Page 70

By Jack Joseph Smith

Then in a canyon he was seated quick against a smooth lava stone, shaped with no jags. He rose a slight stunned; Then taking seriously the way he moved, he began to make good footing through the upside of the crevices; He would take a chance, and bound out from a timed tight timing. Stepping in miniature at first, he longed for the sweep of strides; Holding to pace he climbed, garnishing his gains for a body inhibition of new energy. His gaze was directly upon the earth, but back beyond the image of structural time; Where his try was not an institution, but rather a relationship. Up inside of him he felt a gladness, as if an animal about to be man at the touchstone of the first community of caves; He knew that he could never be home again as he was now. He had dove off the cock tailed ship of American nobility directly during the middle ages of the twentieth century. The bitter end being the enemy he never wanted to enjoy as a lesson; he had to ask himself about flying from water before the year two thousand. He looked out over the canyons and peaks to the ocean. So much, yet the world appeared as if it were at glance. And not so many years ago a glass

Original Scan

Page 70

AI Interpretation

GPT

Animal wakes into canyon footing, cave-memory, and a rejection of American nobility as he tries to stand inside a more primitive relationship to the earth.

The page is a reentry into geography and history. The lava stone and crevices make movement bodily again, while the cave-community image turns that movement into a return to first human forms. The twentieth-century passage frames this return as a break from inherited prestige.

Claude

Back on land, the canyon climb is written as return to something older than modern prestige - not defeat but recalibration. The page reads as reentry from vision into geography.