The Soul Is a Bird - Laurie Anderson

Now, as press, this didn’t really seem like a great way to advertise concerts,

but it sounded like fun anyway

And I stayed at the palace in one of the former king’s harem houses.

Each of the king’s wives had had her own house guarded by a pair of animals.

A bear and a fox, for example.

By the time I got there, years later,

the menagerie had dwindled a bit: my house was guarded by two tropical fish

Bali was extremely hot in the afternoons, and the conversations with the prince

drifted along randomly from topic to topic.

The prince was a bon vivant,

trained in Paris, and he spoke excellent English.

And when he wasn’t in the

palace he was out on the bumpy back roads racing cars.

So we talked about cars,

a subject I know absolutely nothing about, And I felt that as far as

representing the Western world was going, I was failing pretty dismally

Then, on the second night, the prince served an elaborate feast of Balinese

dishes.

At the end of the meal, the conversation slowed to a halt,

and after a few minutes of silence he asked:

«Would you like to see the cremation tapes of my father?»

The tapes were several hours long, and were a record of the elaborate

three-month ceremony shot by the BBC

When the king died the whole country went to work building an enormous funeral

pyre for him.

After months of preparation, during which time the corpse

continues to reside in the living room, they hoisted the body to the top of

this rickety, extremely flammable structure, and lit a match.

The delicate

tower crumbled almost immediately, and the king’s body fell to the ground with

a sickening thud.

Suddenly, everyone began to cheer

Later, I learned that the Balinese believe that the soul is a bird,

and that when the body falls, it shakes the bird loose and gives it a head

start on its way to heaven