This is my dream body,
the one I use to walk around in my dreams.
Ln this dream, I’m in a hospital bed.
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 Lolabelle.
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 Lolabelle sewn into my stomach
so that I could then "give birth" to her.
And this had been really hard to do.
Lolabelle 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.
Lt 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."
(train clattering on tracks)
LAURIE: 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 says.
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-my honor
to be part of this experiment,
this-this experience with you and your - and your family.
And-And it's - it's been -
It's been -
Tell the animals," she said.
"Tell all the animals."
ls it a pilgrimage?
Towards what?
Which way do we face?
Thank you so much
for having me.
LAURIE: As a child, I was a kind of a sky worshipper.
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 nights.
What are nights for?
To fall through time
into another world.
I live in downtown Manhattan next to the West Side Highway.
Ln 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 speedboats began to dock out there.
Lt 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.
I decided to go to California, up to the northern mountains -
-(slide projector clicking) -with my dog, Lolabelle.
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.
I’d heard that rat terriers
could understand about 500 words,
and I wanted to see which ones they were.
Lt was February,
and the mountains were covered with tiny wildflowers.
And such a huge tall sky
and 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.
Lt was just so beautiful up there
that I forgot the whole project really.
Lt 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 surveillance.
Now, occasionally, out of the corner of my eye,
I’d see some hawks circling in 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.
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 prey
and that these birds had come to kill her.
And second was a whole new thought.
Lt was the realization that they could come
from the air.
"I mean, I never thought of that.
A whole 1 80 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 9/1 1 ,
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
back.
LAURIE: 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.
(electricity crackling)
Sometimes phosphenes are called prisoner's cinema -
some kind of eternal, plotless avant-garde animated movie.
Or maybe they're just screen savers -
holding patterns that just sit there
so your brain won't fall asleep.
♪♪ (woman singing, indistinct)
♪♪ (man singing, indistinct)
LAURIE: When Lolabelle 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, Elisabeth,
decided to teach Lolabelle to paint.
And so Lolabelle 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.
I thought maybe they could be snack trays or
little clogs,
like the ones Japanese dogs might wear in the rain.
You know, we could sell them on the Web site.
-♪♪ (art rock) -MAN.. ♪ Hey ♪
♪ Hey ♪
Lolabelle 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."
♪ Hey ♪
"Let's do that."
♪ Hey ♪
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, "Um, is it gonna be fun?
Because if it's not gonna be fun,
I’m just not interested."
(police radio chatter)
Lt 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 1 3 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.
(man speaking foreign language)
(horns honking)
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 ll,
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.
(dogs yelping, barking)
Lolabelle 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.
(shouting, arguing)
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 Lolabelle with him to Canada,
where he spent a month camping and crying
and thinking it all through and talking to himself.
And Lolabelle 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 our 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.
(traffic passing)
Terriers are really adaptable and very social.
So Lolabelle immediately fit right in into the West Village.
(sniffing)
Within a week or two, she seemed to know everyone -
Kurt, who has the Austrian restaurant on the corner,
our neighbor Julian, 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.
(dog panting)
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.
(bicycle bell rings)
So many things are being recorded -
numbers, locations, names,
dates, times, directions.
Massive amounts of data are being collected and stored.
And 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 e-mails 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.
♪♪ (woman singing, indistinct)
(voices whispering)
♪ Hey ♪
WOMAN.. ♪ Some call me beauty ♪
♪ Some call me pain ♪
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.
Ln the winter, you could see him really well
outlined against the bright sky,
hammering and spinning around 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.
(voices whispering in telephone lines)
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,
"Hey, Moe! Good job on the phones."
"The 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?
What then?
Say, are you perhaps made of glass?
To live in the gap between the moment that is expiring
and the one that is arising,
luminous and empty.
The real city falling through your mind in glittering pieces.
And when you close your eyes, what do you see?
Nothing?
Now open them.
WOMAN: Good girl. What a good girl!
Thank you.
Wow. Lolie!
LAURIE: When Lolabelle went blind,
Elisabeth decided it was time for her to learn piano.
So we set up some keyboards on the floor,
and she would run over and turn them on and start to play.
Lolabelle played every day for two years,
and she got reasonably good.
-♪♪ (rhythm track: pop) -♪♪ (plunking notes)
(barking)
(low growl)
She was trained with a little clicker
that Elisabeth used.
-♪♪ (continues) -(barking)
♪♪♪♪
She also played more experimental music,
and she used some of the same programs and samples that I use.
♪♪ (synthesizer: ethereal)
(barking)
♪♪ (synthesizer continues)
(barking)
She also did a lot of benefit concerts for other animals
and for various animal rights organizations.
-♪♪ (rhythm track: pop) -♪♪ (plunking notes)
(audience laughing)
♪♪ (plunking notes)
♪♪ (organ: "O Tannenbaum")
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 he's swimming by himself in a gold ocean.
(Lolabelle barking)
When Lolabelle 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'd 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 want to say this,
but we're not going to do this, so never mind."
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.
(chuckling)
So we went to the hospital and we took Lolabelle 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 a 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 Lolabelle 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? 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 Matta-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 sawed 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.
MAN: They say that the object
is the medium through which the light -
And when he died,
there were two lamas on either side of him.
And when he stopped breathing,
they began shouting into his ear.
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.
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.
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" -
(voice whispering)
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.
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 trains -
Optical illusions.
Not there.
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.
You are not alone in leaving this world.
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? What am I?
LAURIE'S VOICE (echoing): Looking for your food bowl
and wondering what -
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?
WOMAN.. ...get some good food and bring her home.
LAURIE: The long ago fears
of childhood.
WOMAN #2 (echoing): This is a nightmare.
No solid self.
The longing after your own happiness.
Trapped in your thought flow.
Wake up.
♪♪ (man singing, backwards)
Clocks have stopped.
♪♪ (continues)
Once you wore that.
Once you did that.
Everything you knew about time slipping, repeating.
Do not be afraid.
Like all mornings.
Recognize this.
Leave behind aggression.
Leave behind
passion.
Recognize this.
WOMAN.. ♪ Some call me beauty ♪
♪ Some call me pain ♪♪
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 2, Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan
in a raid called Operation Neptune Spear
led by the CIA.
On April 22, the memory unit
of the flight data recorder from Air France 447
was recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Then on May 21 , there was a prediction
by a US religious group
that the world was going to end.
MAN: ...judgment has come.
Your world is now under judgment,
where it was not prior to May 21 .
LAURIE: On May 23, there was a retraction.
MAN: 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.
LAURIE: 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 into place when the first one breaks?
I want to 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.
Lt 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 mid-air,
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 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, Laurie,"
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.
And 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 had 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.
Lt was the way the ward sounded
at night.
Lt was the sounds of all the children
crying and screaming.
Lt was the sounds that 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.
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
more.
(computer chimes)
For two years after Lolabelle'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.
♪ You were there dressed as a cat ♪
♪ Two French girls in Mexican hats ♪
♪ Never knew you could dance like that ♪
♪ Smoke was whirling I gave a shout ♪
♪ And that was when the fire broke out ♪
♪ I say uh-oh ♪
♪ Another fire ♪
♪ Ln dreamland ♪
♪ Just another fire ♪
♪ Ln dreamland ♪♪
They die in the winter in Chicago.
The cold takes them away.
Lt 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.
Lt 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 I 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.
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 - It's been a -
It's been a privilege, and you and your -
and your family and -
And just one more question.
Did you ever really love me?"
♪ I walk accompanied by ghosts ♪
♪ My father with his diamond eyes ♪
♪ His voice life-size ♪
♪ He says, "Follow me ♪
♪ Follow me" ♪
♪ And I come sliding ♪
♪ Where I've been hiding ♪
♪ Out of the heart of a child ♪
♪ Meet me by the lake ♪
♪ I'll be there ♪
♪ I'll be there ♪♪
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 PhiI
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.
Lt 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 strapped 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,"
she said.
"Tell all the animals."
ls it a pilgrimage?
Towards what?
♪♪ (rock ballad)
LOU REED: ♪ She says, What do you call love? ♪
♪ Well, I call it Harry ♪
♪ Oh, please I’m being serious ♪
♪ What do you call love? ♪
♪ Well, I don't call it family and I don't call it lust ♪
♪ And as we all know, marriage isn't a must ♪
♪ And I suppose in the end, it's a matter of trust ♪
♪ If I had to ♪
♪ I’d call love time ♪
♪ She said, What do you call love? ♪
♪ Can't you be more specific? ♪
♪ What do you call love? ♪
♪ ls it more than the heart's hieroglyphic? ♪
♪ Well, for me, time has no meaning ♪
♪ No future, no past ♪
♪ And when you're in love ♪
♪ You don't have to ask ♪
♪ There's never enough time ♪
♪ To hold love in your grasp ♪
♪ Turning time around ♪
♪ That is what love is ♪
♪ Turning time around ♪
♪ Yes, that is what love is ♪
♪ My time is your time ♪
♪ When you're in love ♪
♪ And time is what ♪
♪ You never have enough of ♪
♪ You can't see or hold it ♪
♪ It's exactly like love ♪
♪ Turning time around ♪
♪ Well, I gotta have it ♪
♪ I got to, got to, got to have it ♪
♪ Turning, turning time around ♪
♪ Got to have it Turning time around ♪
♪ Turning, turning time around ♪
♪ Turning time around ♪♪
♪♪ (fades)