Page 231

By Jack Joseph Smith

"Your brains are missing," a voice from the body of police had yelled. But rather it was the sensation from hard pumping blood that was not there for them... He had directed the drugs to stop the flow from pulsating, so that when he had moved before them it bewildered them that his body gave them no feeling of reaction though the situation appeared incredable. His mouth had turned up as the mask of sneer laughter, but not at them, rather his neck was then bent back and his face had been raised fully to the sky. It was as if he had accepted his entire being as being a symbol of distructions excitement with absurdity just before the flash. Ther he had turned his eye down the barrel of the gun seemingly knowing exactly where he was on the Southern California ground. And moving fanatically closer toward the spreading uniformed V seconds before the shot from a wild heart governed by unsolem lips he had said, "it is the courageous climax turned comfortable boys - when a man knows he no longer need endure that downward roll- out past what is already final only to fall fatiqued into the framed flats of ending." And there in that flash on burning strips his mind was sucked from the blue to black man world shapes into a

Original Scan

Page 231

AI Interpretation

GPT

Blackman's approach to the police becomes a bodily performance of unreaction, climax, and annihilation, with the instant before the shot framed as both absurd and symbolic.

The page makes his drugged stillness central: the police cannot read his body because it withholds the ordinary signals of fear or impact. His speech remains grandiose at the edge of violence, so the shooting feels less like interruption than the terrible culmination of the role he has taken on.


Claude

Blackman's shooting is rendered as a fusion of absurdity, courage, and annihilation — no single frame owns the scene. The page is the manuscript's most violent paragraph.