Page 29

By Jack Joseph Smith

SEEING through a triangle is not difficulty A PLAN, AN ACTION, A CHANGE. Seeing things through a trangle is not difficult. A plan an action a change, three places. At this moment let me decide that coming back to the beginning creates the fourth demention. Beginning at the end of a life might make a right mind wonder if the story teller is capable enough to think. But then, if magic were a part of my dressing gown, I wouldn't be here in the first place. I grew my hair like tweed for years, and then it ended. Hollywood sent me a suit from the forties, and I put it on with a wide soft colar. Catching up to now I know I am sick enough for days of tea, but I feel the door knopb shut me into another dream. These nights for many years have been darker than they should be. I can tell the truth already. The stars across my eyes decided to erace rather than create. You must see how easy it is to lie. Everyone knows; I mean the town laughs at how much I have enjoyed them. Absolutely I under- stood making it awhile back down the highway when Christ walked out of the bushes as a bush and I went back to bed in the bed of my pickup truck. These German streets in the middle of the Amer- ican wilderness are like the bats that grin when they find lea- ther on the machinery. The dam on the river is loud enough to keep the birds away from the worms, and only old MEN with wastecoats will rest there. I read where diencephalon means forebrain, and that's why I walk alot. The tavern is all red or tinted that way. A musician, a friend, quietly is telling me to leave, but I'm having chile anyway.

Original Scan

Page 29

AI Interpretation

GPT

A prose draft turns a triangular plan into a meditation on return, memory, illness, lying, wilderness, walking, and a red tavern.

The page makes geometry into a way of narrating life: a plan, an action, and a change lead into the claim that coming back to the beginning creates a fourth dimension. Its autobiographical details keep shifting between dream logic and local scene, ending with the speaker still in the tavern despite a friend's warning to leave.

Claude

A reflection on triangular thinking and the fourth dimension gives way to an autobiographical account: hair cut after years in a braid, a Hollywood suit from the forties, a party at the Long Branch Tavern in Monroe ending in a beating.

This page most clearly announces the collection's structural ambition: 'coming back to the beginning creates the fourth dimension.' The shift from formal thinking to the beating is abrupt and honest. The townspeople welting the back of the narrator's head with sticks and fists - separate from the one-on-one fight - gives the violence a communal dimension that the narrator slowly works to understand as a message rather than random aggression.