↑ Vantage pt for Jay Levine at tippity top of crow's nest before he jumped.
Das Boot: the first and perhaps most profound of the Dreamscape categories in that it describes not only the day-to-day adventures of a Caribbean escape, but also a moment that was much of a fulcrum or a rubicon for everyone involved, both a gathering and a dispersal. They were all twenty-four or twenty-five years old, an age where everything in the past seems like prologue and the next turned page is where the story really begins. There was a lot of debate about what comes next: plans hatched, destinies reconsidered. And soon after: Sebastian heading for Brazil, Christoph to Argentina, Helene to New Zealand, our pal Jayson and Natalie both to New York City. And the more we studied these pages, the stronger the urge became to apply allegory and deeper significance to everything that was written. And although 'reality' strongly resists such neat and tidy structuring, nonetheless here it is.
-- Eds
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Das Boot (20/33)
December 19, 1990
Choose a different dreamscape
Morning again. If I look up through the propped hatch I see stays + lines, silver in the sunlight, shooting up toward the mast they support. I see the long red flag and part of the green, both impossibly bright, fluttering against the blue sky. The ship sways and rocks. We are anchored, here, protected not by an island but by an extended, hooking reef which blocks any prodigious + threatening wave action but does little for the wind. The ship rocks and creaks and groans and gurgles. Occasionally a low scraping vibration signal the anchor’s shifting movement against the coral some 20 feet beneath. Writing in a journal is like flying after slogging through a mucky swamp of fiction composition. Ah, the freedom! Write anything, mon, anytime, in any mood, without fear of failure since no one ever bears witness. A breath of cool, clear, sea air, it is. But what next? 2 ideas…