Page 389
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page imagines a crawling child seeing flowers, world-sting, ships, tunes, life on fire, and form creating itself before rules take hold.
The scan-reviewed text makes the childlike distortions part of the page's argument rather than OCR damage. Words like `crarm`, `f-rawyt`, and `rittle` keep creation unstable, as if early perception sees life forming before it can speak cleanly.
A first-person creation-voice spoken from infancy, where the child sees life forming before it can name it. 'I was crawling when I saw flowers'; 'The sting of the world / Did not have a will / Yet I knew it all.' The speaker prizes being unbothered: 'My wildness was lucky to be left alone / Not bothered by rules / I never formed a game.' Perception watches form arrive and end - 'Life on fire and form creating on it's own,' 'When all that followsform / begins f-rawyt / Then life itself / ends that way' - closing on life as 'a rittle / and a child thar can't speak.' The distorted spellings ('crarm,' 'f-rawyt,' 'rittle,' 'thar') keep creation unstable and pre-verbal.