Then, I don’t know, I stood there in the sunshine a few minutes more, listening. It was late afternoon, quiet. One had the feeling that nothing urgent was happening nearby. When I studied the ground near my feet I could see ants moving hurriedly in different directions, going about their business. They had no idea who Black Elk or any of these other deceased persons were. The thought made me smile, though it was the kind of thought that occurs to you only when you’re feeling philosophical or vague. It wasn’t meant as a diminishment of anyone.

Black Elk’s grave was no different, except for a large, hand-painted sign that had been planted over it, so that people like me could see where it was without searching for it. When I reached it I said a little prayer of thanks, then took out my Rosary beads and prayed the five decades of the Sorrowful Mysteries, because it happened to be a Tuesday, which is one of the two days of the week that we pray those particular Mysteries, the other day being Friday. That took me about twenty-five minutes.

No one was around, the place was entirely empty. On almost all the graves were makeshift wooden crosses, many of which had fallen over or were in a state of disrepair, though not necessarily because of intentional neglect. There were also Indian beads and trinkets of various kinds strewn here and there on the soil, or hardened dirt, within the rectangular, wood-framed areas measured out in front of each marker, or stone.

I suppose at this point I should describe for you what I did next, but you can probably imagine. I pulled the truck to the side of the road, switched off the engine, got out, and walked up to the cemetery in a slightly self-conscious way.

However, it wasn’t long before I passed the house, reached the top of a slope, and saw on the hillside, behind a wire fence, a simple and unadorned acre or two that comprised what I’d been looking for.

One of the girls obliged, and gave me to understand, with gestures more than with words, that I needed to turn my truck up what looked like a person’s driveway, on a heavily rutted road, which I did somewhat hesitantly, because I wondered whether a resident might come out of the house and yell at me for what might seem to them to be my importunity and lack of manners.

The cemetery where Black Elk is buried is so unassuming and nondescript that I almost missed it, and in fact had to ask two young Lakota girls who were walking along the road with a much smaller Lakota boy if they could point me in the direction of it, when I knew that I was near.

Besides, anyone driving through a tribal land, or reservation, who doesn’t in fact live on it is something of an interloper, I would say. Even if that person’s intentions are good. As I like to believe mine were.

Of course, anything I venture to say in this context is fraught with history, both real and imagined. Meaning, I’m aware of the fact that my account of this experience cannot be separated from my identity as a white American male. Which I don’t mention because I necessarily object to it, but rather because I recognize that it is as it should be, or anyway as it inevitably must be.

I’d just as likely say they were formed by what appeared to me to be the ‘spirit’ of the place, whatever that might mean.

For example, one could easily say my impressions were formed by the ‘socio-economics’ of the place, but such a description seems to me trite, even if it isn’t irrelevant and in fact could be partially true.

Probably my impressions had to with the lifestyle of the tribal population, as I perceived it, but they also were formed by something more complicated than that, which would be difficult to reduce to a single word.

For example, once I’d entered the reservation, and was paying attention to the landscape, I saw how the homes and the buildings and the cars and even the dogs seemed different than they did outside of the reservation, though I’m not sure I could’ve been more exact than that, or been able to explain what I meant, had someone asked me to do so.

I brought my laptop with me, because I thought I might write in the evenings or in the mornings, in whatever motels I happened to stop at, but, for one reason and another, I ended up not getting any writing done, which is fine, I don’t always need to be writing, even if it’s true that I did try to remember certain things, as I saw them, which I thought I might record here, in these entries, because I found them interesting or even merely because I noticed them.

A few days ago I rented a pickup from a rental car company here in Cheyenne, not far from where A. and I live, and drove up mostly by back roads to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, about four hours away, in South Dakota, because I’d been wanting to go for a drive and thought I might visit the grave of Nicholas Black Elk, who is buried in a Catholic cemetery not far from Wounded Knee.

Walter Benjamin, the cultural critic and Jewish intellectual, foresaw this, in principle, in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Even if he couldn’t have foreseen it in its specifics.

In this sense, we no longer encounter art for the sake of the encounter but for the sake of the image we have of ourselves in the encounter; that is, the image of ourselves we’d like to curate, to the world.

All one needs to do, to understand this, is to think of the number of selfies of other people one has seen, on the screen of one’s computer or on one’s phone, with, for example, the Mona Lisa, at the Louvre, even if one hasn’t seen the Mona Lisa oneself, nor visited the Louvre in person.

Though perhaps the degradation has less to do with the ‘ethos’ of the individual traveler than with the ‘aura’ of the occasion of travel. That is, with the diminishment or cheapening of it, through a kind of saturation.

Now we have ‘influencers,’ of course. Who post their photos on social media. But there has been a degradation, in the ethos of travel and of tourism, that has accompanied, and is inversely proportionate to, the mechanical or technological innovations that have made travel more accessible and convenient.