Page 14

By Jack Joseph Smith

And now I was back. Back in Los Angeles, California. Walking down the old Pacific Coast Highway just south of the headway into Santa Monica Canyon. Looking back, the long spiral distance, it is mid June of nineteen sixty six, and I am searching. Never supposing for my- self as perhaps in those past journeys to this wide spread city yet contained in one adventure pre- supposed film. Searching for my wife and child. Not in the physically sence, for they were home. Home in the North Hollywood beginnings of the San Fernando Valley. But searching for them in a surmise Toward order. Of logic. For at least at the surrounding parts of the core I was still Jesuit. Off Off the highway the beach bodies rolling perpendicularly clean to the washing tide, mentally vacant to their own worship. And I am going into them now. Already drawn. As the stream of a ribbon I am gone. Curving to come back. But disassociated, only a higher hand, higher power, to wind the body, the circle, back. The billows of the can- yons winds seemed to make for an easy evil. Uncomplicated. Disturbance unlikely to happen swiftly, any sudden way of seeing disaster at the brink... left out there languishing in the open sea. Across the arch of the last of the Santa Monica Freeway strands were peace signs, but I was headed for debauch.

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A scan-verified return to Los Angeles places the speaker near Santa Monica Canyon, searching for his wife and child as a matter of logic and faith while drifting toward beach bodies, peace signs, and debauch.

The handwritten corrections clarify the page's inward motion: the speaker is not physically searching for his family, but trying to turn toward an order that might hold them. The beach scene then pulls that discipline toward disassociation and temptation.

Claude

A first-person return that frames the whole book as a spiritual search. 'And now I was back. Back in Los Angeles', mid June 1966, walking south of 'the headway into Santa Monica Canyon', the narrator declares he is 'searching ... for my wife and child' - but 'Not in / the physically sence, for they were home' in 'North Hollywood', rather 'searching for them in a surmise Toward order. Of logic', because 'at the surrounding parts of the core I / was still Jesuit'. The discipline immediately frays against the beach, where 'bodies rolling perpendicularly / clean to the washing tide' are 'mentally vacant to their own / worship', and he feels himself 'drawn ... As / the stream of a ribbon I am gone', the canyon winds making 'for an easy evil. Uncomplicated.' It ends in a flat confession of the split: 'strands were peace signs, but I was headed for debauch.' Source spellings ('physically sence', 'pre-supposed') are preserved.