Page 59
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Inside the cone, Animal experiences blasted vision, hollow infinity, and the effort to break through sight itself.
This page sits at the center of the flight sequence's sensory logic. It is less about transcendence than about surviving an encounter with scale, brightness, and abstraction that the body can barely register. The sand and gravity image makes the vision feel suspended between cosmic scale and bodily reassurance.
A burst throws his mind 'out to a distance' where he sees 'a bow in the cone,' a shape 'similiar to an hour glass,' himself 'a piece of sand about the sun lost not by gravity.' He becomes 'the captive of a hollow, wild, and singular infinity,' a 'yearn deeply abstracted below the abdomen' that 'souled for the accomplishment of breaking through sight.' He grasps the image only because 'he had never touched the matter of it'; there is 'no laughter in splendor,' 'no sigh or gasp at the apprehension of death,' only change 'after the duration of long patterns.'