the end of days

About 100 years ago the Great War was just beginning.Perhaps nobody could see it coming or, more importantly, what it would entail. I suppose that's what war is: the eruption of anarchy into the ordinary, daily routines and fabric of life. And despite all the planning no-one can tell how things will pan out (maybe that was part of the "thrill" of it after all...a step into the unknown, a step back before the lawlines were drawn). 

On November 12th, 1921, Plenty Coups participated in a dedication to the Unknown Soldier...

The end of the West, the end of the novel, the end of history, of communism, the end of Europe as we know it, the end of faith, the sense that things are in terminal decline, that a way of life will never be recovered. At best some one will read about it in some dusty, neglected volume. Time is lost, never to be regained. Time is a falling away...When did it begin? For Hans Jonas it was the Renaissance (or around then). Before, 'life' was everywhere but from that moment on-but of course, it's never a moment-, with no fixed nature, no cosmos, no patterns or models to follow, or unchanging transcendental realm everything was flux, a mere swerve of atoms and subject to decline and, ultimately, death: entropy. This is it, this is as good as it gets. (Kristeva and Holbein's Christ. Fro now on the great winding down begins, only to be staved off by constant revolution, re-invention)

The end of the future-which suggests there's a history of the future. What happens when there's no north, north of the future, no "ifs", and no possibility of imagining how things could continue.

After that nothing happened. 

The end of days suggests not just loss but something more radical: the inability to say what counts as a loss any more. When a way of life disappears or collapses then concepts, words and ordinary activities that are bound up in that conceptual universe cease to make sense. Nothing happens. The very idea of happening changes its texture; the very structure of temporality is disturbed.

The end is unimaginable. It is now a distinct possibility but no-one knows what how to picture it, how one could negotiate a life in the end of days. What was impossible became possible, said Hannah.

A "storm" was on its way. The enigmatic dream of Plenty Coups. How would they survive? How would they survive as Crow? 

Is the only way of living with the end a kind of nostalgia or can one imagine the contours of the future by projecting the past into it? There was no question of the Crow living on as Crow with the same old ways and rituals since they would not be, from now on, be a material possibility.The question becomes, then: how to live in a new way as a Crow?  

Pretty Shield: "I am trying to live a life I do not understand."

Plenty Coups, 1921...