Page 258
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page combines self-division, performance, and comic memory, turning Chaplin into a figure for both emotional rescue and embarrassment.
The page keeps circling the problem of inwardness. The speaker imagines the self splitting apart while still staying 'within,' then drifts into theatrical speech about faces, endings, and Chaplin. That shift makes comedy feel double-edged: it offers form and release, but it also carries the sting of deprivation and bad memory.
Animal argues with his own inwardness: to 'stay in one room and split apart? No, for sincerity he could never think like this! To run is his joy! Not away; but within!' - movement imagined as a dart that goes 'through like a dart... within a place; yet they are motion.' Starved of faces ('give me faces!'), he reaches for Chaplin as both rescue and wound - 'Charley Chaplin and I would give the world a good ending' yet 'gives me bad memories; because I had to go without the dogs!!!' - and lands on the bare verdict that 'To be in this position is mercyless, indeed; a falsehood.' Source spellings 'unconcious,' 'cyrcular,' and 'mercyless' are preserved.