintings every day.
Bright red abstract works.
And she would scratch on these plastic sheets
using static electricity.
She also made small sculptures
by pressing her paw into lumps of plasticine.
She made a huge number of these things,
and I didn't really know what to do with them,
so I thought maybe they could be snack trays,
or little clogs, like the ones Japanese dogs might wear
in the rain.
You know, you could sell them on the website.
Lola Belle sat in the studio with me
through lots of different record projects.
Rat terriers have really good hearing,
especially in the upper registers,
and they never seem to get bored.
Hey, let's listen to that cello track for the 70th time.
Great idea.
Let's do that.
Some trainers say that in order to understand your breed,
you have to imagine what their voices would sound like,
and what they'd say to you when you give them a command.
So give a command to a German shepherd,
and he'd say, right boss, no problem, consider it done.
Give a command to a poodle, and it's please love me.
I'll do anything if you just love me.
But give a command to a terrier, and they say,
is it gonna be fun?
Because if it's not gonna be fun,
I'm just not interested.
It was so strange the way it happened.
Almost overnight, there were soldiers everywhere in the city
where there used to be just maybe one policeman.
Now there were groups of soldiers
with machine guns and riot gear.
Almost immediately, it became normal.
They began to blend in.
Nobody talked to them, but they were everywhere,
like ghosts.
And I thought, when did that start to happen?
We're trying to prevent it from happening
instead of having to deal with it afterwards.
So Homeland Security began to breed dogs.
When the puppies were 13 weeks old,
they were sent to prisons to be trained by prisoners.
The smartest dogs were drafted to work with police
on patrols and on bomb-sniffing squads.
The Homeland Security slogan,
if you see something, say something,
sounds like something the Austrian philosopher
Wittgenstein might say.
And his books are full of cryptic sentences about logic
and about how language has the power
to actually create the world.
If you can't talk about it, he says,
it just doesn't exist.
After the see something, say something slogan
had been around for a while,
someone from Homeland Security must have had second thoughts
about asking people to report on each other all the time.
I would have loved to have been
at that Homeland Security PR brainstorming session
when they decided to add this phrase to their slogan.
There are so many trucks in my neighborhood now
carrying information and data
on the way to secure storage areas.
Iron Mountain started as a network of caves
for growing mushrooms and gradually turned
into a bomb-resistant storage facility
for corporate documents.
After World War II, the company began inventing
new identities for Jewish immigrants
who arrived with nothing, no papers,
or at most their old library cards.
So Iron Mountain created all sorts of new documents for them
and they became instant Americans.
Lola Bell was a mall dog.
She came from one of the high-speed puppy mills
that breed dogs in batches and then sell them in malls.
She was bought by a couple who were
in the middle of a divorce and no one could take her.
The woman didn't want her and the husband didn't want her
and the boy wanted her, but nobody really wanted the boy.
And so the man took Lola Bell with him to Canada
where he spent a month camping and crying
and thinking it all through and talking to himself.
And Lola Bell rode up on the bow of the kayak,
perched on the front leading the way
as the man paddled along and tried to figure out
what to do with his life, how to go on.
And I think that was where she learned
the great skill of empathy.
And also where she learned what
her meditation teacher keeps telling us.
And he says, you should try to learn how to feel sad
without being sad, which is actually really hard to do,
to feel sad without actually being sad.
Terriers are really adaptable and very social.
So Lola Bell immediately fit right in into the West Village.
Within a week or two, she seemed to know everyone.
Kurt, who has the Austrian restaurant on the corner,
our neighbor Julie and the painter
who lives across the street,
and lots of people who were total strangers to us.
She had a tab in several stores
and on most walks she would drop in
to pick up a treat or a toy.
The West Village has the highest density
of dogs in the city.
Lots of the dogs are chasing birds and barking at cars.
But weirdly, there are almost no collisions.
Pretty much everybody manages to stay out of the way.
Dogs see mostly blues and greens.
Their eyesight is very blurry
and gets combined with their sense of smell,
which is hard for humans to imagine
since we lost most of our ability to navigate by smell
when we began walking upright, so far from the ground.
So many things are being recorded.
Numbers, locations, names, dates, times, directions.
Massive amounts of data are being collected and stored.
What kind of information is this?
Fragmented conversations full of jump cuts and distortions.
And what are the stories that emerge from these fragments?
And why are they being collected?
And it's only when you commit a crime
that the data is put together
and your story is reconstructed backwards.
A portrait of you made up of data trails.
The places you went, the things you bought,
the pictures you took, the emails you sent.
And like Kierkegaard said,
life can only be understood backwards,
but it must be lived forwards.
The new headquarters of the National Security Agency
is finally almost finished.
This huge data center in Utah collects information
and has clearance to bug the systems of individual citizens
and to engage in sabotage using subversive software.
The United States is the first country
in the history of the world to collect and store information
about its own citizens on this scale.
Until now, records were mostly accounts
of the lives of kings and pharaohs
who also stored their records in massive desert complexes.
A lot of the information is stored in the cloud,
but the likelihood that your story
is going to get mixed up with someone else's story
is extremely high.
I remember the first time I realized
that some people live in different worlds.
I'd be walking to school and I'd look up
and there was Moses hanging by his tool belt.
Every day, no matter what the weather,
Moses would climb up the telephone poles
and attach his belt to them and open the phone boxes
and move the lines around.
Sometimes he'd take out his tools and do some hammering.
In the winter, you could see him really well,
outlined against the bright sky,
hammering and spinning round and round up there.
Now Moses did not work for the phone company.
He just lived in another world,
a kind of dream world of trees and circuits and electronics.
But everyone in town made a point
of thanking him for fixing their phones.
The men would be walking home
from the train station in the evening
and they'd yell,
good job on the phones,
reception on my line is really great now.
Nice job, clear, thanks a lot.
As a child, I had a hobby of making colonial newspapers,
just inventing things that happened in colonial times
and printing them and handing them out to the neighbors.
I also had a hobby of trying to imagine things
that had never happened in the history of the world.
For some reason, this was really important to me.
So I'd go out into the woods and make a fort
and roll oak leaves into oak leaf cigarettes
and crawl into the fort and smoke the cigarettes
and think up various improbable events.
For example, a man is walking along a road
and just as he looks up into the sky,
which is filled with dense, swirling snow,
a duck flying above him has a heart attack
and falls right on top of the man and kills him.
Things like that.
Sometimes these thoughts would lead to questions like,
is it true that on Mars, the cliffs are 40 miles high?
Or what if everything just stopped?
The tides and the waves and what if the sky froze?
But then, say, to live in the gap
between the moment that is expiring
and the one that is arising.
A city, luminous, the real city,
falling through your mind in glittering pieces.
And when you close your eyes, what do you see?
Now open them.
Good girl, what a good girl.
When Lola Belle went blind,
Elizabeth decided it was time for her to learn piano.
So he set up some keyboards on the floor
and she would run over and turn them on and start to play.
Lola Belle played every day for two years
and she got reasonably good.
She was trained with a little clicker that Elizabeth used.
She also played more experimental music
and she used some of the same programs
and samples that I use.
She also did a lot of benefit concerts for other animals
and for various animal rights organizations.
She also made a Christmas record.
Which was pretty good.
One of my favorite paintings is by Goya.
And it doesn't look like his other work at all.
It's a huge gold void.
Except at the bottom, there's a little dog
and you see only his head.
And he seems to be climbing a steep hill.
Or maybe swimming by himself in a gold ocean.
When Lola Belle got very sick,
we took her to the hospital.
We spent a lot of time with vets
and they always wanted to give you this speech
they prepared about pain.
Which was, of course you don't want her to be in pain
and so we just give her a shot and put her to sleep
and then another shot and she stops breathing.
And every time they would say that,
I would say, listen, I know you wanna say this
but we're not going to do this so nevermind.
But they would still try to give the speech anyway.
I was really worried about this.
So I called our Buddhist teacher and he said,
animals are like people.
They approach death and then they back away.
And it's a process.
And you don't have the right to take that from them.
He said, you should just go and get her from the hospital
and bring her home.
Pretty much exactly what your Jewish grandmother would say.
Get some good tranquilizers,
get some good food and bring her home.
So we went to the hospital and we took Lola Belle home.
We stayed with her for three days
as her breath slowed and then stopped.
We had learned to love Lola as she loved us
with the tenderness we didn't know we had.
The thing that's forbidden
by the Tibetan book of the dead is crying.
Crying is not allowed
because it's supposedly confusing to the dead
and you don't want to summon them back
because they actually can't come back.
So no crying.
When Lola Belle died, our teacher said,
every time you think of her,
give something away or do something kind.
And I said, then I'd be giving things away nonstop.
And he said, so, and it took me so long to figure it out
because death is so often about regrets or guilt.
Why didn't I call her or why didn't I say that?
It's more about you than the person who died.
But finally, I saw it.
The connection between love and death
and that the purpose of death is the release of love.
Gordon Mata-Clark died young
and he died in an amazing way.
Gordon was a good friend of mine and he was a sculptor.
One of his most well-known works was called Splitting
in which he saw a suburban house in half.
He was a minimalist and there was a lot of advanced theory
about why he cut houses in half.
Although none of the theories
talked about his parents' divorce
or what happened one day
when his twin brother jumped to his death.
Out of Gordon's window.
When Gordon got sick,
he decided to make his death very social.
And so he invited his friends to come to the hospital
and he had only 24 hours left to live.
The length of time that his system was breaking down.
And he decided to spend this time reading to his friends.
And when he died,
there were two llamas on either side of him.
And when he stopped breathing,
they began shouting into his ear.
Now the Tibetans believe that hearing
is the last sense to go.
So after the heart stops and your brain flatlines
and the eyes go dark,
the hammers in the ears are still working.
And so they shout instructions
from the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
also called the Great Liberation through hearing.
And they yelled,
Gordon, you're dead.
You're dead now.
And then they say,
you see two lights and one is near you
and one is far away and don't go to the near one,
go to the one that's far away and so on and so on and so on.
I've seen three ghosts in my life now.
And the first was Gordon.
A few hours after he died,
he appeared on the back porch of the commune I was living in.
Every love story is a ghost story.
Said David Foster Wallace.
After death, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
all creatures then spend 49 days in the bardo.
And the bardo isn't a place,
it's more like a process that lasts 49 days
as the mind dissolves.
And as the Tibetans believe,
the consciousness or let's say the energy
prepares to take another life form.
Leap, leap, all goes to darkness.
And the next thing you see is your next life.
A slow awakening to this world or another world.
Now you are in another form without a body.
Recognize this.
The cities, the mountains, the rooms,
the trees, the train.
Optical illusions like dreams made of nothing.
Things you loved as living things
move with a different speed.
They disappear, echo, repeat.
Anger turned to liberation.
Earth into water, water into fire,
fire into air, air into consciousness.
The many days of silence and loneliness.
At first you don't realize you're dead
but continue doing things you used to do.
Looking for things you've lost.
Your mind overwhelmed by memories and plans.
What am I?
Recognize this.
The monkey mind, my teacher calls it.
Dissolving like moonlight in a cloudless sky.
Recognize this.
You can move through walls.
Recognize this as the play of your own mind.
Leave attachment to the things you left.
Could I have done this?
Could I have said this?
Get some good food and bring her home, that's all.
The long ago fears of childhood.
No solid self.
The longing after your own happiness.
Trapped in your thought flow.
Wake up, wake up.
Clocks have stopped.
Once you wore that, once you did that.
Everything you knew about time,
slipping, repeating.
Do not be afraid.
Recognize this.
Leave behind aggression.
Recognize this.
I spent the next 49 days keeping a kind of double diary,
keeping track of what was going on in the real world
and what was going on in the Bardo.
Lots of things were going on in the real world
during that time.
On May 2nd, Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan
in a raid called Operation Neptune Spear, led by the CIA.
On April 22nd, the memory unit of the flight data recorder
from Air France 447 was recovered
from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Then on May 21st, there was a prediction
by a US religious group that the world was going to end.
The world has come.
The world is now under judgment
where it was not prior to May 21st.
On May 23rd, there was a retraction.
There's a big difference in the world
that we can't detect at all with our eyes,
but we can know from the Bible.
Strange, but after all this time,
30,000 years of human civilization,
we still have no idea why we dream.
Of course, there are lots of theories,
and one theory of SIDS, or sudden infant death syndrome,
has to do with dreaming.
SIDS, or crib death, is the mysterious phenomenon
of the death of a baby who just suddenly stops breathing.
And according to the theory, the baby dies during REM sleep,
a period when dreams of the past are the most intense.
And these dreams are from before the baby was born,
before the baby began to breathe.
And the dreams are so real,
the baby gets lost in them and just stops breathing.
And when you see an X-ray of a child's head,
you see this second pair of teeth
right above the baby teeth.
And this second pair of teeth is ready to drop down
into place when the first set falls out.
Now, wouldn't it be great to have a second brain
or a reserve heart that would just drop down into place
when the first one breaks?
I wanna tell you a story about a story.
And it's about the time I discovered
that most adults have no idea what they're talking about.
It was the middle of the summer when I was 12.
And I was the kind of kid who was always showing off.
I have seven brothers and sisters
and I was always getting lost in the crowd.
And so I would do practically anything for attention.
So one day I was at the swimming pool
and I decided to do a flip from the high board,
the kind of dive when you're temporarily
magically suspended midair.
And everyone around the pool goes,
wow, that's incredible, that's amazing.
Now, I'd never done a flip before,
but I thought, how hard could it be?
You just somersault and straighten out
right before you hit the water.
So I did, but I missed the pool
and I landed on the concrete edge and broke my back.
I spent the next few weeks in traction
in the children's ward at the hospital.
And for quite a while, I couldn't move or talk.
I was just sort of floating.
I was in the same trauma unit
with the kids who'd been burned.
And they were hanging in these rotating seats
with slings, sort of like rotisseries or spits,
machines that would turn you around and around
so the burns could be bathed in these cool liquids.
Then one day, one of the doctors came to see me
and he told me that I wouldn't be able to walk again.
And I remember thinking, this guy is crazy.
I mean, is he even a doctor?
Who knows?
Of course I was going to walk.
I just had to concentrate,
keep trying to make contact with my feet,
convince them, will them to move.
The worst thing about this was the volunteers
who came every afternoon to read to me.
And they'd lean over the bed and they'd say,
hello, Lori, really enunciating each word
as if I'd also gone deaf.
And they'd open the book.
So where were we?
Oh yes, the gray rabbit was hopping down the road
and guess where he went?
Well, nobody knows.
The farmer doesn't know.
The farmer's wife doesn't know.
Nobody knew where the rabbit had gone,
but just about everybody seemed to care.
Now, before this happened,
I'd been reading books like Tale of Two Cities
and Crime and Punishment.
So the gray rabbit stories were kind of a slow torture.
Anyway, eventually I did get on my feet
and for two years, I wore a huge metal brace.
I got very obsessed with John F. Kennedy
because he had back problems too.
And he was the president.
Much later in my life,
when someone would ask what my childhood was like,
sometimes I would tell them this story about the hospital.
And it was a short way of telling them
certain things about myself.
How I'd learned not to trust certain people
and how horrible it was to listen
to long, pointless stories
like the one about the gray rabbit.
But there was always something weird
about telling this story that made me very uneasy,
like something was missing.
Then one day, when I was in the middle of telling it,
I was describing the little rotisseries
that the kids were hanging in.
And suddenly, it was like I was back in the hospital
just exactly the way it had been.
And I remembered the missing part.
It was the way the ward sounded at night.
It was the sounds of all the children crying and screaming.
It was the sounds the children make when they're dying.
And then I remembered the rest of it.
The heavy smell of medicine.
The smell of burned skin.
How afraid I was.
And the way some of the beds would be empty in the morning
and the nurses would never talk about
what had happened to these kids.
They'd just go on making up the beds
and cleaning up around the ward.
And so the thing about this story
was that actually, I had only told the part about myself.
And I'd forgotten the rest of it.
I'd cleaned it up, just the way the nurses had.
And that's what I think is the creepiest thing about stories.
You try to get to the point you're making,
usually about yourself or something you learned.
And you get your story and you hold on to it.
And every time you tell it, you forget it.
Mar.
For two years after Lola Belle's death,
I continued to get notifications
from a Facebook account I didn't even know she had.
One of the things I did to try to remember her
was make huge paintings.
Imagining her 49 days in the Bardo.
Most of the paintings were full of wind and noise and chaos
and half-remembered songs.
They die in the winter in Chicago.
The cold takes them away.
It sweeps in off the lake and off they go.
Has done for centuries now.
Some of them died in the stockyards in Chicago
or in backyards full of rusted jungle gyms
and old stoves and snow.
Some in overheated houses out in the winter woods.
Others in their duck blinds
or in their leaking boats
when they sank in one of the icy Great Lakes.
It was in the winter, last winter,
when I heard that my mother was dying.
And so I had to go.
And I was kind of worried.
So I talked to Father Pierre,
who's a priest, a converted Egyptian Jew,
a playboy who loves elegant things
and has a book collection of 30,000 books.
And he's such a smart guy.
And so I said, listen, I have a really big problem.
I'm going to see my mother and she's dying,
but I don't love her.
And Father Pierre said,
okay, well, just bring her some flowers
and tell her you've always cared about her.
And I thought, I can do that.
Besides, you really don't want to lie
to someone who's dying.
But when I got there,
they were rushing her around in a gurney.
And they didn't have time to get the flowers.
And it was loud and confusing.
And there wasn't a single moment to say,
you know, I've always cared about you.
And then all of a sudden, she was dead.
And there's a Buddhist exercise
called the mother meditation.
And you use it when you can't feel anything.
You try to find a single moment
when your mother truly loved you
without a single reservation.
And you focus on that moment.
And then you imagine
that you've been everyone's mother.
And they've been yours.
And I looked and I looked for that moment,
but it just kept slipping away.
So which way do we go?
Thanks.
No, it's been a privilege.
And you and your family.
And just one more question.
Did you ever really love me?
We lived by a lake.
And every winter it froze.
We skated everywhere.
One evening, I was coming home from the movies.
And I was pushing my little brothers,
Craig and Phil, in a stroller.
I had decided to take them over to the island
to look at the moon that was just coming up.
But as we got close to the island,
the ice broke.
And the stroller sank into the dark water.
And my first thought was,
Mom's gonna kill me.
And I remember the knitted balls on their hats
as they disappeared under the black water.
So I ripped off my jacket
and I jumped into the freezing water
and dove down and got Craig
and pulled him up and threw him on the ice.
Then I dove down again,
but I couldn't find the stroller.
It had slipped down the muddy bank,
further down under the ice.
Then I dove in again.
And I finally found the stroller
and Phil was trapped in
and I ripped the strap off
and pulled him out and pushed him up onto the ice.
Then I ran home,
one twin under each arm,
frozen and screaming.
I ran in the door
and I told my mother what had happened.
And she stood there and said,
What a wonderful swimmer you are.
And I didn't know you were such a good diver.
And when I think of her now,
I realize that was the moment
I had been trying to remember.
Tell the animals.
Tell all the animals.
Is it a pilgrimage?
Towards what?
It means your time.
When you're in love.
In time,
you can't see or hold it.
It's exactly like love.
Turning time around.