Month: May 2024

The Death of Crazy Horse

The Death of Crazy Horse

This passage on the death of Crazy Horse from Ian Frazier’s book on the Great Plains is just fantastic.

It describes how, after being bayonetted in the back , the great Lakota warrior refused the U.S. Army cot toward which he had been led to die.

Ian Frazier:

“What I return to most often when I think of Crazy Horse is the fact that in the adjutant’s office he refused to lie on the cot. Mortally wounded, frothing at the mouth, grinding his teeth in pain, he chose the floor instead. What a distance there is between that cot and the floor! On the cot, he would have been, in some sense, “ours”: an object of pity, an accident victim, “the noble red man, the last of his race, etc. etc.”

But on the floor Crazy Horse was Crazy Horse still. On the floor, he began to hurt as the morphine wore off. On the floor, he remembered Agent Lee, summoned him, forgave him. On the floor, unable to rise, he was guarded by soldiers even then. On the floor, he said goodbye to his father […]. And on the floor, still as far from white men as the limitless continent they once dreamed of, he died.

With his body, he demonstrated that the floor of an Army office was part of the land, and that the land was still his.”

It’s a soaring passage.

And it’s made more moving by the fact that I listened to it while driving across the American plains as part an eleven-part series on Custer, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse—done masterfully by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.

THE LESSON

What I want to focus on is Frazier’s ability to condense the character of a lifetime into a single, pregnant image: the space between the cot and floor.

“On the cot, he would have been, in some sense, ‘ours’.”

“But on the floor Crazy Horse was Crazy Horse still.”

Some might say he reads too much into it. And, of course, there is a danger of imbuing tiny details with an excess of significance.

But I don’t care. I love it.

And there is a lesson here for those, like me, who want to use words well.

Now more than ever, our audience is drowning in a sea of white noise: emails, calendar invites, unbidden incursions of all kinds.

What they need is an arresting image on which to hang the point we want them to remember: “What a distance there is between that cot and the floor!” That’s it. That’s the brilliance of Frazier’s passage.

If we can give them that—in a way that elucidates rather than distorts the truth—then we will breathe life into the cold, dead words that often sit corpse-like and content upon the “cot” of our narration.

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What is walking?

What is walking?

“The world reveals itself to those who walk.” So said Werner Herzog.

I’m flying back now from Budapest, where I had the privilege to speak to a group of European church leaders. I was lucky enough to bring my eldest daughter with me. And we had two days prior to the conference to explore one of Europe’s great cities. (It’s been special and I’m grateful for the invitation.)

In Budapest, we walked a lot.

As always, I conceived of things while moving slowly on foot that would not have pressed themselves upon me otherwise. Like: Hmm…, Hungarians are thinner. I bet it’s partly the walking.

Then this gem from L. M. Sacasas hit my inbox (here).

Sacasas writes thoughtfully on the crossroads of technology and culture on his Substack, The Convivial Society. (You should subscribe to it.) In his words,

“To walk, then, is to inhabit a fitting scale and speed. It is the scale and speed at which our bodies are able to find their fit in the world, and the world rewards us by spurring our thinking and disclosing itself to us.”

I’m pondering that wisdom as I lament the fact that my next book (or rather, books) don’t seem to be revealing themselves as readily as prior ones. Reasons are numerous. I have more jobs and “hats” than five or ten years ago. More kids. More soccer games. More emails and calendar invites. But I wonder if it isn’t also that I’m just not walking and thinking enough to have worthwhile things to say. (I suspect most preachers and teachers can relate to that.)

Sacasas wonders if the reason walking and writing pair so well is that both require a kind of deliberate slowness. Because, “Past a certain speed, we simply cannot perceive the world in depth.”

Both writing and walking . . . seem to calibrate the tempo of our minds to the rhythm of thought.

Yes, cars and jets and computers and smartphones are useful—I’m boarding a transatlantic flight in a few minutes and typing on my MacBook. But as always with technology, there is a cost to our sedentary connectivity.

Namely, “the tool we think enhances our capacity may also diminish it” (…a note to all incautious evangelists for the gospel of AI).

To this end, Sacasas then quotes Rebecca Solnit, who observes,

The mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.

Of course, not all sidewalks are created equal—the trash-strewn footpath by the Casey’s is not the Danube promenade by the Hungarian Parliament. Nor are all motives for our ambulation equally transformative. The tourist and the pilgrim differ in subtle and important ways. As Sacasas puts it,

The tourist bends the place to the shape of the self while the pilgrim is bent to the shape of the journey.

Those differences aside, mt overarching takeaway—and one I hope to embody more this summer—is as follows:

There is a scale of activity and experience appropriate to the human animal and things tend to go well for us when we mind it.

I’d say more, of course, but it’s time to strap myself to a metal tube that moves around 500 mph. No time for irony (or editing).

But here’s to more walking when the jet-lag wears off.

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