Page 66
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page revises the earlier spiritual-material imagery into something harsher, where belonging, mountain-scale judgment, and punishment are tied together.
The surviving lines give the sense of a poem being actively argued with on the page. Salt, flesh, language, climbing, and return all work as pressures against a stable self.
'Before Final Things Begin To Break' is an actively revised reworking of the 'Final Things' material, harsher about belonging and judgment. It recycles the candle imagery -- 'Clean on the glass the candle sticks, / there, caught is your vision so simple, / with THE FLAME' (the handwritten capitals preserved) -- and the Buddhist collapse, 'All be the same say the Budist, / ... when God is a language, / rather than the reverse of a dream.' The flesh-and-sea lines return ('While only flesh I suppose, / Is not nonsense,' 'to be the sea, is deeper than an interest'), now tied to ordeal: 'to look down before mountains, / you must climb up is certain for punishment.' The new pressure is dislocation -- 'I have seen myself walk two ways at the same time, / and I have felt salt in strips sing me away, when / longing wants to whip me back to where I don't belong' -- and the cold close, 'when it ends, it has little to do with you.' This reading remains provisional because the page is mixed-quality with needs_manual_review set; a surrounding handwritten overlay is partly unresolved and was omitted rather than guessed. Spellings 'Budist' and 'reguardless' are kept as written.