"Nothing Left But Their Names" lyrics - LAURIE ANDERSON

[Spoken:]
You know, recently I got a book listing all the animal species that have
Disappeared off the face of the earth called All the Disappeared Animal
Life Forms of the World

The list is really impressive and it included the dates and territories
Where the animals were last sighted. Or wherever the last fossil was
Unearthed

Now as you probably know 99.9 per cent of the species who have ever
Lived are now extinct. So this is a very long list including massive
Numbers of civets, big subsets of spotted lizards, every last mastodon
The short-faced bear, the Shrub-ox, fifteen chapters on sloths. And one
Whole chapter on the one-eared dinosaur

It was amazing, you cannot imagine how many kinds of weasels have
Come and gone. The publishers claim that the book is a definitive
Masterpiece. In fact, according to them, the book actually weighs
Approximately thirty weasels. And so goodbye to the disappeared ones
There they go, hopping and jumping away, swimming and floating away
Gone forever. Vaporized as if they'd never existed except for a few bones
And footprints. Nothing much left but their names

You know the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet is alef. And the letter alef
Actually has no sound. It's a letter with no sound, a mental letter. So to
Say alef you open your mouth and you think of the letter and you start to say
It and then you stop
And that is alef

That's the thing with words... they leave so much to the imagination
Like in yoga class when the teacher saying things like, "Imagine your
Breath is filling the entire room." Or, "Imagine that your legs are planted
In the ground and they keep going down and down under the ground like
Roots like fifteen feet down" and you can actually feel your legs doing that

And really they could just go on and on in this vein like, "Now imagine
That you've swallowed your head and it's inside your stomach and you're
Upside down and you can't open your eyes and you're completely stuck
There." Things like that

I have to say that often it's much better to talk about things than to actually
Do them. Take for example - a very long expedition to the North Pole

You know the reason I really love the stars? It's that we cannot hurt
Them. We can't burn them. We can't melt them or make them overflow
We can't flood them or blow them up or turn them out
But we are reaching for them. We are reaching for them

And ah yes the moon and stars are up there like acquaintances I had
Always meant to befriend Yes I meant to learn their names but for various
Reasons having to do with lack of time and lack of ambition I never did do
That. And they remained up in the sky as nameless as if we'd never been
Here at all