Page 76
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page treats violent perception as something half personal and half cosmic, with terror, sorrow, place, fear, starlight, and the sun all pulled into the same field.
The restored handwritten revisions make the page stranger and more self-correcting: straw and gold become an either/or, sameness turns into sameness, sorrow becomes always knowing, and the final isolation is answered by starlight.
The first 'Loss Of The Sun,' the most cinematic of three drafts of one violent vision. 'Time an place didn't make a differance / The rifle he was pulling had a feeling / and it was watching, colors mixed and brushed' fuses gun and gaze, and the woman is filmed into a celestial image -- 'She just happened to be a Moon on film' -- while 'Police were on their way to kill her anyway.' The violence is aestheticized: 'Needing to be exqusit with terror and tongue,' 'the quick comfort of violence done.' It then climbs toward the cosmic, 'Only death makes God longer against the Sun,' ending in bare isolation, 'Housing or shade or both still a alone / And a starlight.' This reading remains provisional because the page is mixed-quality with needs_manual_review set, and the dense handwritten place-line revision (including the awkward 'THE INDYE OF A the right place') stays interpretively unresolved. Source spellings 'differance,' 'exqusit,' and 'INDYE' are kept as written.