Heart of a Dog Page #3

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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.

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.

Good girl. What a good girl!

Thank you.

Wow. Lolie!

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.

She was trained with a little clicker

that Elisabeth 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 he's swimming by himself

in a gold ocean.

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.

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.

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"...

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.

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