Heart of a Dog: Laurie Anderson
OMTIMES: The parallel between what happened with your dog and the hawks in Northern California and the 9-11 event, would you say that expansion of our level of awareness would cause, to a certain degree, also a loss of our state of innocence?
Laurie Anderson: I am not sure how innocent anyone was at that point. It was strange however to take my little dog all the way to California to get away from it all and have the result be that she became fearful of the sky. Lolabelle was a see-and-be-seen west village dog but when the hawks swooped down there was a very clear and unmistakable message coming from the back of her dog brain. She understood in an instant that she was prey. Maybe vulnerability is a better word than innocence to describe New Yorkers in the days after 9.11.
OMTIMES: Is it the right assumption to say that the Heart of a Dog movie is a collection of musings and life reflections seen through the eyes and pure heart of your dog?
Laurie Anderson: Lolabelle’s point of view is literally the way we see certain scenes. But we also see the film through the lens of a surveillance camera and we also float around in the bardo with rapidly changing points of view. The viewer is asked to change points of view many times and to imagine things that are described in words but not shown.
OMTIMES: You make great points about the power of language and about the Logic metalinguistic encoding of Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘If you can’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist”. Do you think that with the loss of our innocence, some elements of dry bitterness, cynicism and fear were introduced in our society through our language, or the way we now express ourselves?
Laurie Anderson: I believe dry bitterness has been around forever and that the fallibility of words marks our lives. Some of the words- the fast paced unvoiced texts- were made for the part of us that never speaks. What I think of as the silent witness. Many people now text or email more than they talk and this has robbed us of lots of subtlety- principally tone of voice which tells you how we feel about the words.
