Laurie Anderson: Our dog Lolabelle died.
The Believer: Oh, I’m sorry.
Laurie Anderson: Yeah, what a sweetie pie. She was my best friend. When you’re very physically attached to something—not so much mentally, but physically, something that is always at your knee, you know—it’s very different when they evaporate. So in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for forty-nine days you’re in the Bardo, and it describes in a really fascinating way how you lose your senses and how your mind dissolves as you prepare for another cycle. At the end of that forty-nine-day period, you are born in another form, and, in my dog’s case, what was at the end of that forty-ninth day was my birthday. I’m kind of a believer in magic numbers, in a way. So I wanted to study that particular Bardo, and then I found that that’s only one of the many Bardos. The other Bardo that is happ..