Page 24
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page works through right of passage, jobs, children, rain, isolation, ghosts, political resistance, nothingness, impossible hands, glory as false living, and CREATION's distance from what the speaker has done.
The cleaned typed layer makes the page read as a sequence of aphoristic tests. Its handwritten edits push against the typed certainty, especially where the lock line becomes CONSACRATE, the impossible hands line is folded into waiting and aftermath, and the closing turns from a struck-out God and big mistake toward CREATION, FALSE LIVING, and the speaker's own act.
A dense page of self-justifying maxims: 'he has his right of passage,' 'Simple to fall in love,' a hope to 'be remembered as having at least one child,' and the advice 'keep your ears open laying off a soft circumstance.' The all-caps outbursts - 'SO CLEAN AS MY birds,' 'EXCEPT CITIES,' 'CONSACRATE the lock, no trick, watch me rearrange it' - drive toward a bleak conclusion that 'everything amounting / to glory has alwys been one FALSE LIVING / and that is why CREATION has nothing to do with it, what I'VE done.' This reading remains provisional because the page is flagged needs-followup with partly captured handwritten marginalia.