Page 178
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Chapter X closes in a dense drunken self-reading: Michael sees his face, body, laughter, dreams, and reason as distorted symbols, then imagines the hot wind and a raceyard where he can run everything out of himself alone.
The page makes the party's social theatre collapse into private self-laceration. Michael's misshapen language and repeated questions turn his face into a text he cannot fully interpret, while running appears as the only remaining purge.
Chapter X closes in dense self-laceration where the body becomes an unreadable text: his face 'drouping and fat,' 'Lines are crawling' that 'Only the slave can interpet,' the husband's piano 'Deapth without deapth. Agong in reaching.' He cycles through 'I no not, / I no not, not from where it comes,' casts himself as 'the presentation and the symbol of dreams... the uneducated among those without the un,' and calls out for 'Danial' to 'come / back' only to be refused. The passage strips itself bare - 'Let all love leave me. Please. No strength / left' - then recoils into laughter, naming 'Reason is my killing song; and song / I laugh with,' before resolving on the body's only purge: running it all out in 'the hot wind,' 'Steaming with flesh,' alone in a 'raceyard.' Source coarse language is preserved as archival text per the scan review.