Cole Swensen

Emile Berliner, one of the first developers of the gramophone, recorded numerous Arapaho,
Commanche, and Caddo ghost dances, as well as a Paiute gambling song, and published
them in July,1894.

                         When from the door I saw him coming

The Ghost Dance dates to 1888, when, based on a vision he had during a solar eclipse, the
Paiute mystic Wovoka claimed the earth would soon end, and therefore inherited, especially
through dancing, in which one dies for a minute

                           Then saw I               the many plainly

Wovoka’s vision of non-violent resistance was shared by Tolstoy: To you can no damage be,
who turns again

   And saw that they, in numbers entering

The ghost dances were recorded by the ethnologist James Mooney, who may in some cases
also have played them.

Tolstoy published The Kingdom of God is Within You in 1894, in which the other cheek in
which one sees

the Ghost Dance movement largely died out after Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890) in
which some had believed

the Ghost Dance shirt is impervious to bullets

a rag flies around the sun at specific intervals

Thomas Edison filmed a Sioux ghost dance on September 24, 1894—or more precisely, he
filmed a dance that featured true ghost dance costumes, but the documentation carefully
states that it is not an authentic ghost dance bending as the light will not

It is 1894, and the gramophone is being sold in a shop in Baltimore. In fact, by fall, they will
have sold over 1000 playing machines, and some 25,000 records    ashless   the voices; we
have come no closer

that blank that stills and faces fast                 in which they turn and slowly halt

and latch you in the glance. The dance, brief and the ghost

lived within                   whatever we were
was photographed with the lights out.