Laurie Anderson. I’ve never had particularly strong feelings one way or the other. But the other evening I had Night Waves on in the background and I heard a piece from her latest performance work, Homeland. She’s doing her portentous-spooky talking schtick, telling a story inspired by a few lines from Aristophanes’ Birds. Here’s how Anderson describes it in an interview:
“It’s about a lark, and it’s set in a time before the world began. And there was only sky at that point. No land at all. Only sky and billions and billions of birds. Then one day, the lark’s father dies. This is a big problem—what should they do with the body? There’s no land. The birds try to work this out, and days go by, and finally the lark has an idea. She decides to bury her father in the back of her own head. This is the beginning of memory.”
This little story really, um, stuck in my head. Even though I co-wrote a version of the Birds way back when, I couldn’t remember (how ironique) this bit and had to look at up. The story is there up to the burial of the father, the inverse Athena myth, but of course the lark is male and it’s Anderson who turns it into an aetiology of memory. Perhaps I like it partly because I was doing so much flying around before Dad died, and I don’t remember when I last had a real sense of home. And while Dad became increasingly land-bound in Belfast, it was never really his home and it would have felt wrong to bury him here.
Come to think of it, I did have a terrible headache when Dad was dying. Could have been the combination of stress, tears, and hospital lighting. But there are two ways of seeing everything, if only you can manage to hold them both in your head. Eerie background music and portentous-spooky voice not required.
Post a Comment