Page 231
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Blackman's approach to the police becomes a bodily performance of unreaction, climax, and annihilation, with the instant before the shot framed as both absurd and symbolic.
The page makes his drugged stillness central: the police cannot read his body because it withholds the ordinary signals of fear or impact. His speech remains grandiose at the edge of violence, so the shooting feels less like interruption than the terrible culmination of the role he has taken on.
The drugs that 'directed the flow' to stop his pulsing make Blackman's body unreadable to the police, who fire at a man who 'gave them no feeling of reaction.' Face raised to the sky as 'a symbol of distructions excitement with absurdity,' he sights down the empty barrel and names the moment 'the courageous climax turned comfortable boys,' a refusal of 'that downward roll-out' into the 'framed flats of ending' - the shot then sucks his mind 'from the blue to black man world.'