Page 179
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This variant keeps the same Hollywood-and-cosmos frame, emphasizing directionlessness, a studio life, and the conversion of streets, a mosque, and footsteps into personal mythology.
The scan-cleaned text clarifies the page's geography and its deliberately rough spellings. The poem reads Los Angeles as both route and revelation, with history reduced to footsteps after the cosmic flash.
A second state, titled 'I$ Was all Hindu' with the dollar-sign intact, re-routes the same material through tighter Los Angeles geography. The road becomes a wound - 'The slapped concrete wound like a mixed lariat / Along the Hollywood hills down from Temple St. / to Beachwood Bulvd' - amid 'loss of wit and family too'. The speaker is directionless but rooted ('I felt hoollywood / as my home'), sent by 'the guy who had turned me onr / to my studio' to 'walk on down to talk'. The mosque again triggers revelation - 'thought that's Him / the first of us seems' - before the cosmic refrain returns: 'Explicade among the stars we are blinded', and 'footsteps are only history'. Rough source spellings ('Bulvd', 'onr', 'pased', 'Explicade') are preserved.