↑ 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 (4/33)
December 7, 1990
Choose a different dreamscape
Poor Jay. An incredible game, Jay’s brains steam, concentration, tenseness, Jay thinks too hard, a move, great, another move, one more, many more, too many more. Jay thinks…. The last draw and the king falls… Whose?, well… it’s late. I’ve got to get up early and have the batteries charged. Poor Jay. Played chess, a good game, very good, a happy game, alright…
Yeah, Sebastian won. Yeah he did… sure… uh huh… right. But… there I was on my journey to get water and I began to question, not myself, in my mind (or maybe it was myself) questioning my questioning. I felt the ground: the rich brown dirt of the path, the small pebbles pressing into my heels.. I considered “I am here, this is me.” And yet… blah blah blah …but not for me, thank heavens. I live for the now; the taste and smell of the dust blah blah kicked up from my feet on the way to the bus stop, this afternoon with Nattie…
“When does it come?” I asked.
“Ehh?”
“When? The bus? Do you know when it arrives?”
“Oh! Just now!” Nodding reassurance. “Just now it comes.”
We wait another 10 minutes. More single people trickle from the banana fields under the blazing blue sky. We move to the shade of the Marigot Bay sign, sit on a discarded piece of cardboard. One guy (older than 15 because, he said, he is out of school and school only exists to age 15) had a miniature skateboard: the sole of one one roller-skate nailed to an accommodating board. So I tried it. Wheeled around. The hot tar. Blazing blue sky. Bananas, inverted, wrapped in blue plastic. The lady beside me on the bus held an infant in her arms. 1 week? Less? Dilated eyes stare fixedly into space, into the mother’s eyes, into my own. No more cognizant of the world than of itself.
No engines yet. Tomorrow, Allah willing, systems will cooperate and we will have power. And then we can continue.
Odd to have no phone ringing into my space. I like it, cause who would be calling me here anyway? Hark! A mosquito invades my contemplations. Oh to kill it! I hear it…