My mailman sips a cigarette
inside his postal service truck,
parked up the avenue beneath

a massive ash. His knuckles rest
above a standard-issue tube sock,
as if concealing it: the spark—

the spark amid our paper debts
and correspondences, our mail—
or as if contemplating when

to put the whole thing up in flames,
the magazines, the ink, the gas.
Truthfully, which of us would not

appreciate one extra day
untroubled by the past or asks
of our exacting future selves?

The news can wait. So, too, the cash.
A bit of ash is all it’d take,
one harmless flick of that cigarette.

Better yet, let me show you.

The rest of my family had plans in Florida, so I packed my Jeep and drove west for a few days. Per usual, my final destination was the Black Hills, but I decided to take a different route this time, to see some new country. I even drew up a map.

Instead of driving straight west across South Dakota on I-90, I chose to loop down through the Nebraska Sandhills, up into the rugged southern unit of the Badlands, and then on into the ponderosa pine forests of Paha Sapa.

My first stop was Niobrara State Park, which sits at the confluence of the Missouri and Niobrara rivers. The region is gorgeous, expansive, lush—teeming with cranes, geese, bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, nighthawks, double-crested cormorants, mallards, meadowlarks and swallows. And, of course, eastern red cedar.

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Spanning the Missouri, the Chief Standing Bear Memorial Bridge opened in 1998 to commemorate the famous Ponca leader. Standing Bear is best known for his participation in the first U.S. court ruling to recognize Native Americans as “persons” under the law, Standing Bear v. Crook, in 1879.

The Ponca have lived around the mouth of the Niobrara since at least the mid-1700s. They are often described as a docile people, and they didn’t give much of a fight when the U.S. government coerced them to relinquish all their homelands in the 1850s, all but a small reservation along the river. Then, in some bureaucratic oversight, even this land was erroneously handed over to the Sioux by the Fed in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

The Ponca were defenseless against raids from the combative Lakota. Eventually they were simply ordered to relocate to “Indian Country” in present-day Oklahoma. The Ponca complied but balked at the squalid living conditions of the new reservation, and nearly one-third of the tribe died as a result of the exodus, including Standing Bear’s son Bear Shield.

Unauthorized, Standing Bear and a band of Ponca made the arduous trip back to Nebraska to bury Bear Shield. The party was eventually tracked down, arrested, and detained at Fort Omaha—a turn of events that ultimately worked in the Ponca’s favor.

For it was here that a journalist named Thomas Henry Tibbles heard of Standing Bear and published a sympathetic account of the Ponca’s plight in the Omaha Daily Herald. This story made its way to lawyers John L. Webster and Andrew J. Poppleton, who helped Standing Bear file a suit for habeas corpus, resulting, ultimately, in the landmark decision regarding Indian personhood under the Constitution.

“[My] hand is not the color of yours,” declared Standing Bear during his moving courtroom speech, “but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same God made us both.”

Judge Elmer S. Dundy ruled that the Ponca—legal persons though not yet citizens—were being unjustly detained; therefore, Chief Standing Bear and his people were set free. Many returned to the Niobrara.

Next morning I took NE-12 west to Valentine, a route Jim Harrison once described as “good for what ails you.” He was right about that.

Along the way I passed through the smallest incorporated town in the United States, Monowi, Nebraska, population: 1. Apparently Monowi is held down entirely by 90-year-old Elsie Eiler, who serves as mayor, librarian, bartender, clerk, and treasurer. Per Wikipedia:

During the 2000 census, the village recorded a total population of two, consisting of a married couple, Rudy and Elsie Eiler. Rudy died in 2004, leaving his wife as the village’s sole resident. In this role, she serves as mayor and issued herself a liquor license. She is also required to submit an annual municipal road plan to maintain state funding for the village’s four streetlights.

Although the village is nearly abandoned, it does have a bar called the Monowi Tavern, operated by Eiler for passing travelers and tourists. She also maintains Rudy’s Library, a collection of approximately 5,000 volumes established in memory of her late husband.

Growing up in Nebraska, I used to venture into the Sandhills with my family to fish or tube the Niobrara in the summers. On the surface, the region can appear like a desert; in fact, the dunes rest atop the vast Ogallala Aquifer and contain over 1 million acres of wetlands, streams, and lakes, forming the largest intact grassland in the Western Hemisphere.

The dunes resist farming but suit grazing, of both the bovine and human variety. Passing through the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge, hot winds howling outside, the word elysian kept coming to mind.1

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Eventually I crossed the border and made my way to the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala Lakota people.

My purpose was to visit a few gravesites on the reservation. I’d almost forgotten that Pine Ridge remains one of the poorest places in the country, suffering consistently high rates of unemployment, alcoholism, and crime. Infrastructure struggles. Stray dogs roam the sidewalks, where there are sidewalks.

At one point I passed what I honestly mistook for a junkyard—until I noticed the man sitting in a folding chair in the midst of the heap. It was just his yard.

Of course the Lakota people have a thorny history in/with the U.S., to put it gently. Less than 150 years ago these were the equestrian lords of the high plains, a sovereign nation of warriors, bison hunters, and holy men. What happened?

History happened, I guess. Greed, lust, fear, betrayal, social Darwinianism, misunderstanding, mistranslation, violence, violence, violence. You could say the Lakota were colonized by Anglo-Americans, which is partially true. You could say the Lakota refused to get with modernity, which is also partially true. You could say much more besides.

It would be an oversimplification to view Pine Ridge as the logical conclusion of some historical narrative which casts the Lakota as passive victims of European expansion. And yet, driving the reservation’s tumbledown neighborhoods, one cannot ignore the specter of the not-so-distant past.

(Leaving Valentine, I heard a radio ad for an upcoming tribal celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn this summer. "The past is never dead,” wrote Faulkner. “It's not even past.”)

I parked my Jeep outside Holy Rosary Church and waited for a group of dark-haired girls to walk by and got out and started up the hill toward the graveyard. Through the gates, I made my way to the tall cross monument behind a chipped white-picket fence in the back corner. Dead grass and sunflower stalks hissed in the wind. Smears of cloud smeared an egg-blue sky. A life-size statue of Christ, hanging on a splintered red cross, peered down at me—or us.

“RED CLOUD”

Red Cloud was one of the early Oglala chiefs to surrender to the U.S. government. Although he’d made a name for himself in battle—and even has an entire war named after him—Red Cloud finally faced up to the impossible odds of resisting Manifest Destiny and accepted life on a reservation, Pine Ridge. For all this he is remembered as something of a moderate, a realist, though still a great warrior. Red Cloud was also baptized into the Catholic Church in 1884.

Roman Catholic and Episcopal missionaries were very active among the Lakota in the 19th century. (I’ve heard that the majority of all baptized members in the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota today are Native American.) Some historians argue that conversion to Christianity was little more than a survival tactic for Sioux who had capitulated to white ways. I don’t doubt this was sometimes the case, or that some Lakota received baptism without proper catechesis.

I do not believe, however, that these conversions were in every case spiritually disingenuous. That would be presumptuous of me. Besides, we have numerous examples of Lakota who seemed to take their newfound faith quite seriously.

Black Elk, for instance.

A noted Oglala Lakota holy man, Nicholas Black Elk not only received Christian baptism in 1904; he also became a catechist for the Church, serving his local parish and instructing others in the faith. Black Elk Speaks, the acclaimed account of his early life, ends with the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, at which Black Elk was present; however, that book reveals precious little of his life and work in the 20th century. And Black Elk saw plenty of the 20th century—just look at the headstone.

Perhaps parish ministry in the hinterlands of Pine Ridge is less enchanting to a general public than our stereotypical pictures of 19th-century Plains Indian life. Black Elk is remembered as many things: mystic, prophet, medicine man, holy fool, missionary, catechist. Standing there, I was struck by the juxtaposition of his many reputations and his humble gravesite, notched on a nondescript hillside behind a couple trailer homes.

The Lakota have long viewed the Black Hills as the center of the earth. But Black Elk added that every individual may be regarded the spiritual center of the earth:

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.2

Hinterlands? I take it back. Black Elk rests in the heart of all that is.

A pulverizing storm broke as soon as I left the cemetery. I hurtled through the southern unit of the Badlands toward my next campsite, dreading the thought of pitching a tent in 40mph winds.

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Happily, the rain abated just as I pulled into the campsite, and I enjoyed a calm evening at Sage Creek among prairie dogs and several grazing bison.

After two sweltering days in the Sandhills/Badlands, I rejoiced when I finally arrived at the evergreen fastness of the Black Hills. The storm had brought a welcome cold front, and I spent the final leg of my trip hiking and bouncing between monuments, cafes, and breweries. (And sleeping on a real bed.)

Tip: if you ever find yourself strapped for time while exploring the Black Hills, visit Crazy Horse over Rushmore.

The Black Hills Writers Collective invited me to be the featured author at their April poetry open mic, which took place that Thursday night. It was lovely, and just the right amount of civilization to balance out an otherwise solitary trip.

Several other local poets read, including my old friend Robert Bordeaux. I sold several books and read some new materials. My Airbnb host even attended.

I realize this travelogue is not a typical post for Conversant. For the last couple of years I have been poring over the history of the Great Plains, where I have lived all my life. One reason I took this particular trip was to see with my eyes landscapes, rivers, and memorials I have heretofore only read in books. I hope the images served to draw you toward those places, too.

I have more to write about all of this, but that will come later—and in verse.

Except, this is obviously false...

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a dozen anvil-blue barn swallows graze

the shaggy pasture grass for horse flies.

Their feathers flicker in the dragging light

as, one by one, they swerve and leap and loop

across the field like split-tailed sparks emit-

ted from a welder’s torch. Yet it’s the grass

the horses hanker for, the sweet, tall grass

fenced off these many weeks. As dusk settles,

the swallows arc back to their pellet nests

below the eaves, leaving the horses in

the gloam. I wouldn’t tell them if I could,

that the grass is being kept for them. I want

to see their faces when the fence comes down.

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“Till the Fence Comes Down” was just published in the spring issue of Third Wednesday. Workshopping the poem not long ago, a friend of mine called it “eschatological,” which I suppose it is. I present it to you on this final Sunday of Lent, the dawn of Holy Week, the beginning of the end of a good, long wait.

Pax,

C

Today marks one year since the publication of my first book of poems, Forbearance. To all who have read it, loved it, loathed it, lost it, lost interest in it, shared photos of it among mountains, lakes, or in the hands of your children—thank you for attending to these words.

Against artistic careerism

Now, some of you have already been asking me what’s next, which is always the question, isn’t it? You only get one debut as an artist, one ex nihio leap from the watery chaos of anonymity. Everything after comes with an asterisk.

I can think of artists whose entire careers seem haunted by the extraordinary success of their early work. The debut sets a precedent, a backdrop against which subsequent work is both created and evaluated, if only in the artist’s mind. Well, “extraordinary success” does not describe my problem, thank goodness, though I confess I feel the pressure of that question: what next…?

Scan the Wikipedia bio of any artist and you will likely find commentary on how his/her style developed over his/her career. The Greats are even given eras—Bob Dylan’s gospel era, Cormac McCarthy’s Southern Gothic novels, etc. This sort of critical classification makes sense in retrospect; however, when artists themselves get preoccupied with the trajectories of their careers, their work can begin to feel overly self-conscious, concerned more with posturing and petty reputation management than the expression of genuine imagination. Taylor Swift is great in her way, but her discography is perhaps the prime modern example of such artistic careerism.1

The danger of artistic careerism is that it subordinates art to artist; art becomes the instrument of ego. Of course, every writer wants to pen something timeless, and we all crave a sense of progress. Personally, I would love to release an album of ambient post-rock bangers one day. The trouble comes when we try to wrangle the spirit of inspiration within the narrow scope of personal ambition. Put differently, trouble comes when we forget we are going to die.

Wilderness wisdom

“Write as if you were dying,” says Annie Dillard. “At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.”2 I have made a practice of rereading Dillard’s The Writing Life every year. Always there is some cold jolt, some fresh revelation. Most recently, I was blithely dreaming of a book of essays I’d like to write one day, perhaps after publishing my next book of poems—which I am only beginning to write—when I read the following:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.3

Okay, then. No more scheming. No more hedging or hoarding. To hell with your cozy contingency plans. Give! All! Now!

Or that’s how it felt in the moment. Now it is Lent, and I am still reflecting on ashes, mortality, deprivation. The 40 days of the Lenten season hark back to Christ’s 40 days of fasting in the wilderness, which hark back to Israel’s 40 years of wilderness-wandering. In each case the wilderness poses a question: will you trust God to provide? Christ, thrice tempted by Satan, passes the test, revealing his unwavering faith in his Heavenly Father.

But Israel? They flounder.

Recall the story with the manna in the wilderness. God promises to send bread from heaven to feed the grumbling Israelites, with two stipulations:

1. Monday through Friday, they are to gather only the manna they need for each day (leftovers will rot);

2. on Saturday they are to gather two day’s bread, for none will be given or gathered on Sunday.

True to form, some Israelites hoard more than they can eat in a day (which goes to maggots), and others go looking for manna on the seventh day. Moses gets an earful.

Christ may have had these hungry Israelites in mind when he delivered any number of his parables warning against greed or worldliness. “Fool!” God says to the rich man with many big barns. “This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (see Luke 12.13-21). Surely Christ had these Israelites in mind when he taught his disciples to pray “give us this day our daily bread.”

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Spend it all

Dillard wants to apply this ancient wisdom to the writing life. The writer must approach every new work with the absolute abandon of faith. Faith in what? That “something more will arise for later, something better.” The reason “anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you” is that the whole business is predicated on grace, which Dillard (nearly) acknowledges in the same chapter: “At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.”4 Grace shifts art from the realm of ambition to the realm of gratitude.

What I have called artistic careerism is akin to storing up earthly treasure. It is hoarding too much manna; seeking immortality by our own devices. Yet we can smell the falsity. We open our safe and find ashes and maggots.

The alternative? Spend it all, trusting God will continue filling the well. Make ambitious plans, sure, but make them in pencil. Since you are dying, since all your readers are dying, write like you have nothing to lose.

“This is bravery in the life of an artist,” writes Carey Wallace, “not our perfect control as we attempt to scrawl our own mark on the world, but the strength to step into something greater than ourselves, to reach past what we know for what we don’t.”5 In a word: surrender. It is this posture of surrender, of openness, that I admire in artists and non-artists alike.

A.G. Sertillanges once remarked that “Every great work was prepared in the desert, including the redemption of the world.” Despite all appearances, this is what Christ was up to in the desert—preparing a great work, by surrendering his will to God’s.

“Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.”

Moonhand

We stationed my new telescope on the tailgate
and took turns peering into insatiate reaches
of desert sky over Amarillo’s outskirts, alight
like every other night. Gene focused the dial
on a marble moon, stepped back, and held
his hand five inches from the eyepiece, 
catching out of the crisp air a pale bar of light.
Luminous nickel, vatic birthmark, magic
trick tattoo. Rusty motes of desert dust dancing
through the beam, the way snowflakes will
vie for the spotlight of any old street lamp.
Grinning, he slid his hand back into his pocket,
as if to hoodwink the very night. Morning
next it was everywhere and everywhere
at once—the far-flung shreds of the selfsame
sun, violet, aureate, red, flashing over
a fresh plain of hoarfrost atop earth’s crust,
a day’s worth of manna, already melting.
We took in what we could, then went for coffee.

When I became the king of Israel
    the people grumbled, as they often do.
They claimed my father, Solomon, was harsh
    and overburdened them with heavy yokes.

They wanted me to cut them slack. I sought
    my father’s (senile) elders for advice.
And, wiping spittle from their beards, they said,
    you give them what they want, a lighter load.

My buddies saw things otherwise. One night
    around a jar we found a clever comeback
to the people’s cries. You’ve had enough?
    My member’s thicker than my father’s thighs!

In retrospect, I might have used a softer
    turn of phrase. The Hebrews did not take
to heavier taxes or longer days … And
    they stoned to death the taskmaster I sent.

Shortly after this the kingdom tore
    in two. Shishak king of Egypt plundered
Jerusalem, marauding the temple stores,
    my father’s shields of gold, which I replaced
    with shields of bronze—all I could afford.

This and less virile poems can by found in my book, Forbearance (Cascade, 2025).

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This is Lucy’s advice to Charlie Brown when he admits to feeling Blue™️ during Christmastime. “I know I should be happy,” he says, “but I’m not.”

You need involvement. How would you like to be the director of our Christmas play?

Charlie accepts.

As soon as he joins the cast on stage, he begins bossing people around, naturally: “One of the first things to ensure a good performance—pay strict attention to the director!” But no one is paying attention to him. They’re all goofing off, dancing to Vince Guaraldi. He tries again, but to no avail.

Just dancing, dancing, dancing.

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Defeated, Charlie and Linus go search for a Christmas tree while Lucy takes charge. Amid a stand of ugly, artificial tree-shaped objects, they discover a little wilting evergreen. “Gee!” exclaims Linus, “do they still make wooden Christmas trees?” Charlie feels drawn to the pathetic tree—”I think it needs me,” he says—and carries it back to rehearsal.

Unfortunately, his friends only laugh when they see it, mocking his selection with a volley of savage adolescent insults:

Boy, are you stupid, Charlie Brown!

What kind of a tree is that?

I told you he’d goof it up!

You’re hopeless, Charlie Brown, completely hopeless!

At this point, Charlie slumps back into his depression—and desperation:

“ISN’T THERE ANYONE WHO KNOWS WHAT CHRISTMAS IS ALL ABOUT?”

Here comes the most memorable scene of the film. Linus—little thumb-sucking Linus—takes center stage and recites a passage from the Gospel of Luke about Christ’s nativity:

Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

This proclamation inspires Charlie Brown to stick with his humble tree, though not for long. It is ultimately his friends who see it through, dressing the tree with ornaments and inviting Charlie Brown to join in “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” which he does. Charlie Brown joins the dance.

Until this Advent, I had not watched A Charlie Brown Christmas for probably 20 years. I was struck by the depth of its seemingly simple message. At first, Charlie Brown thinks becoming the center of attention—the director of a play—will cure his holiday depression. By the end, however, he learns that true “involvement” consists not in calling the shots but in service and song.

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If you will forgive some theologizing, the film reminds us that Christ’s (humble) incarnation is the ground of our work and worship. God’s involvement in the world enables both our incorporation into Christ and our subsequent involvement in the life of the world, down to the last wilting evergreen at the tree farm. Or, we love because he first loved us.

To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our neighbor.
—Simone Weil

Today is my 33rd birthday. I had planned to write a piece about making grand, Christlike sacrifices, since Christ is said to have been crucified at 33. But today is also Epiphany, and I am still reflecting on the manger. Epiphany commemorates Christ’s manifestation to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi. Like Charlie Brown, they arrive late to the party, so to speak, but when they do, they know what to do. They worship.

You want to feel happy; to garner attention, lovers, and praise; to justify your little existence. You want to build God a temple, but God says, I do not need your temple.

God says: Dance.

It is because of His humanity and His incarnation that Christ becomes sweet to us, and through Him God becomes sweet to us. Let us therefore begin to ascend step by step from Christ’s crying in His swaddling clothes up to His Passion. Then we shall easily know God. I am saying this so that you do not begin to contemplate God from the top, but start with the weak elements. We should busy ourselves completely with treating, knowing, and considering this man. Then you will know that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
—Martin Luther

Is that… Crazy Horse?

The famous Oglala Lakota war chief never agreed to have his picture taken, it is said. Apart from a few general traits—sharp nose, light brown hair, smaller build—no one living knows quite what he looked like. I recognized the medallion as a replica of the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills, or how the monument is projected to appear once completed. Zach and I had driven past the site just four months earlier on a camping trip. One day, perhaps 100 years from now, Crazy Horse will be the largest mountain carving on Earth.

The barista preparing our drinks looked like a barista: canvas apron, tattooed forearms, curly red mohawk tucked beneath a backwards cap, and the waxed mustache. He appeared to be wearing a pair of Meta’s AI glasses. When he learned we were visiting from South Dakota, he shared that his parents used to own a house in Custer. He praised the beauty of the Black Hills and the Crazy Horse Memorial gift shop. Unfortunately, the house was haunted by “paranormal shit.”

He explained that, while staying with his parents years ago, he “got choked” one night. We asked what he meant by this. He said he was lying in bed when suddenly something fierce began wringing his throat:

“The only thing I knew to do in that scenario was just say Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! So that’s what I did, and it let go.”

He then saw a dark figure slip into the closet. Leaping from bed, he switched on the lights—the bulbs flashed, then exploded, and the demon was gone.

“You know,” he said, “the whites stole the Black Hills from the natives. That land is cursed.”

His parents sold the house and moved back to California.

The Lakotas were not the first Native Americans in the Black Hills, but they had more or less secured the region from rival tribes by the year 1800. The Hills offered abundant game, vegetation, timber, and shelter from the surrounding plains. Who wouldn’t want to claim that majestic mountain fastness known as Paha Sapa?

As American expansion moved west into the 19th century, conflicts arose between the Lakotas, Oregon Trail pioneers, and—with frustrating regularity—the U.S. military. This eventuated in a series of treaties between the Lakota people and the U.S. government, which acknowledged, among other things, the tribe’s sovereignty and claims to specific land. Remarkably, the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie included all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River within the Great Sioux Reservation, of which the Lakota were assured “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation.” By 1874, however, the Fed had found a compelling reason to rethink its promises.

Gold.

The Black Hills Gold Rush precipitated a string of historic calamities: wild encroachment and gold mining on Lakota lands, followed by the near-extinction of its bison; Custer’s demise at the Battle of the Little Bighorn; and, ultimately, the confiscation of the Black Hills by the U.S. government in violation of its 1868 treaty.1 At the center of this tectonic collision was a peculiar man named Tasunke Witco, Crazy Horse.

Though shrouded in legend, the basic shape of his life is clear enough:

Crazy Horse was born around 1840 near Bear Butte, just outside the Black Hills. He lived his thirty-seven or so years on the great grassland steppe of North America. Like all Lakota boys of his time, he was raised to shoot a bow, forage, hunt bison, ride horses, steal horses, raid, fight, scalp, practice virtue, observe sacred rituals, honor his elders, and fear Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit in all things. As a young man he received a formative vision which seemed to predict both that he would become a great warrior and that his people would one day betray him. Pensive and taciturn by nature, he nonetheless led the Lakota in several pivotal victories against the oncoming “Long Knives” of the U.S. Army. Crazy Horse never signed a treaty, never accepted government handouts or confinement to a reservation. In the end, he was indeed betrayed by his friends, and suffered a fatal bayonet wound to the gut by a no-name Army soldier at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Refusing the cot they offered him, he bled out his final moments in the dust.2

Whatever else might be said of him, Crazy Horse was a man who lived on his own terms. Yet even this is an oversimplification. Certainly, he was something of a maverick, even a loner, but he also possessed unyielding loyalty to the Lakota tribe and way of life. As Larry McMurtry put it, “Crazy Horse was loved and valued by his people as much for his charity as for his courage.”3 This is one of the more forthcoming statements in McMurtry’s terse biography, which charges other writers with mythifying Crazy Horse the man. He cites with approval the gripes of historian George E. Hyde:

They [fanatic historians] depict Crazy Horse as a kind of being never seen on earth: a genius at war yet a lover of peace; a statesman who apparently never thought of the interest of any human being outside his own camp; a dreamer, a mystic, and a kind of Sioux Christ, who was betrayed in the end by his own disciples… One is inclined to ask, what is it all about?

Everything I’ve read on Crazy Horse grants the point eventually: this “Sioux Christ” was and remains an enigma, such are the limits of history. After all, when he spoke, he spoke Lakota. He preferred solitude and spent all but the final months of his truncated life avoiding white civilization with its journalists and photographers. On the other hand, Crazy Horse’s protean mystique arises not only from the historical lacunae, but equally from the few firm facts we do have about him. Above all, the paradoxes of his life begin to cohere, so to speak, when we remember that Crazy Horse was a Thunder Dreamer.

Crazy in a Sacred Way

Many Lakota youth underwent vision quests to seek spiritual guidance for their lives. Of those who obtained visions, but few made contact with the Thunder Beings of the West, or Wakíŋyaŋ. In Lakota cosmology, the Thunder Beings were spiritual deities associated with storms, the sky, and the west.4 They were believed to bestow special powers on the chosen Thunder Dreamer, provided he fulfilled the substance of his vision. By most accounts, Crazy Horse was such a dreamer.

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The vision that would determine the course of his life has been variously told and interpreted (not unlike the famous dream of his younger cousin, Black Elk, also a Thunder Dreamer). After fasting alone on the plains for several days, Crazy Horse was visited by the Wakíŋyaŋ in the form of a spirit-horseman emerging from a lake. The rider is typically described with lightning bolts and blue hailstones painted on his body, a reddish pebble somehow tucked behind one ear, and a single feather adorning his unbraided hair. A red-tailed hawk soared above. The rider passed unharmed through a flurry of arrows and bullets, but then a band of his own people rose up, seizing him, and pulled him down from behind. Thus the dream ends.5

To me, the details of the vision are less significant than the lifelong purpose Crazy Horse—through the guidance of his elders—found in it. The rider was him, of course, or somehow foreshadowed the man he was to become. Lakota historian Joseph M. Marshall III explains:

Anyone who dreamed of the Thunder Beings, the Wakinyan, was called upon to walk the path of the Heyoka (heh-yo’-kah), also known as wakan witkotkoka, which is roughly translated as “crazy in a sacred way.” A Heyoka was a walking contradiction, acting silly or even crazy sometimes, but generally expected to live and act contrary to accepted rules of behavior. In doing so a Thunder Dreamer sacrificed reputation and ego for the sake of the people.6

Drawing on Lakota oral traditions, Marshall suggests that Crazy Horse embraced the vision as a summons to humility and sacrifice over vainglory. It was customary for Sioux fighters to boast of their exploits on the battlefield, the enemy scalps they’d cut. Crazy Horse would remain a warrior—would become the greatest Lakota warrior of his day—but now he was to forsake all such vanity. He must dress simply, forgo the spoils of war (including scalps) and, most importantly, provide for the elderly and vulnerable in his camp. So long as he adhered to his vision, Crazy Horse would remain untouchable in war.7

One is tempted to speculate about all this. Was the vision merely a self-fulfilling prophecy that manifested the sort of hero young Crazy Horse already aspired to become? Did it endow him with supernatural powers, or simple human courage?

We will never know. What we do know is Crazy Horse seemed to take the call of the Heyoka seriously. Even as he led his people in resistance to the will of “Great Father” back east, he grew strange in their eyes. One evening he would return from a hunt or raid to distribute provisions among the needy and encourage the young; the next he would pace the camp without acknowledging a soul, as if lost in thought. All his life he craved solitude, and the mounting pressures of leadership and brute survival would drive him onto the vast isolation of the plains, where he could reflect and pray to Wakan Tanka for guidance.8

In the savage winter of 1876, Crazy Horse’s family began voicing concerns over his tendency to disappear into the hills for days on end. Black Elk Speaks gives this account:

He hardly ever stayed in the camp. People would find him out alone in the cold, and they would ask him to come home with them. He would not come, but sometimes he would tell the people what to do. People wondered if he ate anything at all. Once my father found him out alone like that, and he said to my father: “Uncle, you have noticed the way I act. But do not worry; there are caves and holes for me to live in, and out here the spirits may help me. I am making plans for the good of my people.” He was always a queer man, but that winter he was queerer than ever.9

Like biblical prophets and other holy fools of old, the Heyoka served as a kind of contrarian social critic—subverting the status quo through his odd behavior, declaring difficult truths from the wilderness.10 McMurtry posits that, had it not been for his duty to his languishing followers, Crazy Horse might have remained a cave-dweller for good.11 Instead, starving and surrounded by a seemingly unstoppable foe, he made the inevitable decision to turn in.

Sort of. In his final negotiations with the Army, Crazy Horse was led to believe he might get his own agency out of the deal, a modest plot of land in the Powder River country of Wyoming. The actual plan was to ship him to an island prison off the Florida Keys called the Dry Tortugas—a wildly unimaginable scenario. Well, misunderstanding and deception led to confusion and fear, and Crazy Horse was dead before they could leave Fort Robinson. He never saw the ocean.

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Gold in the Grass

While writing this essay I have been reading ’s new book Against the Machine. Kingsnorth argues that Western civilization, since at least the Enlightenment, has been dominated by “The Machine,” which he defines as “an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits.”12 The Machine seeks total control of the world and will subjugate or bulldoze whatever stands in its way: nature, religion, culture, humanity itself. Ironically, in building this Machine, says Kingsnorth, the West has effectively colonized itself, selling its soul to the unholy trinity of big tech, big money, and limitless industry.

Staying human in the age of the Machine will therefore require a return to roots and limits. Specifically, we must embrace the “Four Ps”:

1. Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.

2. People. Who a culture is. A sense of being ‘a people’.

3. Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation.

4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates to God or the gods.13

One way to view the life of Crazy Horse is as the story of a man, at once exceptional and ordinary, who found himself snagged in the gears of the Machine. Kingsnorth’s term is capacious enough to encompass the various factors typically invoked to explain the Plains Indian Wars—colonization, Manifest Destiny, railroads, etc.—while highlighting how the whole fiasco was, crucially, driven by specific economic interests. That is, avarice.

Except in passing, Euro-Americans largely ignored the Black Hills until they heard the rumors of gold. On his 1874 expedition through the region, Custer hyperbolically reported discovering the precious metal “from the grass roots down.” Days later the Bismarck Tribune predicted the Black Hills would become the next “El Dorado of America.” Thousands of miners flooded the Hills. When the U.S. government realized it could (would?) no longer prevent them, it simply seized the land from the Lakotas.

That land represented the “Four Ps” of Crazy Horse—though “represent” is far too abstract a word. The Black Hills region quite literally comprised his past, his people, his place, even his prayers. The treaties meant nothing to him. Nor did he suppose the Lakota people “owned” the Black Hills as Whites understood private property. Paha Sapa was his home, the earth he knew and loved. This is why he gave his life defending it; this is why the Machine killed Crazy Horse.

It is easy to sympathize with those “Agency Indians” who surrendered in the face of impossible odds. Abject track record aside, the Machine promised clothing, food, and shelter. And booze. Better to accept an attenuated existence on some reservation than death by starvation, bayonet, or bullet wound. Right? And yet there is a reason the Lakota chose Crazy Horse for their mountain. The Machine may have killed him, but it never tamed him.

“The Heyoka is a man taller than his shadow,” writes Wambli Sina Win. These days, Crazy Horse casts a colossal shadow.

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I had already been thinking about him.

On my flight to Arizona, I happened to read chapter 6 of Ian Frazier’s modern classic Great Plains, the chapter on Crazy Horse. Frazier believed the death of Crazy Horse “shrank” America in our collective imagination. In its war against roots and limits, the Machine—call it colonization, empire, capitalism, whatever—the Machine smothered the vision of liberty and justice that inspired America’s founders. “Like the center of a dying fire,” Frazier writes, “the Great Plains held that original vision longest. Just as people finally came to the Great Plains and changed them, so they came to where Crazy Horse lived and killed him.”14

Even so, the great, granite Thunder Dreamer rises over his Black Hills, a paradoxical symbol of freedom and fidelity, strength and submission, solitude and solidarity. Reflecting on it all moved Frazier to conclude his chapter with a startling passage that verges on hagiography. I quote at length:

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn’t end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on a train, slept in a boardinghouse, ate at a table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going to where he expected to die; because although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as “Red” and Spotted Tail as “Spot,” they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena which our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists.15

Since Frazier wrote this in 1989, a reputable sketch has in fact emerged, drawn by a Mormon missionary who consulted Crazy Horse’s sister for accuracy:

As for the monument, some doubt it will ever see completion, so adamant is the mountain, so slow the chisels of men. A recent article in South Dakota Magazine takes a more optimistic view, reporting that new technologies—including a 270-foot remote-controlled crane and a German-made robotic arm—have accelerated construction considerably. Crew leaders are even toying with completion dates within their lifetimes. The only catch? “Robotics and some other advanced technologies don’t function well when temperatures fall below 40 degrees.”

We will never capture him, this strange man of the Oglalas. He is out alone in the cold, among the caves and holes, making plans for the good of his people.

Personal Postscript

After a solid year of grappling with Crazy Horse and the history of the Black Hills, I have felt obliged to write this piece, though I thought twice about publishing it. I don’t expect (m)any of you to share these preoccupations of mine. The temptation is to reduce Crazy Horse to a handful of relevant “life lessons,” a temptation I have not entirely resisted. True, Crazy Horse was a mere man. We would doubtless be appalled by the violence he was capable of. He neither gave his life for the sins of his people nor rose again on the third day. And yet I can’t help but admire his fortitude. I only hope I would have acted as he acted, had I faced what he faced.

Insofar as what he faced was the Machine of which Kingsnorth writes, Crazy Horse remains a model for those of us attempting to maneuver the Machine’s latest machinations, just as he remains a perpetual symbol of strength to the Sioux people. He reminds us all that a life devoted to a particular past, place, people and prayer may be met with perplexity and scorn in this world, but that such a life can be good, even great, regardless.

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Orchard Pigs

Five thousand trees endowed with ruddy fruit.
But one could overwhelm our wooden pails
and flush our veins with sugar. Still we stroll
the fecund rows, pretending to discrim-
inate between a flawless gala and
a flawless gala and another and…

The tang of windfall oozes from the grass,
where still more apples waste away among
buzzed honey bees. Margins can’t be great,

keeping a place like this. Not long ago
farmers would loose their pigs into the trees
to clear out fallen fruit. The orchard to
themselves, they’d guzzle apples till their brains
fermented hard as cider, squealing round
and around the rows beneath an opal moon.

We filled our buckets, filled our stomachs more.
We felt obliged to relish every limb.
Not (as it were) to get our money’s worth,
but in a eucharist of sorts: to taste
infinity, juice dripping down our chins.

You might as well browse the entire Poiema Poetry Series while you’re at it. Luke Harvey’s Let’s Call it Home, J.C. Scharl’s Ponds, and Claude Wilkinson’s Soon Done with the Crosses are a few of my favorites.

Shop the sale

In other news, we moved into a new house in eastern Sioux Falls last week. The process was (and remains) as purgatorial as expected. I have read and written precious little, though I’ve installed some nice bookshelves. As the year hurtles to a close, I plan to publish one final essay here by 2026, something I’ve been working toward all year. I’m telling you now to hold myself accountable.

Thanks, as always, for being here.

C

Inkwell

Reading at the End of the World

This Edition of Inkwell Espresso Features Marilynne Robinson…

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8 months ago · 42 likes · 10 comments · Inkwell and Cameron Brooks

A book is an ingratiating thing. It is actually yours, so long as it is in your hands. You invest memory in it as a physical object. You can mark it up, return at will to a place you have found moving or problematic, and be reminded that you change as a reader, even while enjoying the pleasure of memory. Nothing is going to go wrong with it. It never needs a charge. You can buy a book and shelve it as a promise to yourself, an aspiration.

—Marilynne Robinson

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As I write this, I am surrounded by boxes of books. We’re moving houses in three weeks, so it’s packing time. Moving, of course, forces you to come to terms with your stuff. And while I have sold off or donated a number of books, most of them are coming with us (again).

The question I asked of each book was not “do you spark joy?” but rather, “might you come in handy on the journey ahead?” If yes, it’s coming with. Books are like tools, I’ve heard it said; they’re nice to have around when you need them.

I admire Marilynne’s palpable sense of wonder before language, literature, humanity, history, God—an intellectual capaciousness nurtured by a lifetime spent among books. Both as writer and reader, she is a model for those of us devoted to the written word, and will remain so for generations.

I’m sharing two of my poems below. If you'd like to read the third, do order a copy.

I’d Like to Love You How

I

I’d like to love you how
   the stylus reads the grooves
of this cool fifty-five
   Clifford Brown reissue.

Attentive yet relaxed,
   untroubled by the bends
or notes that don’t belong.
   Just music, till the end.

II

I’d like to love you how
   this sachet de thé vert
immerses every leaf
   beneath boiling water,

resting its head against
   the mug’s hot convex wall
as if to say, we might
   as well get comfortable.

Open Mic Night

Before she read she said she’d written two

and only two haiku in all her life—

the first, penned over forty years ago,

some clever quip about George Washington.

It made us laugh, how it still made her laugh.

The second poem was fifteen minutes old,

still incandescent as she took the mic,

three lines, just tapped into her phone, about

a single cornstalk standing in a field,

forgotten by the farmer. It made her choke,

speaking those simple words. She read again.

A single cornstalk standing in a field.

Most of the time, few syllables will do.

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In other words

• I recently interviewed my favorite living author (!) for an upcoming piece with Inkwell. Subscribe to their channel so you don’t miss it.

• If you happen to be in the Black Hills next weekend, I’ll be reading some poems at the South Dakota Festival of Books.

• Mary Finnegan has launched a wonderful new project called Talk to Me in Long Lines, “a journal of (long) narrative verse and dramatic monologues.” I have already pitched them a poem and will be reading everything they publish.

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Poetry is often compared to prayer. “Absolute unmixed attention is prayer,” wrote Simone Weil. Understood as an art at least aimed at pure attention, poetry suits the simile. Yet, in my admittedly limited experience, composing certain poems feels less like prayer than the byproduct of prayer, the fruit of it. A poem is a poet’s proof of having attended, however partially or poorly. Iris Murdoch believed the content of our moral choices is all but predetermined by the habitual objects of our attention: viz., our loves. In the heat of the moment, “most of the business of choosing is already over.”2 Isn’t it the same with art? When I sit to write, I myself am no blank page; I come laden with jays and aches and books, the redolence of damp pine needles and the rattle of dragonfly wings. I have been praying all week, sucking sugar from the vine. Now it is time to work out my poem with fear and trembling. And gratitude—for I find within me a trickle of living water that has not gone dry. A good poem is a good work.

Last week kindly featured some of my work in their ongoing Artist Chair series. Head over to the post to hear a recording of me reading two jazzy poems from Forbearance. I’ve included the text of the poems below if you’d like to follow along 🎷

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Solum Literary Press

Artist Chair: Cameron Brooks

Welcome to another installment of the Artist Chair, where Solum Literary Press lights a humble match upon some kindling, and invites you to sit a while. The attention is set towards our contributors, who welcome us all to consider their self-disclosure through honest discussion of their…

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10 months ago · 14 likes · Solum Literary Press and Cameron Brooks

Off Silence

Hip mystics tell me silence is the salve
       for a disintegrated soul, a sort
            of detox from that stupefying din

called postmodernity, even a sine
       qua non for making out the quiet Voice
              within. Perhaps. As yet, I still enjoy

a bit of bebop while I do the dishes,
       the shining saxophone of Lester Young
              spinning in my living room. Or, stuck

in traffic on a gloomy day, I’d rather
       put on something cool by Clifford Brown
              to pass the time, a trinity of brass

and bass and ride converging with the verve
       of fathomless potentialities
              becoming what they only could become.

On Silence

Dishes done, both sides of a record spun,
       stylus skating silently along
              its runout groove as gusts of snow outside

snuff out the lastlight of another day.
       Another day comes down to this: my sense
              that silence never proved an emptiness.

Purchase a copy of Forbearance

New song alert

In other news, I recently released a new single. “West River Song” is a sort of folk hymn to the Black Hills of South Dakota—just me and an acoustic guitar. It’s been an eventful summer, and I haven’t spent nearly enough time playing music, but I’m happy to share this song before the leaves start to change. Find it wherever you listen.

A good word

In Christianity it is not humans who come to God with a compensatory gift, but rather God who comes to humanity in self-giving in order to overcome the divine-human alienation … This is why Christian worship and ethics focus so intently upon gratitude. The beginning point is thankful acceptance of the divine gift. Worship centers on thanksgiving (eucharistia). Counter to ordinary human expectations, the Christian life consists in taking the risk of allowing ourselves to be endowed with gifts from God.

— Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity

The first and largest section of the collection, “North American Sequence,” consists of six meditations on time, death, and Roethke’s mystical views of the natural world. Revisiting the work recently, I couldn’t help notice Roethke’s persistent engagement with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in these poems. Below I briefly explore how each work represents a different solution to the “problem” of time. 

Roethke and Eliot basically agree on the problem of time: we cannot alter the past or control the future—which inevitably brings death—and we cannot stop the constant transfer of future potentialities to past fixities via the conduit of our scattered present awareness. Every moment considered is a moment gone.

In Four Quartets, Eliot’s rather elegant solution to our temporal predicament was to anchor human experience outside of time, in what he called the “still point.” This was a metaphysical move. Without some timeless transcendent something to reference, the flux of human history would amount to a wasteland for Eliot. But it was also a theological claim: the still point is ultimately God, who alone stands above time.

From “Burnt Norton”:1

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

Placing “the dance” in time is precisely what Roethke wishes to do through his poetry. One way to read “North American Sequence” is as a series of attempts by the speaker to achieve a communion with nature so profound that time halts altogether, and so becomes irrelevant.

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Roethke says as much in “The Far Field,” in which the speaker remembers a meadow where he’d once encountered both the violence and grace of animals: “I suffered for birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower, / My grief was not excessive. / For to come upon warblers in early May / Was to forget time and death.”2

Other passages contain elaborate descriptions of the flora and fauna of Roethke’s surroundings, especially the coast of the Pacific Northwest, “where the fresh and salt water meet.” In the woods, along the bay, beside a single rose—these poems are replete with meeting places. “I sway outside myself / Into the darkening currents, Into the small spillage of driftwood” he writes in “The Rose.” Roethke seeks a kind of transcendent immanence, salvation from time within time.

Roethke was basically a Transcendentalist, taking after the likes of Whitman and Emerson. For them, Eliot’s God is unnecessary to solve the problem of time, if it be a problem at all; properly attending to Nature will suffice. Or so Roethke wanted to believe. Here’s a passage from “Journey to the Interior” that recounts a lucid open-hood drive through the Tetons. At first the speaker recalls the speed at which everything was flying past, but then his perception of time slows once more to that still point:

The floating hawks, the jackrabbits, the grazing cattle—
I am not moving but they are, 
And the sun comes out of a blue cloud over the Tetons, 
While, farther away, the heat-lightning flashes.
I rise and fall in the slow sea of a grassy plain,
The wind veering the car slightly to the right,
Whipping the line of white laundry, bending the cottonwoods apart,
The scraggly wind-break of a dusty ranch-house.
I rise and fall, and time folds
Into a long moment.

Roethke’s quest for communion with the natural world resulted in musical yet concrete poems, especially when compared to the dense abstractions of Four Quartets. Theologically, I side with Eliot. No flow state, no shift in human perception can solve the riddle of time, let alone the ravages of history. Only the God beyond time can redeem time.

Even so, Roethke reminds us of a profound mystery: that our most bodily experiences often accompany a sense of self-transcendence, what Hartmut Rosa has termed “resonance.” We sway outside ourselves. Likewise, Roethke’s poetry affords readers a temporary escape from time, as it were. Reality swells. The old wineskins moan. We wonder what it would be like, going on forever.

June flew, huh? All my summer travel plans happened to coalesce in the last 30 days. During that time, I’ve hiked the Black Hills, fished the Glacial Lakes of northeastern South Dakota, swam the gulf coast of Florida, and watched live jazz at a Minneapolis dive. Although I don’t have much writing to show for it (yet), I do have photos. Below is a selection of favorites from each stop, followed by miscellaneous updates and a poem from yours truly. Look forward to a longer essay next month, if you look forward to that sort of thing. As always, thanks for being here.

Warm regards,

Cameron

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“Crazy Horse was not unaware of the mountains…”

He knew the Bighorns and the Black Hills, was born near and died not far from Bear Butte. But for most of his life he was a man of the Great Plains. His rivers were the Platte, the Niobrara, the Powder, the Yellowstone, the Tongue, the Little Missouri. He lived under one of the most generous skies in the world. Again, many commentators have recognized that such skies, hovering over the rolling land, with the horizons a mystery, with mirages frequent, make the plains a place that calls forth imaginings. Those long vistas, those splendid clouds tempt the imagination as the plains of Castile tempted Don Quixote. When Plains people die, white or Indian, they speak of a going up, for where would the spirit go except into that sky? It is easy on the plains to imagine things not seen, worlds not known.

—Larry McMurtry, Crazy Horse (1999)

Coming to Terms

The Poet only had so much to say
     till he set out to say more than he knew,
the textbook definition of a fool,

it’s true, yet this he likewise realized
     was not far from the point: to reach for words
and into words whose latitudes can’t but

betray the sheer enormity of things.
     Yes, words of scandalous particularity,
like tokens of an order infinite

as stars. When God told Abraham to count them—
     this was no lesson in arithmetic.
The deathless promise is what shook the old

man’s heart, a vision like a fisher’s net
     cast wide across the desert sky, cool night-
winds crooning in a tamarisk, the thought

that from a distant time or point of view,
     even these constellations might prove a speck
in some still greater harmony of stars.

According to my notes, I completed this poem one year ago, last June. It was the final poem that made Forbearance, and it might be my favorite of the bunch. I wanted to convey something of the grandeur of the poetic task, its eternal aspect—which, if you ask me, is not an aspect at all but the whole shebang.

Many thanks to those of you who’ve read the book. For the rest of you, it’s never too late. I’ll even toss you the Amazon link.

Here’s a keen new review from one Sarah Sims:

Forbearance is the book you want in your saddlebags for the journey. It’s the grit and wit you’ll need when the winds pick up, because you know they will. And it’s the softness and elegance that reminds you there’s a whole heaven—yes, up there, and all around, beckoning you to witness and bear with it.

The Good Stuff

Listening

• “Rituals” by Watchhouse (LP)

• “I CARE” from the new Turnstile album, “NEVER ENOUGH”

• The Earth Is All That Lasts: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation, Mark Lee Gardner (Audiobook)

Reading

• Crazy Horse in Stillness, William Heyen1

• Warlock, Oakley Hall

• The World-Ending Fire, Wendell Berry

Sipping

• Colombia Agua Blanca, Wonderstate Coffee

Pondering

• “Holy and weird things are blooming” by Carolyn Morris-Collier — Puts a finger of some significant socio-cultural-religious developments across the globe. That sounds abstract but it’s not.

• “In Defense of Pint and Pipe” by Malcolm Guite — A fun essay on the limits of ‘optimizing’ bodily health at the expense of holistic communal and spiritual wellbeing.

The Lakota people call these hills Paha Sapa, though they are not so much hills as mountains, rising like a dark island from the windswept plains. The region’s highest point, Black Elk Peak, is also the highest point in the U.S. east of the Rockies. At 7,242 feet, it rewards its many pilgrims, tourists, and photographers with a spectacular panorama of the surrounding hills, which fall away in giant rock formations and dense timber.

Many Lakotas view Paha Sapa as the center of the earth. From Black Elk Peak, it’s easy to see why.

The Lakotas were not the first Native Americans in the region, but Paha Sapa seems to have acquired a spiritual significance for them by the time they settled there in the early 1800s. As American expansion moved west, conflicts arose between the Lakotas and overlanders, Oregon Trail pioneers, and (with frustrating regularity) the U.S. military.

This led to a series of treaties between the Lakota people and the U.S. gov., which acknowledged, among other things, the tribe’s sovereignty and claims to specific land. Remarkably, the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie included all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River within the Great Sioux Reservation, of which the Lakota were assured “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation.”

Spoiler: it didn’t last.

Massacres & Romantic Tales

According to Annie D. Tallent, the first white woman to enter the hills, no expedition succeeded in penetrating the region prior to 1874 except that of U.S. General William S. Harney. She writes:

With members of his staff, [Harney] climbed the rugged peak, which was honored with that brave officer's name, and on its lofty summit unfurled our national emblem for the first time to the mountain breeze, and under its sacred folds pledged to it their allegiance and undying loyalty in numerous bumpers of sparkling champagne, as evidenced by the many empty bottles discovered on the spot by the pioneers about two decades later. And thereby hangs a romantic tale.

Revelry aside, the only problem with this story is that it never happened.

It’s true Black Elk Peak was formerly named after Harney, who received the honor after leading a punishing military campaign against a band of Brulé Lakotas in 1855. Harney was hired to avenge the killing of 30 U.S. soldiers by Indians the year before. In response, his men killed 86 Lakotas, mostly women and children, and captured 70 others. But this massacre took place far outside the hills, in Nebraska, and there’s no evidence Harney himself ever “climbed the rugged peak.”

Perhaps Tallent was conflating the exploits of Harney with another U.S. military officer whose name still haunts the hills: George Armstrong Custer. In the summer of 1874, Custer led the first major expedition into the heart of Paha Sapa to investigate widespread rumors of gold. Custer’s party was taken by the beauty of the country, and his cavalrymen decorated their horses’ bridles with wildflowers. They also found gold.

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At one point, Custer and a few others climbed Harney Peak. Historian Jeffrey Ostler gives this account:

Atop the peak, Custer and his party drank to Harney's health and then bestowed new names on two prominent peaks to the northwest. One, Terry Peak, honored Custer's commander, Brigadier General Alfred Terry, leaving the other (three hundred feet lower in elevation) for Custer himself.

Thus began the Black Hills Gold Rush, precipitating a string of historic tragedies: wild encroachment and gold mining on Lakota lands, Custer’s demise at the Battle of Little Bighorn, and, ultimately, the confiscation of the Black Hills by the U.S. government in violation of its 1868 treaty. This final move was also a violation of the Fifth Amendment, according to a 1980 ruling by the Supreme Court, which said concerning the matter: “a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.”

Today, the U.S. owes the Sioux Nation $2 billion for illegally seizing the Black Hills. But the tribes continue to refuse the settlement.

The land was never for sale, they say.

The Whole Hoop of the World

Of course, the Lakotas were never fond of their sacred landmarks wearing the names of men like Custer and Harney. So, celebrations erupted when, in 2016, Harney Peak was renamed to Black Elk Peak.1 Nicholas Black Elk was a noted holy man of the Oglala Lakota people. At the age of 9, he received a mystical vision about the future of the Black Hills and the Lakota people, recounted in the words of John G. Neihardt in his classic Black Elk Speaks:

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

Black Elk told Neihardt the “highest mountain of them all” was Harney Peak. This vision of total unity would both disturb and guide him throughout his life, which saw such calamitous events as the Battle of Little Bighorn—where he fought alongside Crazy Horse, his cousin—and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Black Elk was an old man when he finally, physically, ascended the mountain that would bear his name. He’d also been baptized into the Catholic Church by this time, yet he remained faithful to his boyhood vision.

Black Elk prayed to the Great Spirit for his people, weary but hopeful that “some little root of the sacred tree still lives.”

After our climb, Zach and I ate lunch atop Black Elk. The noon air was clean and bright. Dozens of strangers sprawled about the rocks, resting and feeding the wild and wildly curious chipmunks who occupy the peak. A train whistle cried somewhere very far below.

The champagne bottles are gone, but I thought of Custer and his men, claiming the surrounding peaks of their newfound El Dorado. I pictured Harney raising a toast to his flag. Conquerors, all.

What would you have done?

Then I remembered Black Elk and the flowering tree and the whole hoop of the world. I watched the green hills blur blue into the blue sky. I tossed my apple core to a chipmunk.

Whatever Black Elk’s vision meant, it was not some cheap universalism, not for him, anyway. The Lakota holy man gave his life for the health of his people and his land. As a Catholic catechist, he taught others the faith of one Lord, one baptism, one God and Father of all.2 Black Elk perceived that all people live and move and have their being in the same God and from the same Earth, and that this net of relations is sacred.

The gold miner, by contrast, runs roughshod over notions of sanctity in his quest for material wealth. He views the Earth as little more than the sum of its scarce resources—less a mother than a mule.

“The Earth itself is better than gold because it produceth fruits and flowers,” wrote Thomas Traherne. I suspect Black Elk would agree.

The repercussions of the Black Hills Gold Rush are still apparent across the region, now overwhelmed by tourism, that awkward engine of commercialism. You can purchase Black Hills gold at roadside shops, hit up slot machines in Deadwood, or witness a fireworks display over the granite faces of four American presidents carved into a mountainside. But over Rushmore looms a still-higher mountain, now named after a man who once said “the Holy Land is everywhere.”

Driving by Rapid City on our way home, Zach and I passed a billboard that read: RETURN THE LAND, HEAL THE PEOPLE. What would this mean for South Dakota, for the nation? I don’t know. But I’m beginning to wonder.

While attending Princeton Theological Seminary from 2016–2018, I enrolled in two courses at the University across the street: a summer intensive in French and Philosophy of Law with Professor Robert P. George. An esteemed legal scholar with thirty degrees and honorary titles to his name—from Oxford, Harvard Law, and beyond—Professor George was a paragon of Ivy League intellectualism. He wore a three-piece suit to class and lectured ad-lib from the head of our long wooden seminar table, occasionally sharing stories of high-profile legal cases and Oxford’s golden era.

I soon realized my classmates were not simply taking the course for philosophy of law; they were taking Philosophy of Law for Professor George. So was I.

When it came time for term papers, I wrote on the subject of natural law and human rights, one of Professor George’s specializations. The trouble was, I had research papers due in three other classes that semester, with some 60 pages to write in a few weeks. Still, I prioritized my paper for Philosophy of Law, determined to impress Professor George with my lucid logic and penetrating seminarian prose.

God alone knows how many hours I burned on that assignment—researching, writing, revising, and revising. So I’ll never forget the satisfaction I felt when, one sunny April afternoon, I turned it in—my work of art—just before noticing a glaring typo on the paper’s title page. I swiftly corrected the error and re-sent my email to Professor George’s assistant, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

Did he notice? I’ll never know, but I got a B+ on the paper.

I. Abandoning Our Work

Paul Valéry once quipped that “a poem is never finished, only abandoned,” capturing a predicament at the heart of creative praxis: namely, determining when a poem, painting, essay, song, sculpture, or any work of art is finally done. For Valéry, though, it’s a false question. We only complete those incomplete works we inevitably leave.

I find Valéry’s sentiment here refreshingly realistic. A poem might owe its final form to chance and circumstance as much as the will of the poet. The poet writes in time, after all, not an ethereal vacuum. And time is always giving him reasons to get on with things—to meet deadlines, hit send, forget. To not write. Even Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who once woke from an opium-induced dream with an entire epic poem in his head (allegedly), only managed to put down fifty lines before getting interrupted by an infamous “person on business from Porlock.” Returning to his desk an hour later, poor Coleridge could no longer recall the vision, which is why he eventually published the poem under the title “Kubla Khan: A Fragment.”

And isn’t life teeming with persons on business from Porlock?

We should note the cynicism in Valéry’s remark, however. For only a cynical view of the creative process would preclude the very possibility of completion, of perfection. “What is not perfected is not,” wrote A.G. Sertillanges, a contemporary of Valéry, observing how the word finished means both ended and perfect. It goes without saying that an abandoned poem cannot be perfected. But what might it mean to perfect one’s art, anyway? And is that asking too much?

II. The Albatross of Perfectionism

Perfectionism is unfashionable these days, in the arts as elsewhere, the enemy of both progress and completion. The idea is that impossible standards prevent us from finishing our work, or from taking much satisfaction in what work we’re obliged to turn in. The pressure to perfect can be so paralyzing that it’s hard to get started in the first place. Perfectionism breeds fear of failure, we’re told, frustrating the creative process. Hence conventional wisdom discourages us from aiming at perfection at all. Better a shoddy first draft than a blank page, right?

Today’s frenetic social media landscape tends to feed this impulse, pressuring creators not to perfect their work so much as post about it—and often. “Publish or perish,” as they say in the academy, only now it also applies to Instagram, Spotify, and Substack. In a recent article, Philip D. Bunn laments how Substack—widely praised for bypassing the gatekeepers of legacy publishing—has diluted public discourse by cutting out the role of professional editors, those perfectionists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric traditionally entrusted with the discriminating work of quality control. Bunn speaks of his own writing career:

I learned valuable things about how to communicate good ideas beautifully and effectively from all of the editors I have had over the years, things that I cannot and do not learn by sending an email out into the ether, with troves of typos and ambiguities abounding.

Pressing send is all too easy, by design.

Nor is it mere coincidence that our digital platforms have arisen alongside an internet culture that glorifies expressive individualism and so-called authenticity. The algorithm needs its pound of flesh, and we need “content.” Granted, Substack is bursting with talented writers these days, and I can think of several accomplished artists who appear to successfully navigate Instagram without lowering their personal standards. But I suspect even they would concede that social media tempts them to compromise quality for the sake of quantity, not vice versa.

So perfection is the enemy of completion, especially online, but genuine art calls for fulfillment. In contrast to the “digital creator” of social media, the artist desires to “free what waits within,” in the words of Rilke, to produce art worthy of the name. Yet resisting post-or-perish culture will require renewed commitment to fulfilling our work—algorithms be damned. The first step is interrogating our assumptions about perfection.

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III. Obliged to Perfection

In his 1920 classic, The Intellectual Life, Sertillanges outlines the spirit, conditions, and methods of the intellectual vocation. Sertillanges wrote as a Dominican priest to aspiring Catholic scholars, but much of his instruction pertains to other creative callings, not least the faithful artist. Especially relevant is his insistence on perfecting all work “one has thought well of undertaking.” Sertillanges understood the intellectual life as a sacred vocation, accountable to the God of Truth. The worker thus strives for perfection out of obedience. “To have a vocation is to be obliged to perfection,” he wrote. By the same token, to leave one’s work prematurely is to neglect one’s artistic duty.

“Artistic duty” might sound like a category mistake, but only if we accept the now-prevailing view of art as self-expression, according to which the artist is beholden to nothing save his private whims. If, on the other hand, his vocation originates in a sacred call, the faithful artist answers by fulfilling his obligations before God and neighbor—by finishing his work. Sertillanges again:

Finished means ended, but it also means perfect, and these two senses reinforce each other. I do not really finish that in which I refuse to aim at the best. What is not perfected is not. According to Spinoza, being and perfection correspond to the same idea; being and good are convertible.

A work of art exists only insofar as it has been perfected. The incomplete novel, song, or sculpture suffers cavities of nonbeing. Every typo is an ontological chink letting in a little oblivion.

Reflecting on the convertibility of being and goodness brings to my mind the creation accounts of Genesis 1–2, where God forms the heavens and the earth out of nothingness. To be strictly literal, the text does not state that God created the world good, though that’s implied. Instead, it depicts God pausing at the close of each day to behold the goodness of the world he was creating, as if to remind us that goodness was and is truly there, intrinsic to being itself. Only after crowning creation with man and woman does God declare the whole tov meod, very good. Then he rests: “And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done” (2:2). The seventh day represents the consummation of creation, God’s perfect work.

It follows that artists reflect their Creator when they strive to fulfill their work—taming the chaotic waters of a first draft and bringing order to all that is tohu vavohu. This obtains despite the thorns and thistles of our fallen world. The thorns and thistles do frustrate the work, though, which helps explain our aversion to perfectionism. The thought of imitating God sounds lofty when you’re simply trying to meet the submission deadline of your favorite literary magazine. We might wonder whether Valéry was right after all, that perfection is unattainable, chimerical—especially when we consider the wider context of his aphorism:

In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.

Here we see it is specifically the amoureux de la perfection—lovers of perfection—who feel artistically hamstrung by time and circumstance, since their idealism prevents them from finishing anything. Perfectionists would tinker with their work ad infinitum, were it not for yet another person on business from Porlock, knocking at the door. Valéry was himself a meticulous poet and essayist—a perfectionist by most standards—but he recognized the mania of perfectionism. As we’ve seen, Sertillanges was also a “lover of perfection,” yet more sanguine about the possibility of finishing one’s work. The difference lies in how the two men understood perfection.

IV. Relatively Perfect

The perfection Sertillanges required of his students was neither absolute nor abstract, but relative and concrete. He saw that, though God may call many individuals to the common purposes of the intellectual life, yet each scholar’s work must remain distinct, determined by the singular shape of his or her life. Above all, one’s work must correspond to one’s talents, time, and God-given graces: “All this severity with ourselves presupposes that the work undertaken is suited to us and proportioned to our resources.” Lacking this key assumption, contemporary anxieties over perfectionism in the abstract are understandable, perhaps, but mistaken nonetheless. I am only obliged to perfect my work, and only insofar as I am capable. How could it be otherwise?

Furthermore, perfection here means fully realizing the inherent telos of an individual work, not meeting some universal ideal. A painter needn’t consult the Platonic Realm of Forms to complete a canvas, for instance. That’s because the requirements of perfection emerge organically between artist and artwork. With each brushstroke, the painting makes its own demands; it begins to exist, to insist. The skillful painter respects this fledgling form even as she labors to fulfill it. “Everything must be brought to term before it is born,” wrote Rilke. A perfect work is thus one whose particular demands have been satisfied in proportion to the powers of the artist who conceived it.1 Refusing to abort the work, she gives birth. Suddenly, the child is. The child is perfect, like every child.

Creative acts have often been likened to gestation or childbirth, highlighting, among other similarities, the artist’s constant need for patience. If I have oversimplified the process for the sake of illustration, Rilke reminds us that art can never really be rushed. Consider this striking passage from his Letters to a Young Poet:

These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them… patience is all!

Perfecting a work of art can feel like waiting for a change of seasons or the arrival of a baby. Unlike a pregnancy, however, works of art do not typically come with due dates. Rilke here suggests that the artist operates according to qualitative time (kairos) rather than chronological time (chronos). Of course, as a mortal she remains subject to clocks and calendars like the rest of us. But as an artist, eternity stretches out before her. She waits and labors and waits until her fruit is perfectly ripe—and no farther—until she can speak over her creation those primordial words of divine blessing: tov meod, very good. Then she rests.

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At times we force the process—impatient creatures that we are—and to tragic effect. Consider the example of Kathleen Raine, who introduces her Collected Poems with this sober remark: “A volume of Collected Poems is a poet’s opportunity to discard work that never should have been published.” She notes how young writers especially feel pressure to establish their credibility through publication and so settle for inferior work. Instead, she advises, they should consider “the irrevocability of the printed word.” Reading a poem published too soon is like biting into a green banana, only the bitterness lingers.

For his part, Sertillanges described creative works as the “offspring of your spirit” and compared the process of perfection to that of rearing a child: “When you have brought forth the work, you will treat it like the child that one feeds and educates, but whose heredity is fixed, whose fundamental characteristics are established.” Good parents strive to bring out the best in their children, even through discipline. They do not saddle their children with unreasonable expectations of conduct or achievement. Every individual is irreducibly so. Likewise, every genuine work of art is sui generis, of its own kind, and therefore of its own perfection.2

V. Freedom and the Perfection of Love

These metaphors begin to buckle slightly when we consider, as we must, that works of art may be judged against one another in ways children should not be. You may be proud of that sonnet you crafted back in English 101, but it’s no John Donne. Sorry. If we can conceive of art’s perfection relative to the powers of the artist, what’s to stop us from taking a wider frame of reference—comparing works across artists, genres, or historic periods? Each time he sits at the piano, must the modern composer imagine Bach scowling down from Heaven?

Christian artists can comfortably leave these questions to the critics and aesthetes. Their work—though ideally informed and reformed by artists of every age—originates in God’s call, to repeat, which always addresses us as individuals of finite abilities and peculiar passions. Moreover, God’s call liberates us to draw inspiration from other artists, especially great ones, without succumbing to the “anxiety of influence.” The towering legacy of a figure like Bach seems to transcend human limits, even judge them, when, in reality, Bach’s work represents the fulfillment of one particular vocation: German, Lutheran, Baroque. The universal is always found in the particular—so is perfection.

Give out all that is in you, and if you are faithful to yourself, and faithful up to the end, you may be sure of attaining the perfection of your work—your work, I say, the work that God expects from you and that corresponds to His graces, interior and exterior. At that moment you will have to say to yourself that many works and many lives are finer than yours, but you will be able to add: none is finer for me, and there is no other similar.

Protestant readers, myself among them, might puzzle over Sertillanges’ Thomistic delineation of interior and exterior graces here, though we are perfectly comfortable with grace. Despite all the above talk of obligations, duties, and works, a thoroughly Christian account of vocation finally rests on God’s grace, not human effort. For one’s justification before God does not hinge on one’s vocation; it is the other way around. Reconciled to God in Christ, the artist receives and realizes his or her creative calling out of gratitude, which is to say freely. Yet, as Martin Luther saw, Christian freedom always, paradoxically, binds us to the good of our neighbor. And this insight provides a final reason for perfecting our work.

The reason is love. Christian artists perfect their works the better to love their neighbor—the neighbor who reads their stories, studies their paintings, listens to their music. We do not create for ourselves, nor even for God alone.3 But we glorify God by perfecting our art for the sake of others. “God does not need our good works,” wrote theologian Gustaf Wingren, “but our neighbor does.” A work of art exists only insofar as it has been perfected, and only so far can it serve my neighbor. I must not abandon my work, therefore, because I must not abandon the neighbor whom Christ calls me to love, indeed, whom Christ himself intends to love by means of my vocation.

How might this be accomplished? Sertillanges believed creative work calls for the virtues of constancy and perseverance in addition to patience. Virtue takes practice. Of course we should continue to question how today’s digital media platforms shape our creative habits. And yes, we ought to respect the irrevocability of the printed word, the framed painting, the recorded song. We might elicit feedback on our works-in-progress from trustworthy colleagues and editors, though not at the expense of developing our own powers of critical self-evaluation. If our aim is work proportioned to our resources, within and without, we would do well to reflect on the shifting scope of our abilities as we plan and polish our art. Above all, we must pray for grace to fulfill our vocations, for prayer fosters every virtue.

Perfection as such needs no defense, speaking for itself. But in our reductive age of technological efficiency, utilitarian politics, and artificial intelligence, Christian artists must earnestly embrace the practice of perfection in order to fulfill their vocation, which is their witness. Perhaps Valéry and Sertillanges represent two principles at war within every artist: Realist and Idealist, Pragmatist and Perfectionist. I have sided with Sertillanges, for now, because he summons us to the obedience of love.

In the end, when a work of art is finished cannot be determined abstractly. The artist must perceive and achieve perfection with each new creation. Situating the artistic vocation within Christ’s greater call of love affords us the perspective and endurance needed to see our works through to completion, by grace. We will continue to miss the mark (and typos). Our efforts at artful love will be partial at best. “But when the perfect comes,” wrote Saint Paul, “the partial will pass away.” May our works anticipate that day.

Quod potui feci, veniam da mihi, posteritas.

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You meet us on the road outside the gate,

our faces fallen in the failing light,

and walk with us as in the cool of day,

and breaking bread restore our broken sight.

You find us cowering behind locked doors

and walled within our hollow hearts of stone.

You speak Shalom! Shalom! and promise your

Spirit, who fashions armies from dry bones.

You seek us weeping by the garden tomb,

our one Beloved gone into the Fray—

Yet resurrection renders death a womb,

so rising forth, you call us out by name.

And if the dawn breaks bleakly as before,

you’ll meet us by the fire at the shore.

--

April 2022