i put the life of goethe back in the book stream unread. it was stained and i'm slightly ashamed. i started reading about the ghost dance. i remember edith the funny little white dog walking around one bush in a trance i called her ghost dance. i read black elk as a kid and i remember it like a forgotten dream. in this day of horrifying spectacle, of extermination and deportation, of the war on the indigenous, the land and the animals, it strikes me that there will be nothing native left standing, only the conquerors. and i think of the natives. how could they live under total occupation of the land and people. and now it's us, the progeny of conquest, who are conquered and occupied. i imagine the whole planet in a ghost dance. the dance of the end of time. 
but i read that black elk didn't say the dream had died, that his dream of the end of the ghost dance was transcribed, and in black elk's accounting, it might not have died at all. this is just the beginning pages of the book. from my time in mount zion illinois, before the divorce, in the carved up land of subdivisions and patches of leftover waste land where the animals and i hid out, into the no man's land my spirit went, i've been doing my ghost dance, alone and with the lost animals, a kind of misfit, misbegotten tribal healing dance, for the ones whose tribe is forever vanishing, and dancing at the edge of the great loss.