Page 21
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A viewing voice follows western Oregon fields, clouds and a river, then watches a man walking a sheep dog beside the Long Tom and an irrigation dam.
The narrator directs a viewer's movement through a landscape and toward the man and dog. The handwritten statement about reduction interrupts those viewing directions, questioning whether the scene can be reached through a reduced description.
A film opening numbered '1.': 'We begin in Western Oregon. It is autum time', moving across the Willimatte Valley to the Long Tom river and 'a thirty-two / year old white man' walking with 'his white and black / mongrel sheep dog', ending with the sound of an irrigation dam that grows 'as the dog winds on / his way'.
The camera-like prose builds a pastoral calm, with the handwritten 'which I / CAN Not cAll out to froM rEductioN' adding the narrator's voice. The two spellings dam and damn are kept as typed.