Page 229
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Blackman answers the police with stylized defiance, turning his own possible death into a performance of contempt for legal power.
The page is frightening because it mixes theatre with finality. His speech is wild and self-conscious, but it is not hollow; it becomes the only sovereignty available to someone already choosing to stand against the armed V.
Blackman moves 'Like a King fairy' against the magnetized point of the law's V, murmuring to the unloaded gun he calls 'empty Bettsy' and singing in a 'lisp' the line 'I didn't know the gun was loaded.' Against the cops' one flat answer ('Your a wicked looking son of a bitch'), his theatre is total, while below in the medow Prankster stands 'watching. Comparing.' - the page sets performed sovereignty beside a witness measuring it.