Page 66

By Jack Joseph Smith

Before Final Things Begin To Break or with it's wax Clean on the glass the candle sticks, there, caught is your vision so simple, with THE FLAME or as well this look goes the other way Crushed as terror, or happy as released All be the same say the Budist, Thought without when God is a language, rather than the reverse of a dream While only flesh I suppose, Is not nonsense Yes, and to be the sea, is deeper than an interest Through all, to look down before mountains, you must climb up is certain for punishment; reguardless of appearance, or any arrangement for death 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 When it all begins, let the lesson know, when it ends, it has little to do with you

Original Scan

Page 66

AI Interpretation

GPT

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.


Claude

'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.