Downloadable WORD document March 19, 2025

Prologue

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our recitation that shall forever blossom.

I am Caithlin Ni Houlihan, blessed in gratitude to be the Epic Storyteller. From the point of view of the epic storyteller, may I first and foremost present Mssr. Antoine Artaud circumscribed by his own time frame as he reckons himself to humanity’s dreams and nightmares to which we all must reconcile and attest.

Antoine Artaud

Hello, mademoiselle, monsieur. I am Antoine Artaud. If I may, I am a transformer of sacrifice.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

We now present  Monsieur Andrei Tarkovsky, master of the scenography and opacity.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Thank you, Sir.  I consider myself recognized.

I oversee transition and opacity throughout the epic; transition- the grey clouds imperceptibly grow darker on a winter day, a dog appears in opacity image from where he always is, the chair creaks behind the mist, the gate opens, the fire ignites and all returns to shadows under the orange light of the fire.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Now, let us introduce, Thomas Fenn, a human being whose lifetime is reflected through these stories.   

Thomas Fenn

Hello. My name is Thomas Fenn.

I am, as you say, the scribe of my own story. I record details. I meet people. I am carried from one place to the next in accordance with the needs of the epic.

I attempt to live in poetic and melodic harmony with you, my invisible guides.

I listen to your instructions, reflect, and then allow my pen to venture into the realm of discovery.

Antoine Artaud

A poet is a creator of little ships, little wooden ships that travel on different currents within the shared dreams of human beings.

I look out to diversified aqueous cloud formations through your time, and I say to you, I pledge to attest to your lifetime and your role as we both must work to illuminate the epic through breath, whether it be the breath of the galaxy, the breath of the sun, the breath of the solar system, the breath of the earth, the breath of nature, or the breath of man. It is the same breath within different time dimensions.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Please understand, that breath and breathing is the rhythmic pulse of the epic. The relationship between time-passage and breath is likened to the relationship between time as a phenomenon perceived by the senses and duration which surrounds and creates time.

Duration cannot be perceived without awareness. This is why watching a clock without looking away for more than a minute is difficult to bear. Time allows for the perception of form through the three dimensions of space. In this sense, time is the prime mover that justifies distance, as it requires time to move from point A to point B.  Duration does not. There is no perceptible dimension within duration.

Duration is related to the transformation of breath, whose process within time cannot be fathomed in the physical world. In this sense, sequential time passages are waves atop the ocean surface of awareness; each wave disappears into the sand just as a breath disappears into the heartbeat. Duration is the ever-continuing breath of the ocean that manifests in the gentle movement of undulation, like the water in a backyard swimming pool moving back and forth when carefully lifted.

Andrei Tarkovsky

In dream memory, the intimacy between the breath and breathing, is determined by an underlying tonality or frequency that enables the breath and the breathing to intermingle. We may refer to this frequency as the music of the human lifetime.

Antoine Artaud

The great scope of an expression is based upon the eternal instant when the breath is released from the breathing.

On this side of the curtain, expression ferments as flashes between breath and time. And on the other side of the curtain, dream memory presses with incommensurable force. The dream memory has no orientation in time but requires to be witnessed.

Thomas Fenn

If I may, at this point, I wish to recount a little episode from my adolescence.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Please. Thomas.

Thomas Fenn

I received my learner’s permit when I was 15 and a half.

A learner’s permit, you see, allows one to drive with a parental guardian, and eventually, one can drive without a guardian during the daytime.

And so one day, I took my parents’ car along with my small typewriter, drove forty miles from their home, pulled over to the side of the highway and lit two green conical pyramidal-shaped incense sticks. I then moved to the back seat and began typing a poem. It was the first time I had thought about writing, however, I was possessed by the image of a radiant palace or library where all the books yet to be written are housed. I referred to this palace as the Palace of Unwritten Books. This image had no precedence; however, it accompanied me as a vision in my dreams throughout my life. I remember rereading the poem and feeling the cold breeze of a Renaissance villa at night. And different people were listening.

FADEOUT

 

The Dragon & The Spider & The Enchanted Tree

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Our blessings, most honoured participant, Thomas Fenn.

With our companions herein assembled, our little boat glides upon the opaque surface over all that is formless.

All that is formless spirals in ever-increasing frequencies that resolve into a single irradiating pinpoint at the bottom of a humming vortex. This pinpoint is a portal so tiny as to be reckoned without dimension. We are at the edge of this pinpoint to which we refer as the stasis point, the point of dissolution.

And so let us continue in this chapter against this proscenium painted above, and to begin, let us recount the story of The Dragon & The Spider & The Enchanted Tree.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you. I repose in your words.

Antoine Artaud

First, we speak of the dragon: orange sulphuric, aromatic but offensive, moss-like. And then a face that turns into a black jewel through which glittering yellow eyes peer. And then ,upon its visage, there is a pink-grey nose, blue lips, yellow teeth, pale green-grey skin.

Thomas Fenn

O My Company. I remember such terror, a nightmare from which I would awake rattled with fear, in which I am about to be consumed by a great fish-like reptilian beast. And now, the same fire scorches in my breathing. My eardrums throb with the heaving breath of this reptile beast. The froth exuding from his hissing mouth sprays my eyes.

Is this the dragon?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

The dragon is a fire-being – quite elemental – whose fire element is harnessed and controlled by the dark forces of Ahriman.

Thomas Fenn

But if I may, who is Ahriman?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Ahriman is the lord of petrification. He manifests from the absolute density of the earth’s mineral core. Ahriman is pure minerality, and as such, he is the negation of colour, the pure unmixed black, devoid of shades and fluidity. Ahriman seeks to lock human beings to the earth utilizing diversification and disunity to transform individuated soul-awareness into isolated-identity-awareness. 

Andrei Tarkovky

The goddess Natura, however, was never defeated by Ahriman as she looked to and was nourished by the planets and sun, whereas the dragon fell under the tyranny of Ahriman in his black midnight. His firepower, therefore, could never penetrate the visibility of Nature, her colours, perfumes, and golden light irradiating the green leaves. The dragon became the impulse of volcanic destruction and conflagration and remained invisible to the physical earth.

Antoine Artaud

Let us return now to the spider, the tiny spirit of the forest.

One day, the spider, alone, was toiling over her web in the enchanted wood, and from behind a purple-topped flower, a little figure, a waif of a boy, with dishevelled ginger hair jumped out and moved towards the spider with an open hand. The spider escaped, but her precious web was destroyed.

Within a short time, three caterpillars appeared in a triangular formation and carried the distraught spider to the enchanted tree.

The caterpillars placed the spider at the foot of the enchanted tree, and the spider immediately set about to create a most intricate and subtle web, the filaments of which intersected and intertwined, dripping with the dew.

Please remember that at that time, the web was not a trap but rather a design pf sentient filaments to enable the interconnections between all creatures living.in the forest.

The enchanted tree was enamoured by the spider’s persistent and most intricate web. As recognition, she allowed the scent of blossoms and pungent perfumes to emanate throughout the forest.

Thomas Fenn

And what happens to the small boy with touselled hair?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

As synchronicity would dictate, a branch fell from one of the trees onto the back of the boy’s head as he reached for the spider.

The young boy slipped into a swoon soon thereafter, and in his after-death envisioning, he was left at the foot of the enchanted tree and became the voice of poetry that reverberated off the filaments of the web as though a paradisial breeze playing a harp.

Andrei Tarkovsky

As the centuries passed, the humid earth grew long strands of grasses around the enchanted tree, and the young boy’s visionary songs blended with the long grasses.

On the contrary, the young boy’s physical body, mixed with the humid earth to become mycelium – the divine blood of the mushroom circulating throughout the forest..   

Sister mushrooms began to grow around the base of the enchanted tree, and the spider then created an intersecting web pathway in strands between the mushrooms,

Antoine Artaud

The sister mushrooms remained attached to the tree’s base, which induced the initiates of a certain cult to inhale their spores during their dance of shadows; it would happen then that these initiates would be stripped of their senses and subsequently transported to the entrance-way leading to the lunar mysteries in order to balance their reverence with their ecstasy through severe trials.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

And so the great epochs shift; the east and west overlap the north and south and the tremendous impulse of the earth’s sentient body shakes the enchanted tree and the web is cut into waggling strands of filament; and the mushrooms begin to whither. It is here that the dragon re-appears and remains as a counterpoint within the epoch.

Thomas Fenn

I am struck by the boy with the touselled hair? What does it mean that his voice would remain?

Antoine Artaud

To understand more deeply, Let us carry you to the memory of England in 1971. And the forest where you met a group of musicians and actors from Ireland.

Thomas Fenn

Yes, I can envision that memory. How strange, instantaneous now, the images from that voyage appear like golden mineral specks floating from the sandy floor to the top of a lake.

I was travelling with my girlfriend, Madeline, that summer. We were hitchhiking, and somehow, we found ourselves in a densely wooded area in the English forest, and there, we met a theatric troupe. I remember a young boy of about twelve years of age who accompanied them. The more I observed him, the more convinced I was that he was not human but a spirit, a creature from the forest who resides within the clovers and leaves. But now I must wonder. Did I meet such a boy? Or did I dream of him in a memory that does not belong to me? I remember that his name was Heron, and that name would forever bind me. But now, this image of him is framed almost like a painting that hangs on the wall of a museum.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

These are dateless memories, Thomas. They are memories that belong to you from other dimensions and are then personalized through the events in this your current – shall we call it – sequential lifetime.

Thomas Fenn

But was Heron a real boy?

Antoine Artaud

Heron was envisioned by myself through visionary travel. Yes, he is a little boy but born in 1865. He is your navigator through the opaque curtains between this world and the one preceding and proceeding your physical birth – that which we call devachan or the astral realm..

Thomas Fenn

Please, recount to me more of Heron.

Antoine Artaud

Heron was born in a village near the ocean in Ireland in 1865. When he was ten, he saw his first messenger. The messenger was not tremendous as Heron expected. He was frail and desirous of conversation.

‘I faded one hundred years ago into the mist’, the Messenger told Heron ‘And one hundred years later, you appear on earth sprouting from my blood like a budding tree with no horizons and no earthly age.’ ‘

But if you are the sacred messenger’, Heron implored, ‘then you are ready to carry me on your wings to distant lands with sunsets like Saphire?

‘I am not a simple divine breeze blowing willy-nilly,’ the Messenger responded. ‘I am your Ethos. I am you. I mould your deepest core.’

It comes to pass that Heron is destined to follow Lauren, his most beloved mystical guide, through the portal of death as she flies towards the Oracular mysteries and magical rites at the threshold of the galaxy, whilst in sequential time, she falls to her death at the bottom, of the Mohar cliffs. Fifteen years later, you, Thomas – or should I say we – are destined to transpose their voyage into a theatric presentation called Distances.

Thomas Fenn

Oh, my company! My head is filled like a helium balloon, becoming a metal zeppelin. I live in this lifetime-story, which was born from the epic. And yet I feel to be a gargoyle bent under all of these disparate events.

Antoine Artaud

You are a transformational human being comprised of interleaving worlds of memories that interconnect amongst one another within the architecture of the epic, like crisscrossing sunrays emanating from the sun.

However, let us now travel to the little park on Steiner and Sacramento Street in 1971, where you completed your first story whose intimations became the seeds of intuitive clairvoyance. You are sitting on a bench, and two of your friends ask you to accompany them.

Thomas Fenn

Yes. Thank you. You bring me to the sense of déjà vu. These memories are like shells that you bring me, and I take one of the shells and hold it to my ear and listen. I hear the distant whisperings that give colour to the memory through their intimate and untranslatable significance.

And yes, the next year, I was sitting on a bench at the corner of Sacramento and Steiner Street in San Francisco, in a beautiful park overlooking the cityscape. I was carrying a fairy tale I had just completed. My friends told me they were going to Golden Gate Park to listen to some admired musicians. I knew I could not go with them, but even more so, I could never leave. That little park had become my home. The cityscape had become my enchanted horizon. I felt utterly alone with my story in my arms whilst living in another place and another time.

Fade Out

STEINER & SACRAMENTO STREET

Antoine Artaud

Can one’s intuitive secret disappear from one’s eyes by the random crisscrossing of city-busy-noise? Or by the tin squeak of the street car with the unrelenting half-bell sound announcing arrival? Or by a big dog jumping, trying to push his paws against your chest? Or to be with your lover when the phone rings unexpectedly?

Andrei Tarkovsky

A secret is a story you tell someone you love because you love them. And since they love you, they also know how you would love to hear their secret, and so you must seal the two secrets together into a verse; otherwise, your secret will remain locked up in the netherworld while their secret slips away to become a hallucination in an isolated world of utterances.

Thomas Fenn

I am very grateful. I have learned to hold your secrets as guidance through smoke and fire. However, your secrets are intimations, whereas my secrets are – what you have called – dateless memories that have been inserted into my life’s passage in time. What is a secret but the shadow of a memory that was never remembered until now? Please continue to guide me through these murky waters.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

This is our pledge.

Let us continue then, Thomas, upon the waves that recursively gather and re-gather and sift little jewels from the floor of the ocean to be transposed into a mosaic and a labyrinth – this our new chapter, Sacramento and Steiner Street.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you. I shall continue.

I was sitting on the wall at the corner of Sacramento and Steiner Street in San Francisco, holding a fairy-tale-story on which I was working. It was written on coloured paper. The first sentences were as follows:

The little boy woke up. He heard the waves hit as a cold slap against the sandy white beach like an orange-juice-soaked Sunday paper falling against the waxed floor. 

I remember looking at the story and then watching my friends depart. It was as though they were turning into mist.

The tops of the buildings seemed to sway mildly above the encircling emerald parks scattered below the fog as I gazed over the park’s edge to the white neo-classical buildings beyond. I remember cradling the story as if a new-born.

Andrei Tarkovsky

And when you saw your friends disappear into the mist, you experienced that dimensional world between night and dawn – a world that is otherwise hidden behind the daytime sun.

I refer to this realm as the four- o’clock-in-the-morning-realm-of-dreams – the portal between the open-ended nighttime sky and the rays of dawn as they illuminate the physical world.

Antoine Artaud

Four o’clock-in-the-morning is the moment of innocence when the sword of the night-time is put back into the sheath. The city streets become silky under the blanket of just-before-dawn. The cafe stands crooked and swaying, hosting ghosts and memories of a lost night; Four o’clock. No thoughts-wishes-hopes,

Andrei Tarkovsky

Thomas, you sat on that wall, blinking away from the salty and breezy oncoming August fog while the doors to your time and space closed. The clock struck four o’clock. Your friends departed.

Thomas Fenn

Yes, it all shifted into a recognition and eternal adherence to you, my guides. So long ago it was. So simple to say goodbye to these friends.  I remember these questions coming to me after they left. I wrote them down.

What does it mean to speak words? What are these words? Are they floating, reconfiguring columns of air diving into the ears and eyes of the attentive recipient? What causes the lines of the calligraphy forming these words to pulsate into the meaning from which these words are born?

How is memory remembered? If there were no words, could we speak through the tongue of memory?

A month later I encountered  my first guide. His name was Adrian. He had read my story and subsequently asked me if I wished to participate in a special therapy based on the Jungian archetype.

I understood then that he could look through my eyes. And yet there he was in front of me as I shared my secrets.

However, his guidance was not haphazard. He would eventually lead me to the outer wall of my identity that would then be obliterated

But who was Adrian? Was he aware? Or did I project him? Indeed, should I even ask myself that?

Antoine Artaud

Adrian was your guide through the lower realms of the astral sphere until you would come to an internal cliff. You were then instructed to climb that cliff alone. Later, you would tumble from that cliff back into time and then space.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

This memory of Sacramento and Steiner Street is illumined inside a crystal globe, a Waterford Ball – or more clearly, a hosohedron with six spherical glass-like surfaces inwardly curved and reflecting one another, each representing a corresponding dimension – the first and the fourth dimension mirror one another, the second and the fifth dimension as well and the third and the sixth dimension further reflect one another producing an interactivity of time spheres and a flexibility of movement for the initiate to move between and within these dimensional sheathes..

Andrei Tarkovsky

The mirroring sheaths of the Waterford ball attest to one another as the leaf attests to the branch, as the branch attests to the tree, and as the tree must attest to the sun through the planets. Contemporaneously, the leaf must attest to the sun directly before the branch attests to the tree in a most intricate spiral.

Thomas Fenn

What does it mean to attest to a separate world? Do I attest to you or to the dateless memories that you evoke through my distant past?  

Andrei Tarkovsky

Attestation is likened to a ballet slipper pressed against the big toe; the big toe is pushed back into the fabric of the ballet slipper while on point. We call this push-back an etheric impulse. The ballet slipper expands thereby and breathes by attesting to the big toe. If the ballet slipper did not attest to the big toe, it would not be a ballet slipper. The ballet slipper, therefore, is enlivened by attesting to the big toe.

Our story and even the epic are based on the poetry of attestation as it is played out between the sun and the sunray, between the lover and the beloved, and between the poet and the muse.

Antoine Artaud

In this regard, let us recall your first mystical lover whom you met during your last year in high school. 

Thomas Fenn

Oh Yes

Her name was Dixie Brooks. I remember meeting Dixie for the first time in 1968. She would share Irish folk songs in her Gaelic language. I was in love with her in a very different way than a young man falls in love. She exuded mystical clarity. And when she spoke, I was carried on the rays of inspiration to a wondrous world that Dixie knew and could navigate way beyond her years as an adolescent.

Later, in 1971, Dixie and I met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her cousin, Elisabeth, We were driving in a car, and there was a political demonstration in Harvard Square. We drove admist the tear gas which came streaming through the air ventilation. Such burning in the eyes I can never forget.

And then Dixie said to Elizabeth in Italian, ‘Lui e uno di Noi’ {he is one of us.} But now I wonder how all of this could have happened. How would I meet such a person? What did she mean when she said ‘lui e’ uno di noi’?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Without the reverberant soul tone, there is no emanating spirit tone. And earth time is squandered and transmutation petrified. From the earth tone, the poet is born. from the moon tone, the muse is born. Shall the earth tone remain in lawful resonance with the sun tone and the moon tone? Or shall that earth tone disperse? And should that earth tone disperse into fragmented slivers of sound, then the moon and the sun star must disintegrate.

FADE OUT

THE SCARLET LEAF, 1969

Andrei Tarkovsky

The muffled light from the flashlight; the child is under the comforter with her head pointed towards the foot of the bed. She is reading a book called Magic and Smoke. She knew about Magic, But Smoke?

Suddenly, the flashlight goes out. The puffy white down comforter surrounds her in a dark enfolding softness. Her astral radiance intersperses through the netherworld like a feather.

Then, a little pink sunray peeks through. The little girl pushes the comforter aside and looks out the window. A roundish-looking cloud passes above like a puff of smoke. She rises from her bed and picks up the comforter and carries it outside, and hangs it on the clothes line. The comforter blows freely in the magical breeze like a freshly laundered shirt.

Antoine Artaud

Magic and Smoke? Eternity and Time. The Smoke and the Cloud? Time and Breath. The Comforter and the Breeze? The sentient realm of dreams and the astral realm of tonality and colour. The little girl? Psyche, the daughter of the muse.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you for the beautiful story. Indeed, as I listen to this story and your interpretation thereof, I wonder, what does the young girl remember of the smoke except as an image of the cloud and magic except the touch of the morning breeze? Why do we forget our dreams?

Andrei Tarkovsky

Perhaps we can ask ourselves: What is the difference between time’s passage and that which surrounds time to which we refer in the common vernacular as dreams, but otherwise and more precisely, duration? Is time not a concept, and duration a perception of both time and the infinite space of the next higher dimension intertwined?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Time reflects the earth’s spinning; Duration is the movement of interweaving dimensions enfolding upon one another. In this way, duration allows for the transformational shift of the etheric body between dimensions. This transformational shift occurs through duration.

Antoine Artaud

The events relative to your personal past are woven into time’s passage. Your memories of these events and the events themselves, whether subconscious or conscious, are referred to as date-instilled memories. The currents of duration, however, stream through diverse channels. These channels are envisioned as canals that weave through the astral fabric of the collective unconscious. We learn to journey through duration and into other dimensionalities. This is the difference between transmigration and dreams.

Thomas Fenn

I meet so many people over time, and then they disappear. But do I disappear in relation to them? Is death a complete erasure? Or do I die and come back through another flower arranged in this bouquet of dimensions?

Andrei Tarkovsky

Time is a leaf, and the chapter is a branch, whilst the epic is the enchanted tree. The branch and the tree are hermetically sealed by allegiance. Time is constantly renewed in the leaf.

Antoine Artaud

The poet is like the bud of a leaf sealed onto the branch. The muse is the transformed sunlight irradiating the breeze through the branches of the sacred tree.  As such, the poet is irradiated by the muse.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

And so let us return once again, as we reflect.

Please begin in 1969 and recount to us the incident with the truck. In this way, we shall individuate and transform a dateless memory into a date instilled memory and the reverse.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you for inducing a more lucid orientation and the ability to navigate through this labyrinth. I shall continue, then.

It was the summer of 1969, the year of my graduation from high school; I drove to San Francisco from Boston that summer. My father had kindly lent me the family car. I remember arriving near San Francisco and going to a very special rest stop with a view overlooking the emerald-green marine landscape of the Bay area. I can envisage the glint of the moon rays upon the water at the very point of disappearance to the other side of the horizon, and it was all scintillating under the glowing sunset and the rising moon.

As I looked out, I heard the folk song Atlantis. And a voice said to me from behind my right ear: ‘California is Atlantis.’

And so I drove along the Pacific ocean and went to the beaches, watched people at their fires, and listened to some people playing guitars. I would pick up hitchhikers and take them to where they were going, and then, at the end of a few weeks, I began my drive back to Boston.

I was driving in Utah along a high speed two way road when the silver glint of the front of the truck suddenly appeared. The truck had changed lane and he was driving directly towards me. We should have crashed.

Antoine Artaud

And indeed, that is what occurred. There was a tremendous impact. And your etheric body was instantaneously reflected – should we say, hurled -from one reflective sheath to the next sheath within the six-dimensional Waterford ball., Although we cannot speak of sequential events, within that instantaneity, your sentient body was reinserted into your physical body, and there you stood wide-eyed, looking at the driver, who was looking back at you.

Thomas Fenn

And what of the world or sheath in which the head-on accident occurred? Did my lifeless body remain?

Antoine Artaud

Your physicality disappeared and reappeared inside this date-instilled memory whilst the dateless-memory of your transmutation is hermetically interlaced into the chapter. This hermetic process creates a new bud for the leaf on the branch.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Every manifestation of an action or event is deconstructed into tonalities that are reconfigured and tuned in accordance with the chapter, book or verse of the epic.

Thomas Fenn

Yes, I am brought back to an in-between moment, that is between the appearance of the truck and the impact! I begin to see the metal of my car becoming fluid or molecular, and then the car passes through the truck, modulating itself to the form of the truck as it passes through, and then the car comes out the other side of the truck and spins around in the cornfield. At that moment, I look up at the sky and see or hear my grandfather speak to me from beyond the clouds.

Antoine Artaud

And thus your grandfather instills himself as a dateless-memory into the date-instilled memory.  

Thomas Fenn

Yes, and what is strange? He died in January, 1964 in a head-on incident with a truck in North Carolina. I remember his opaque countenance appearing to my mind’s eye the night after his death. I was fourteen years old.

Antoine Artaud

The mystical Poet said, ‘Eternity is in love with the products of time’. Your name with its history, the leaf, and this chapter, the branch, became wedded at the instance of this transition. You became a bud.  

Andrey Tarkovsky

And so it is: The scarlet leaf quivers on the branch, lending herself to the last rays of the Sun whilst an old fallen leaf lies at the bottom of the tree- stuck to the frozen ground – wet and flat. Her autumnal colour has been returned to the Sun. As the poet says, ‘these things must be.’

Thomas Fenn

My soul gazes over this abyss of evanescent memories, and within this unwinding, I must ask: what then of Dixie Brooks? Is she the scarlet leaf independent and radiant, forever attached to the branch like a fragile amethyst crystal?

And what of her Self, or what you call her quintessential perception and experience?

Does she disappear into another sliver of time, especially during the incident with the truck? Or is she eternally independent as a projection from dateless memory and acts with independent will and awareness?

Then I must ask: Is she aware of being a human being independent of her eternal image? Or is she the little girl in your story to whom you refer as Psyche, naïve in her infinite beauty?

Andrei Tarkovsky

Dixie Brooks is the selected daughter of the muse within a purely feminine lineage that originated in Atlantis and surfaced during the Renaissance in Italy. We refer to this lineage as the Oracular Sistren.

Thomas Fenn

When you tell me this, I am silent and amazed. I remember her recounting stories of Florence in 1966 when she lived there with her family. This was the time when the Arno reached over her banks to flood the streets of Florence.

She would speak of Jacopo da Pontormo. She told me that he talked to her in dreams. He would refer to her as Ginevra De Benci and recite poetry in ancient Italian. I could not understand what she meant until I moved to Florence. At that time, I would visit the church Santa Felicita, where his fresco La Desposizione is housed. I would gaze into the tonalities and textures and realize that my inner world was composed of such textures and tonalities and that Jacopo da Pontormo was a guide.  

Later in 1974, after having been in a psychiatric institute, I wrote the following entry in my journal.

What is this awareness whereupon human beings move and disappear, storefronts dissolve on the city streets to regenerate into time-new structures, and the chess games in the park continue to be played by different players who lose and win at the same game? But is that all that I see? Yes, there is the song of a single, lark. But. where are you now? And why do I look from behind myself backwards in time and not see you?

Antoine Artaud

The song of the muse does not last for more than a thousand years. After this, the poet is sent to a small cave that overlooks a red-blue ocean in front of which the emerald sand is being tickled in eddies of flashing diamond mineral-specks where he must compose for another thousand years. This is the nature of transitional poetry on the level of the epic.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you for this stirring image. You help me to remember a letter I wrote to Dixie Brooks as I gazed out at the stone-white full moon on a cold November night. I could sense her emanation like the scent of sage in an empty stone room.

Sadness speaks in quiet tones unseen by the sun but nurtured by his light. The sun passes over sadness, And the sadness retreats to nestle in all that is sad, and all that is sad then encircles the sadness in a dance of shadows. Sadness is not a name or an event; it flutters above the Earth like a thin mist and an unrhymable verse.

And she wrote back as follows:

The past was never. The world at present is past, but the past was never. Only somehow the future imagined is. You were father and mother lover, but the past was never. Only somehow the future imagined is, therefore, me.

FADE OUT

Steffen Von Rosenvinge, 1970

Antoine Artaud

O Magic Sylph of the air: Each wind current beckons my body to disappear from the earth and fly towards you. Your eyes turn away in the cold evening as though to espy the radiant sistren in an orange beam. You are neither fire nor the sun nor lightning nor the rain, nor the hail, nor the ocean white foam, but rather you are a transparent countenance intertwining through the breezes. And I do not see you with my marble-like eyes.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Where does the image reflection in a mirror begin and the silver surface of the mirror end? Where does the mist begin and the cloud end? Where does the muzzle of the dog end and the aroma begin? Where does visibility end and vision begin? Where does the muse continue after the song has ended? Where does the poet continue after the beloved disappears?

Thomas Fenn

I hear your enigmatic words, but then, like a minor chord, they dissolve into a realm I cannot touch or see, almost like the after-image spark when you blink at a colour. I become terrified.

When I open my eyes, I observe trees, people, dogs, and a city park. I perceive the colours of the green grass and the crimson roses, but when I close my eyes again, I see visages behind the wavering white and black backdrop of blindness – ungraspable like the magic sylph of the air or the snow mist ballerina on the ice. There are no fingers to touch this fragile aura of whoever this unearthly feminine presence may be, oh wavering figure of the dawn and sunset.

I behold these hands in front of my eyes with their five stick fingers that hold the pen like a wand in an attempt to evoke her company. I do not witness her time. I do not live in her time. But time, himself, constrains me to withstand the vastness of the realm where she resides.

I fall through a block of ice floating on the ocean with outstretched arms like wings. The empty form of the body with wing-like arms is imprinted on the ice, but I disappear into the black, swirling waters below and forget.   

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

The distance from her astral aura is woven through duration, the stream of dateless memory. A dateless memory has no beginning in the temporal world, but the dizzying recognition of the dateless memory is found within the contemplative  soul.

Thomas Fenn

Does she, oh daughter of the wind, behold and guide the soul? Does she gaze through the eyes of the soul? And who then is the soul who gazes through my eyes?

Andrei Tarkovsky

The soul is the reflection of the full moon’s light on the ocean water of humanity’s collective dreams or the reverberant echo in the tone of a musical note emanating from the violin.

Remember, the soul is the reflection of the moonlight upon water- not the moonlight water sprites who swim upon water; the soul is the ever-expanding and diffusing echo of a tone, not the tone embedded in tonalities like the pistil in a rose surrounded by petals.

The mythological role in the epic, then, is of service to her – the magic sylph of the air –through her reflection within his soul.

The knight in shining armour serves the sacred lady as an expression of the soul and then he disappears whilst the mystic and poet evoke her presence as a further expression of the soul.

But the soul expressing herself?

Then, we enter the true mystery and find ourselves on the shores of the great night, overseeing endless waves in time and feeling the breeze of the great Feminine.

But wait, hark, we hear the sound of a distant foghorn, and we envisage the blue-grey vast Atlantic, booming her thunder from Cape Cod to Maine, the great ocean of New England,

 Caithlin Ni Houlihan

And so we return to your recount, Thomas, against the panorama painted above.

We are in 1969 at the moment of the incident with the truck.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you for your guidance through the morass of time as you appear ever closer. I shall continue.

As I mentioned earlier, I was spun into the cornfield after the incident with the truck, and heard my grandfather’s voice almost like a dulcet rumble. I do not remember what he said. But then I turned my head as I got back into the car, and I saw the truck driver peering out from the side of his window. He was pulled over. We never spoke. Now, I wonder whether or not we were two disembodied phantoms. I remember that he appeared very quiet and unconcerned, as if he had completed a task.

The image of the juniper trees comes to my awareness, each set in the ground equidistant as the highway moves serpentine ahead and behind towards the edge of the curved horizon.

I recall a hum in the air like the prickly excitement before a thunderstorm. I was frozen like ice and yet stricken with the intent to drive directly back to Boston. I got into my car, began driving, and did not stop until I reached Boston.

I remember driving over the green hills of Amherst as I approached Boston, and I perceived the quiet voice of a girl who whispered in my ear, ‘YouMe.’

The following month, my father took me to the airport to fly to Chicago. I was to enter a small college nearby. We met two other young men by happenstance who were also enrolled in the same college, one of whom became a true companion in the Art. His name was George.

Although George grew up in a working-class, white neighbourhood, it was clear he had been adopted. He appeared oriental, but not Chinese or Japanese, but rather Tibetan. He was a poet and later became a scholar of Sanskrit. He was a true companion at the beginning of this mystical journey, and I shall speak about him later.

The other young man Steffen Von Rosenvinge arrived at the airport with his father. Steffen and I attended high school together and became good friends. Steffen was impeccable in demeanor and countenance. He was born into Danish nobility. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the small house in Rockport, Massachusetts, where Steffen lived, and I recall the sound of the walls creaking to the blustery winter wind like an old ship in the northern sea. But it was always quiet inside.

The house was replete with antique books and original oil portraits from the previous century. I especially remember one commissioned portrait of his father that reminded me of a Van Gogh painting. The lips were light purple as if the person being depicted was icy and bloodless; his cheeks were pale orange and yellow, pallid, yet he did not appear sickly; his gaze was cold and direct.

Steffen’s father was a very scary man. He was quite tyrannical. I remember that Steffen and I would throw pillows at the portrait, pretending they were rocks. 

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Please recount the instance with Steffen in 1970 when the glass broke for both of you.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you, my guides.

I shall continue this recount from the point of view of a buried nightmare as well as a description of sequential events which did occur within time’s actuality – perhaps we can say that this episode emerges from a date-instilled memory that is surrounded by dateless memory perceptions; this is because my perceptions of time fractures into splinters of glass in the year 1970. 

I believe Steffen and I left the small college to return to Boston in the winter of 1970. In my memory-dream, we are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard Square. Perhaps we are sitting on the steps of a Presbyterian church. It is early evening, and it is very cold.

At that time, I was being consumed by the dragon that took the form of drug-induced narcosis. Steffen, on the other hand, had been diagnosed as paranoid, bordering on schizophrenia and was prescribed powerful medications, including Quaaludes.

I was under the spell of narcosis, and I asked him if he could give me some of his pills to heighten this molasses-like awareness. And so I took many pills from his prescription.

Even though we were sitting outside, the whole atmosphere became restricted by the hollow breathing of my lungs, almost claustrophobic, like being at the bottom of a pile of boys who tackle you and then pile on top of you.

The air was thick, like honey with flies stuck to it. My eyes turned a deep red. And then they closed. I remember the tepid cauldrons of the flesh absorbing the soul’s awareness as though I were lying dead in front of the same church, having been poisoned by these pills. Truly, the glass was shattered.

I was in suspension without a corresponding equilibrium. I perceived motionlessness. And then I heard the slow beating of the heart and sensed my body as though a piece of dried mud falling away in absolute disequilibrium.

Very soon thereafter, I was at home, having suffered no residual aftereffects, when I heard that Steffen had been kidnapped, and nearly three days had already passed since his disappearance.

His father eventually had him discovered by hired police. He was brought home and immediately diagnosed as manic, schizophrenic, and lunatic, and spent many months in a private psychiatric institution.

Steffen eventually lived in that little house in Rockport with his sister, who looked after him. He chain-smoked cigarettes, read books, and wrote letters, always under a cloud of powerful anti-psychotic medicine. We remained in contact – at least for the following three decades. I would visit Rockport when I was in Boston, and we would eat cheese together, and I would drink dessert wine while he drank cup after cup of coffee and continued to speak in a flowing stream of perceptions, images and insights, all swirling together like letters in alphabet soup.

Notwithstanding his swirling mind and his disconnection from the temporal world, Steffen was a poet in his soul. I remember he was in love with a young woman named Kate Olson.

Steffen would describe Kate through associative poetics, his words and images concerning Kate flowed as a beautiful stream of ribbon-like phrasings. 

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Thank you, Thomas, for your very lucid recount. Let us now view our epic through the lens of this chapter, Steffen Von Rosenvinge.

We must remember that what binds you to Steffen is the unconscious transmigration through death, which you both experienced.

You, Thomas, were swept into the lower realms of a region known as mantegheh zandegi heya shade – the region of the relived life; this is the first level the individuated soul reaches after the portal of death.

The region of relived lives can be tortuous as it is a mirror that casts back the lifetime intention in the form of malevolent or angelic entities. Because you, Thomas, entered through the dragon of narcosis, you suffered terrible torment before you were sent back to earth.

Steffen, on the other hand, was carried to olin sath az hafezeh royaye jami – the first level of collective dream memory wherein he was brought into the realm of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark.

Steffen lived under the shadow of Hamlet for the following decades, and, as we will see, he played a role in the grand epic narrative. He reclaimed the dragon soul of the Prince of Denmark, who emerged from the sacrosanct soul of William Shakespeare during a cosmic transition which marked the beginning of an epoch during which humanity is cut from the spiritual realms.

Antoine Artaud

And now we may ask: what is an epoch wherein the epic is narrated?

I ask you to listen to the resonating consonants and vowels in the word epoch and then to hear the inner resonance of such consonants and vowels in the word epic. An epoch is a chord. An epic is the inner composition of the chord. We shall elucidate.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

An epoch is a cosmically designated period during which the relationship between the spiritual and empirical realms is modulated to create a cosmic balance between heaven and earth; this process also relates to the evolution of the planet, about which we will speak later.

We live in the fifth epoch, during which empirical knowledge disallows clairvoyance – spiritual insight – to such a degree that the upper realms become inaccessible.

The fifth epoch is conducive to the dragon, Ahrimar, and Lucifer, who conduct a disjointing of the earth from the solar system.   

You should understand, Thomas, at this point, that the birth of the fifth epoch occurred in the fifteenth century, corresponding to the emergence of the Italian Renaissance. This insight enchants us as we journey through new chapters.

Antoine Artaud

Please recall accordingly: Dixie Brooks lived in Florence in 1966 during the flood. In a moment of recognition, she envisioned the waters of the Arno arriving at a cornerstone of the Uffizi near where she was standing. The waters spoke to her whilst the waves rippled atop the flood waters inside the courtyard of the Uffizi.

Eight years later, you perceived her astral body standing in front of the cars on Masonic Avenue in San Francisco. The cars passed through her as if she were swirling fog on the road. But she revealed herself to you at that instant, as Ginevra De’ Benci, who gazes through the portrait created by Leonardo Da Vinci.

FADE OUT

WINTER SLUSH, 1971

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

And now, let us recite the story of the Princess & the Cat & Time & the Frog before we continue our journey. We would be most pleased, and it shall help us realign as we navigate through the waves of the collective dream world.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Thank you. I shall gladly narrate if it pleases.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Please, Mssr. Continue.

Andrei Tarkovsky

The story then begins as such.

In the beginning of forever, the Divine God created a princess and then a frog. The Divine God created the cat after the frog. And even though the cat was created last, the princess and the cat became best friends.

Then God mixed the potion of princess, cat and frog to create a splendorous and yet fickle being called time. And time was confused, especially because the cat and the princess wanted to fly away.

Time thought, ‘it is all so perfectly arranged. Why do the princess and the cat want to leave?’

Time thought, ‘first and last, are contained in my own ticking heart. Oh, how could they leave me? I would disintegrate.’

Time explained, ‘I must stop them to save myself and God’s second creation, the frog.’

At this point, the Divine God walked in to help both time, and the frog transform into the princess and the cat. He took the moments that swooped around the earth and created a necklace for the princess. The princess began to twirl, and the flame-like sparkles from the necklace illuminated the newly born forest and the ponds where the frog and time used to live.

Then God invented the fly and sent the frog hopping off in pursuit of the fly. The fly buzzed as if a wire vibrating to the speed of light. The vibratory buzz of the fly entered into the blood of the frog, and the frog began to tingle and croak into song.

The song entered the ear of the cat, who began to purr. The sound of the purring spread through the flowers of the forest, and such alchemy transformed the breezes pregnant with the song into the sweetest honey that spread through the flowers, enlivening the yellow, pink and red petals.

The Divine God transformed the princess into a butterfly, while the frog was taken from the earth only to return as a tadpole. The baby tadpole swam like a silver streak around the pond as the rain fell, and time returned from the sparkle of the princess’s necklace and created the seasons.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you. A wonderful story!

Antoine Artaud

This faery tale was conceived by Psyche – or, in the common vernacular, your Psyche and deposited below the surface of your dreams when you were six years old.

Do you remember the Cub Scouts?

Thomas Fenn

Yes, how delightful. I do remember. And now I smile as I see the connection with this faery tale.  The little boys were called tadpoles, and the little girls were called minnows.

Andrei Tarkovsky

When a tadpole swims very quickly, and the moonlight sparkles on the wavelets caused by his perfectly timed frog kicks, then he can touch the world of the minnow or even appear as a minnow.

And who then is the minnow?

As we speak of her, the minnow is an elemental being, and in our study, each element, earth, water, air and fire, expresses the dream world through the gnome, the undine, the sylph, and the fire spirit.

The mischievous, at times, impetuous gnome inhabits the earth soil, the undine inhabits the inner current of the water element and carries light through the water whilst the sylphs carry sunlight through the breezes and the fire spirits direct the sun rays. There are so many kingdoms to which we shall journey, Thomas; amongst them are the elemental kingdoms of the gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire spirits.

But indeed, there is a great price to undertake this journey– a price even greater than one must pay at the threshold of death, and that price is time. One must sacrifice time, a slave to the continuous spinning of the earth around her axis, and a servant to Lucifer, who has usurped time’s circuitous continuity and replaced it with false dreams of eternity.

Antoine Artaud

Sacrifice is the powerful boon one is granted to penetrate the blessed astral and etheric realities, not the sacrifice we attribute to the martyr who proclaims the sacrificed and the sacrificer, but simply the sacrifice. Otherwise, the sacrifice comes to nought. Time and the succulents of predictability must be sacrificed to the unbridled storm that presses against the thin walls of our skin through the pulsing sensations of the sentient body wherein we experience amazement and terror.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Thank you.

Let us step back for a moment and contemplate this panorama. We begin to witness the scintillating convergence of different worlds as though lightning strikes the branch but does not sever it from the tree.

Let us return, then, to 1971, a prologue to our continuation into the beauty and terror of this convergence,   

Thomas Fenn

Thank you. I have so many questions but I shall continue under your tutelage.

It is the winter of 1971. I am on leave from college. I was living with my family near Cambridge, Massachusetts, whilst working for my uncle in a shoe factory in Lowell, Massachusetts. A group of friends lived in an apartment in Central Square, next to Harvard Square, and I would often visit them.

In retrospect, I recall a distant world in my dreams independent of the ticking minutes and hours that relentlessly clicked by. It was as though one closes one’s eyes to time’s passage and then opens them again to the same instant, yet an hour has passed.

I became enamoured of this realm, which appeared as a fluid space surrounding the physicality of people and objects. So, I would sit in that modest apartment on Western Avenue in Central Square with thin walls and makeshift rugs, listening to the streaming silver-like rhythm and chords of one friend playing the acoustic guitar. 

Although I could not put into words what I was experiencing, I did know the landmarks of the voyage. I could monitor this heightened sensitivity by remaining cognizant of the clock. In this way, I kept orientation. I could see the numbers on the clock and thereby trust the sacred guide to take me safely to the harbour.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Yes, Thomas, indeed you speak of duration, which is an ocean whilst time is both a buoy and a lighthouse.

Duration is movement, not form. Time is frozen movement vibrating with a repetitive beat in its click, click inside a stationary spiral.

Within this new dimension of which you speak, your sentient body was ebullient and tingly as though enlivened by the song of the forest. You were becoming a branch on the enchanted tree and leaving the leaf to flutter in the breath of time.

Thomas Fenn

Yes, I do remember the body’s sensitiveness. Yet, these were not sensations born from intoxication or silliness but rather the experience of fluctuation like a magic carpet floating atop the sweet airiness of the nighttime sky. Years later, I would experience lucid dreams at the moment of falling into reverie. I would be alerted to an inner force as a tingly sensation pulling me upwards into the atmosphere. Then, I would begin flight like a bird winging atop the air currents. I remember espying fields with cows grazing, and then I would swoop down to a single cow and meet the softness of her eyes and the moistness of her snout. I recall the physical body being in a state of soft effervescence and very much aware within his cognizance of being the point of return downwards through the magnetic gravity of the earth.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

There is no height, length, or depth to the sentient body. Each point on the surface of the physical body is connected to the sentient body. However, the sentient body manifests through a filament web nourished by the single breath once released and transformed. The sentient soul, instead, perceives through the sentient body and thereby through the senses with her own identity and awareness. The sentient soul is to the sentient body as a thought is to an impulse. And so, Thomas, you experienced the sentient soul during your flights.

Thomas Fenn

But does the sentient body harbour memory through the sentient soul? And what do we remember through the sentient body?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

The sentient body of a tree branch is the space through which a branch grows. The sentient body of a human being is the dimensional space through which the visible world is transposed to the astral world either by dreams at night or through the individuation of the soul.

Do not be concerned about grasping these images in tight-fisted hands. There is much instruction herein reserved that we shall present as we journey onwards.

Let us continue then, Thomas, our recount of that winter in 1971.

Thomas Fenn   

Yes, I shall close my eyes now and return.

I remember the slush on the streets. You would drive, and there would be tire marks that looked like skeletal shells. At that time, I wanted to be a photographer, find a teacher, and take pictures of the frozen branches in the forest. I remember how the ice surrounded the branch as the sun twinkled his sunrays, creating myriad drops of colour.

There was a young woman I knew who would pose for me. Her name was Susan Dempski.  Her extended  family came from Poland. I recall the people around her playing the dulcimer and singing folk songs. She was very natural with her body, and she allowed me to photograph her. I would take pictures of frozen leaves half-buried by the snow and then superimpose a photograph of her upon the frozen leaves. I was intuiting the use of opacity; however, the picture had no dimensionality, so it was all flat, and she appeared stamped to the frozen leaves albeit unperturbed and natural in her image.

During this period, I was working in a shoe factory for my uncle. My uncle was a very kind man. He and his wife had two children, one of whom was named Robin, and Robin died when she was twenty-six.

Robin was of beautiful countenance. She was trained in library science, and I later envisioned her as the guardian of the Unwritten Books in the Hermetic Palace when I wrote our first edition..

Much later, when I lived in Sacramento, I would walk by the building that housed AT&T, on which century-old photographs were displayed as a chronological guide through the history of technology.

There was one photograph, in particular, of two telephone operators in front of their switchboards; one is looking through the picture in much the way a painter depicts himself looking through the dimension of the painting directly into the eyes of the observer. I felt to be communing with the beloved every time I passed by this photograph. The expression of this young woman, her gaze, the simple sweater she was wearing, it was all truly Robin. Soon thereafter, I wrote the following in my journal:

It appears early as dawn now as you walk along these roads in the definitude of your gait. ‘Tis required you’re having forgotten. You have squeezed through the pinpoint in time, O Robin, and now you sit inside the bottom bubble of the hourglass and gaze upon time.

Time sits in a corner emptied of himself. Each human being peering through the chinklets of time will radiate in the emergence of your incantation. Your gaze upon the earthly drama recedes into the hourglass bubble, and you become the faded print on the page of this journal. Your voice is retained thereby.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Sublime, Thomas. The woven melody from the story recounted earlier.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Please continue, Thomas

Thomas Fenn

And so with the coming of spring. I returned to college, which was situated on Indian burial grounds. We would take walks during the balmy mid-western nights, especially during the full moon, as she would glint her rays against the darkish green of the finely crafted mounds of earth left by the Native Americans. We would spend the entire night on such walks under the stars. I could begin to perceive the shaman’s breath and the ritual’s fire in spiralling whispers of shadows during these nocturnal walks. I knew these shadows were different from the casting of light against an object, nor were they symptoms of the unconscious but instead guides into the earth’s fiery core. I knew this was one path I would be required to take. Such would be my sacrifice.

I wrote this entry in my journal during that time.

I do not have a story. I am the constant movement of light; I am your beams. I am grateful for discrimination, and I want to be completely that which is complete. I want to go to the hermetic palace through the dreams, through the melting film, through the broken coloured lights over city walls with music that darts precisely to the point where the jagged dance begins

FADE OUT

2462 California, Street San Francisco 1972

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Let us continue our journey now from another perspective in nomenclature – and refer to Dream Memory and Epicas mirror images of Dateless Memory and the evolutionary Epoch of humanity and the Earth.

A dateless memory is the sparkle in recognition of a distant non-individuated recall within a waking perception that renders it individuated. Such a memory rises like a bubble from the stream of the collective dreams of humanity and is then submerged once again.

Andrei Tarkovsky

When sleep overcomes waking consciousness during the nighttime hours, we fall into the collective breathing of humanity; there is no more identity.

The heroic epic role is the voyage of a single breath in transformation upon the sphere of the dream-world of humanity. Each epic role spirals downwards into the human individuated soul to become a tiny flake of recognition within instantaneity, like a twinkle in the eye.

Thomas Fenn

I attempt to remain fluid as I hear your sublime words. The word dream makes me think of texture and flight and discovery and magic carpets. The word epic makes me think of a mystical chalice filled with dream memories that we call stories. My sensibility prefers epic to story-narrative and dream-memory to dateless memory.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Indeed, they lie on different sides of the same curtain. The epic is a counterpoint to the epoch which hosts the evolution of humanity during terrible and magnificent cosmic shifts in the solar system and beyond, whilst a dream memory is a pinpoint of perception within the soul – an instantaneous deja-vu through a dateless memory that may resonate from the source of the ancient mysteries.

Antoine Artaud

Here, within the current epoch, the fifth epoch, as we have indicated, we must encounter Ahriman in possession of the dragon and Lucifer, whose objective is to imprison humanity in a hermetically sealed cube suspended over a frozen image of the solar system.

Andrei Tarkovsky

The sixth epoch heralds the transformation of the collective psyche of humanity through a great shift within the solar system. We shall speak about the engineering of this event as we journey forward. Suffice it to say that the transposition of the fifth epoch onto the sixth epoch represents the theme and the heartbeat of this epic.  And it is our task thereby to recite the theme and live the epic.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Let us summarize in parcels of history and myth.:

The first epoch aligns with ancient India and the Mahabharata; the second epoch aligns with Persia and the epic of Rostam; the third epoch aligns with Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldaic-Egypt and the epic mythology of Ra, Osiris and Horus, as well as Gilgamesh. The fourth epoch aligns with Greco-Romano and the voyage of Odysseus, and the fifth epoch, our own, is aligned with the Divine Comedy and is transformed beyond.

We shall understand this imagistic knowledge more deeply as we follow the path of your journey through your decades, Thomas.

Let us return now to San Francisco, California, in the year 1972

Thomas Fenn

Thank you. I am most grateful. May I express and thereby reiterate my wish to meet your intention? As time passes, I feel more and more held in your confidence and entrusted to lend my life to your instructions, poetry, and music, which I have done over these decades and will continue to do as a testimony to your vision.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Thank you, Thomas. Your intention is met with our own. Please do continue.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you.

And so, I departed for California in January, 1972. I had no doubt I was to pursue poetry. This realization came to me in an instant. There was no question, choice, or necessity for contemplation. I was living in a world of expression rather than identity, and I was mysteriously free and focused,

We left as a small group and drove across the country. It was late fall. Our sails were billowing with the breath of possibility as we shifted from the saturated porous brick buildings of Boston to the strange geology of San Francisco, with her streets that looked like curly ribbons painted on top of the buckling and tectonic plates shifting beneath the cement and ground cover.

An apartment had already been acquired. It was situated at the corner of California and Steiner; the exact address was 2462 California Street. The neighbourhood was called California-Fillmore, and it was the home of artists, especially painters, writers and dancers, many of whom were older than myself and, therefore, participated in the atmosphere of San Francisco as far back as the 1930s.

I became the child of the neighbourhood, and my work began to circulate within the environs of California-Fillmore. We often met in the wee hours of the night at the twenty-four hour Donut Shop located at the corner of California and Fillmore Street, drank coffee, and ate jelly doughnuts.

I remember one painter who invited me to his apartment as he wanted to share a painting he had completed. I was gazing at the painting, globular drops of paint all connecting into streaks and wild movement and fire. My eyes burned as I looked at the painting, and copious tears fell down my cheeks – not because the image entered into my heart but because the colours entered my physical eyes like little fire pebbles. I could not understand what I was experiencing. The man asked me if I had smoked marijuana, which I hadn’t, and when I left his apartment, I realized my capability in perception was extraordinary as I could enter the colour and become, if I may, the soul of the colour.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

We guide you to this memory, Thomas, and in so doing, we shall underline a principle that will help you navigate behind your closed eyes in your voyage through the unconscious.  

When you close your eyes, you perceive after-images in opaque white of the just-perceived physical object projected against a black backdrop. The black backdrop is a curtain through which one may pass to the astrality of colours whose living nature lies in the transformed impression. It is as though we breathe the impression of the colour through our eyes; this is very different than perceiving the colour as wavelets or calculable frequencies upon the texture of the atmosphere; instead, each primary colour is a living entity whose governing principle is distinct from that colour as the sentient body is distinct from the physical. as the astral body is distinct from the etheric

Similar tendencies in human beings characterise these governing principles: red being active, blue being receptive, green being contained, and yellow being solitary. One may surmise with poetic license that the characteristic of the colour is the expression of the soul of that colour.

And so it is that all primary colours are tuned to a threshold of vibrancy, after which the colour sparkles into lustrous shades of sister colours as when one looks into a headlight through a drop of rain at the instant the sunray touches the drop.

Astral Beings manifest within this radiant lustre and can communicate great mysteries through their splendour into the primary colour. This process involves the study of Hermetics and the development of clairvoyant vision, on which we will focus as we voyage.

Let us continue then, Thomas.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you, Sir. I shall withhold my impatience to understand more of what you say. Admittedly, I do not remember a specific sensibility to colour other than through the imagery of expression. I would never have entertained becoming a painter, for example, but I remember listening to music with eyes closed and feeling beneath a sheen of rainbow colours just out of focus.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

That is entirely accurate, Thomas. I am pleased. We shall pursue this experience in depth when we speak about the relationship between phonetics, music, and colour; all decomposed into commensurable and interchangeable tonalities.

Please then do continue.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you!

However, if I may, at this point I would like to stand back for a moment and return to my adolescence in order to introduce another thread into the weaving of this tapestry.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You may, Thomas

Thomas Fenn

Again, thank you

I am carried to the years between 1966 and 1969. During that time, I was in high school and I had a best friend whose name was Neil. He was quite striking in countenance like a Renaissance Painting.  He was close with Dixie; perhaps they were lovers, but this was unimportant to me as I knew that they should belong together in this physical world. They were both so beautiful.

Neil was attracted to men as well as women. I remember an incident when he and another close friend spent one night together. Later, my other friend told me about the incident in such a way that it appeared strange and unnatural. This upset me, but I never betrayed Neil’s secret within the strict environment of the private high school. Notwithstanding, we often spoke about human love, mystical love and the beloved. He was respectful of my heart and never questioned me for my sensitivity.

In the late summer of 1971, we were in Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Cape Cod, walking along a road that traced the ocean shore. It was the middle of the night. We were both immersed in the swish of the ocean waves quietly beating on the sandy beach just beyond the dunes as the orange sunrise began to appear over the horizon and the clock moved from 4:00 A.M. to 5:00 A.M.

I shall never forget the transition to dawn as the green-yellow of the ocean-side fauna came into focus. It was my first intuition that one could climb over the walls of time and then walk forever along an endless road.

During our last year in high school, Neil began studying a hidden esoteric Teaching, to which we refer as the Work. Although he was quite young, he became part of a study group under the tutelage of an authentic teacher. He began sharing his experiences and recommended that I find these books. I was most intrigued, although I was not cognizant that I had, in reality, arrived to the crossroad of this journey just at that moment.

When I arrived in San Francisco, I knew I had to find this book. The necessity I felt was in equal measure to the necessity to pursue poetics and writing.

Over thirty years later, Neil and I met at a gathering commemorating the lifetime of my father, who had passed away some months before. I stayed in Boston for a few more days to spend time with him. I remember he had just received a letter from Dixie, who was living in Ireland, and that she had asked about me. I was stunned that he should receive that letter in the mail just before we met. It was the first time he had heard from her in the thirty years that had passed.

Andrei Tarkovsky

A deep friendship sheds light on the mystical being born from the friendship whose existence is independent of the friendship. This persona is invisible and indivisible, even when the external friendship dissolves.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You may continue now, Thomas, San Francisco, 1972.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you.

And so I became immersed in the occult in the form of super-imposed images from my unconscious, shadowy opacities in the form of human figures and spaces arising from the surrealistic atmosphere of bygone days, especially the 1920s to the 1940s. As such my perceptions of California-Fillmore became quite embellished rendering it a kind of Shangrila, a magical setting for the creative spirit.     

Antoine Artaud

Your fascination with the occult stems from early childhood, Thomas. When you were eight years old, you were gifted with atavistic clairvoyance during a medical operation to remove your tonsils.

Thomas Fenn

Please forgive me, but I do not understand or remember this event nor do I understand what you mean by atavistic clairvoyance.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

The word atavistic refers to a previous iteration of race in humanity, the Atlanteans. The Atlantean civilization preceded the first epoch. The human race at that time was gifted with perceptual clairvoyance albeit uneducated. They were tuned, so to speak, to the undertones of existence. This natural or atavistic clairvoyance was rescinded as humanity descended into empirical mind-set and materialism that we finally witness during the fifth epoch.

In this regard, you were gifted with this otherworldly perceptual talent during this medical procedure through the medium of ether. Do you begin to decipher this incident through dream memory, Thomas?

Thomas Fenn

Yes, indeed. I am brought back to this event. I remember the doctor putting a mask over my face and telling me to breathe. He told me it would smell like liquorice. Instead, I experienced a suffocating glue-like odour and then terrifying disorientation as if I were falling, falling into high pitched whirling sounds and even voices. After that, I perceived a great spinning vortex that hummed like a hive of bees. I recall the bottom of the vortex as the tiniest opening through which one might squeeze. Later, I awoke and realized that it was my eighth birthday. I was looking at a label on the back of my pyjamas, and in stark realization, I said: ‘How strange, I am actually eight years old.

Antoine Artaud

It was during this intervention that you were carried through the portal of death for the first time. You were brought into the reflective dimension of another age encompassing your time and space. And there, you were instilled with a nascent tendency towards clairvoyance that began manifesting during this period in San Francisco.

Thomas Fenn

I may not be able to absorb the surface meaning in the words and terminologies that you impart. But I do know they enter my blood. I am most grateful.

May I continue, then?.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You may

Thomas Fenn

Besides the bookstore on Polk Street, I would also visit the City Lights bookstore in North Beach amidst the bustling Italian cafes, burlesque shows, and jumbling tourism. The bookstore seemed to bob atop the time waters of another age as a study hall for poets.

When I entered the bookstore, I would feel to be passing through a curtain into the poetic magic of  the 1950’s. I would sit there unperturbed and write in my notebook, or else I would walk like a cat over the wooden floor that would otherwise squeak like the boom of the sail being pushed by the winds, or I would simply listen to the conversation between the poets as they rocked on the creaking wooden chairs smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.

One day, I was in the City Lights bookstore. There were books being displayed in a small corner of the bookstore unrelated to poetry, and there, by the hand of destiny, lay the book that Neil had discovered on the Work.

I was instantly transported. It appeared as though the mystical and the poetic were enjoining. I remember purchasing the book, and it became both a portal and a map that I would carry into the abyss that lay just over the edge of the horizon. My childhood was over.

FADE OUT

Performance 1972

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Before continuing through our journey, let us turn our eyes upwards in wondrous contemplation and reflect upon the divine feminine beginning with our individuated Psyche. In so doing, we shall recite the song of the epic as we journey through the epoch.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you, my guides, for opening my inner ear to this vast night of contemplation. Beauty lies in the recognition thereof and not in the object that it adorns. So, it remains in my nostalgic imaginings that Psyche is a simple young girl navigating through shifting currents of humanity’s dreams and nightmares – not dissimilar to Alice in her Wonderland.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Yes, Thomas, Psyche in appearance embodies the dreams of humanity, sprinkling stories gleaned from the Hermetic Palace of Unwritten Books; these stories become dateless memories that resume into epic fantasy and fairy tales.

Thomas Fenn

Then, did my intimations and inner vision of the Hermetic Palace of Unwritten Books originate with Psyche? Has she echoed these images into my dreams? And in so doing, does she shed the same dreams from her own intimate awareness and then scamper into a faery tale, leaving behind this image called The Hermetic Palace of the Unwritten Books whose very name in concept, ‘unwritten books’, chimes in minor key with the concept  ‘invisible colours’ to which you have previously alluded. In my earthly mind, I cannot comprehend an unwritten book any more than  I can perceive an invisible colour.

Andrei Tarkovsky

The Hermetic Palace of the Unwritten Books is not a star-lit palace of endless hallways leading into the celestial night but a spherical form reflecting dimensionalities beyond our six-dimensional vision limited to this galaxy.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Suppose you envisage an architectural or mathematical form as a globe over which twelve silver reflective sheaths are placed, each equidistant from the next and meeting in the middle as in the shape of the dodecagon.

You then visualize this globe divided into two half-globes, each one a cupola that fits one atop the other. We then place ourselves in the middle space of this now spherical cupola and gaze outwards; we find ourselves surrounded by twelve inverted reflective sheaths, six spanning the upper half-globe and six spanning the lower half-globe. Each sheath within each group of six represents a single epoch formed by the upper regions of angelic presence and the lower regions of the whisperer in the form of Lucifer, whose pathways lead to Ahriman.  

Now, the spherical cupola begins to spin, and the reflective sheaths rebound in vibratory atonal humming that shimmies downwards through the etheric and astral realms to the sentient ear of the young woman whose voice is thereby lifted to transform this humming into antiquities’ poetic form.

Antoine Artaud

Now, let us return to Psyche within this context.

Psyche is an elemental being who rises beyond the four elements to the realm of the sun and is attended to by the sylphs and fire spirits.

We must remember, however, that Psyche is an initiate within the Oracular Mysteries; she is an individuality who must undergo the trials of her initiation as she ascends to the upper heights to join her sisters within the hidden vaults of the Sistren Mysteries.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Let us continue now, Thomas, to weave in and out of strands of time as we compose.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you, blessed guides, for this wondrous scenography you have painted against the backdrop of our chapter. So many memories and reflections beam from years to follow like a wave returning to the ocean from another shoreline, especially regarding Psyche and Eros and the Oracular Mysteries.

And so it is under your illumination and instruction, if I may, that I return to 2462 California Street.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You may, Thomas

Thomas Fenn

And so it was: 2462 California Street was the stage setting.

I remember the large living room with a red carpet, the walls painted in bright yellows and reds, and the makeshift couch with tie-dyed sheets wrapped over the big puffy pillows whereupon one could sit.

I would always insist on keeping the apartment in order, partially out of family upbringing but mostly because I could not tolerate chaos. I needed empty spaces and sunshine.

At that time, however, I lived in a tiny room like a cell in a monastery paying fifty dollars a month, which I could afford as I received a special stipend from a family fund. Notwithstanding, I decided to look for a job, and one morning, I left early to go to the warehouse district to apply for a job.

Upon entering for the interview, I realized that it would be impossible for me to go to work there or anywhere else. I was falling into the timelessness of California-Fillmore. It was like walking through a gate into a courtyard, at the back of which would be the secret door and beyond which a grand proscenium.

I was writing every day, and this took precedence. I was grateful to be free from constraints.

I knew that I was gifted not just through the recognition of my poetic talent by others but also through my friendship with George, who was also a writer. George appeared as a magical being from some story or fable whose past disappears into the mystery of earlier epochs. As a testimony to what I say, he very quickly undertook the study of Sanskrit. He later continued with the ancient Iranian language – the mother of Persian, whose phonetics could be heard in the poetics of ancient Sanskrit texts.

In retrospect, and regarding our friendship, I reflect on Hamlet when he and his compatriots come into contact with the invisible world. Through their shared experience, they enter into a common vision from which they make a vow of secrecy to protect what they have seen.

Such was the nature of our friendship with George, a friendship based on continuity in the world of spirit, not in the world of time. Although we were sharing many untranslatable secrets, it was truer that we were connected by our vow to remember.

Andrei Tarkovsky

George, in etheric form, recites an epic role whose origin lies in the Tibetan mystery; his etheric body then awakens in ancient India at the point of convergence with the disappearance of Atlantis, and within his etheric body, he is initiated into the hermetic science of what we may call tonal phonetics which is a bridge to the Atlantean linguistic.

But now, in 1972, George remains your gifted friend with no pretensions, only untellable memories, whilst you, Thomas, would attempt to hurl yourself into the leaping flames of nullification as though Don Chisciotte, catapulting himself into the squeaking blades of the windmills.

Thomas Fenn

Yes, your stunning surmising underlines my then ruthless fearlessness in confronting death as though death was effectively another secret door through which to pass.

And so, I realized as I was returning that evening to 2462 California Street with book in hand that I was participating in an actual mystery play.

A few days before, I had purchased a book on Antoine Artaud, or, more accurately, I found a book on Antoine Artaud that I was compelled to purchase.

I remember looking at the old photographs of Mssr. Artaud. He appeared as a most striking theatric artist; afterwards, I looked at the images of himself in the insane asylum in Rodez, emaciated and aged, and I realized he had indeed surpassed the threshold of individuation and the allurement of the poetic; in other words, he had departed. Notwithstanding, I felt his wavering presence that evening as a ghostly figure in visitation from another time, which I could only have divined to be Antoine.

Antoine Artaud

Your words carry a pale light to that dark cell in Rodez, Thomas. But remember, you were sensing my own ethereal aura as you smelled the perfumes in the air. That was not me, as you know me now, but a messenger from the sylphs of the air through whom I could whisper my greetings to you as well as my assured promise that I would be at the bottom of the cavern after the performance.

Thomas Fenn

Perhaps it was through your assurance then that I had no fear, and yet, I remained in a state of limbo between this physical being walking down the street and another ethereal being walking through endless space.

As I voyage atop these memories upon your guidance, I learn to recognize the difference between the mirror and the reflection therein.

Or else, I am a portrait in a museum gazing outwards towards the observer, which is myself, and you are glowing behind the eyes of the portrait which is myself to whom I am gazing.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Please continue, Thomas, accompanied by our thoughtful recognition of all that you recount.

Thomas Fenn

I shall.

And so, as I departed the City Lights bookstore, I felt a different breath, like an undercurrent inflexion below the breeze. I was suspended in attentiveness but without trepidation. My auditory senses could discriminate between the sound of the wind and the song of the wind.

I was transfixed by this breezy atmosphere, which was slightly humid but without the customary fog, as the seductive perfume of white jasmine diffused through the shiny green leaves of the roadside bushes. I began to sense the presence of invisible spectators as though I were a marionette on strings ready to perform for the puppet show.

I remember walking downtown to the corner of Montgomery and California Street and then proceeding up the wide-open incline of California Street to the corner of Powell, where there is the Grace Cathedral.

I knew that a decision was being made. I entered the cathedral and stood at the back as I listened to the evening mass and contemplated the inner-vision image of Antoine. I was terrified.

I then left the cathedral and continued my walk over the crest of the hill crossing over Van Ness as the headlights of the cars exploded into sprays of jagged white particles and then further down to finally arrive at 2462 California Street.

Antoine Artaud

At that moment, your sentient body was tuned like a violin such that you began to hear the music of the sylphs – the elemental faeries of the air who evolve towards the mysteries of the Sybill who arrive from the Oracle.

But there in 1972, Thomas, you were with the sylphs of the air, and as you entered the apartment, your ears and eyes could breathe through their song. Our Psyche was there, too, in attendance. The candle was lit. You were ready.  

FADE OUT

The Broken Mirror, 1972

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Before we begin this chapter, The Broken Mirror, let us return to our epic in concept, as we shall summarize below.

Thank you all.

Andrei Tarkovsky

I shall continue, then as we paint the backdrops and ready the stage for our epic.

During the fourth epoch, Aristotle wrote a treatise entitled The Poetics in which he designed an architectural form for theatrics through which the archetypal human drama could be interpreted on-stage; this form applied to the earth, and the passing sequence of time thereon sealed, which was determined to be one day. The epic was not considered within this structure as it was not played out within the concepts of human time and, therefore, could never be performed in front of a physical audience but rather recounted from within the depths of the silent human unconscious.

Antoine Artaud

And so we are confronted with the question: how shall we create a stage for the epic of the fifth epoch, Thomas? Do we enact the epic, and if so, who shall interpret this epic? And who are the spectators?

Oh, But do not be concerned. We shall answer these questions presently, but let us simplify and say that the epic is the voyage of time into the underworld. And beyond.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

We speak of time as breath and the human lifetime as the summation of the number of breaths allotted by fate.

Each breath within the rhythmic breathing mechanism is transformed

into the life-vitality shared by all living beings; this life-vitality is experienced as inner warmth, albeit a warmth that is unrelated to the external temperature, but rather a warmth exuding from the sentient body analogous to the warmth in the blood that comes with a hot shower even if the external temperature be cold.

But what about the breath released from the breathing mechanism as a single drop of etheric awareness rendered independent spiralling upwards through further levels of transformation, with no need to return to the breathing mechanism per se? What could we mean when we speak of independent etheric and eternal awareness in the transformed breath beyond the human experience in time?

We shall understand more deeply the significance behind the answers to these questions, but for now, let us return to what was said in the beginning: time is breath, and we shall add, breath is transformed time.

Thomas Fenn

If I may, I wish to share an image that comes to my attentionhaving listened to your extraordinary discourse..

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You may.

Thomas Fenn

I am huddled at the top of a lighthouse with magical potions ready to be mixed and the elementals reciting incantations, and suddenly, I see a ship rocking upon the wild black ocean, much in distress. I turn the lamp towards the ship when there is a sudden flash, like a camera, and the ship very quickly sinks. I turn around 180 degrees, and then I turn around again to complete the circle, and I find that I am alone. In front of me is a typewriter. I sit in front of the typewriter with a blank stare and I ask myself, am I not the composer, and is the ship not our company in distress alone on the open ocean?

You mention the significance behind the answers, but do those answers apply to the weight of my responsibility towards the unwritten knowledge you impart? And what is the relationship of our work to this inexpressible event of transposition from the fifth to the sixth epoch? In other words, does our work contribute to the external fate of humanity? Or is humanity itself the solitary ship sinking into the oblivion of its isolated and illusory dream of time and that I must return to the typewriter irrespective of it all, with you, my guides, as we journey towards a dimension beyond form?

Antoine Artaud

Please recall these words, Thomas, spoken in an earlier chapter, which will help bring light to the relationship between the epoch, the epic and the role of the epic theatre.

Without the reverberant soul tone, there is no emanating spirit tone. And earth time is squandered and transmutation petrified. From the earth tone, the poet is born. from the moon tone, the muse is born. Shall the earth tone remain in lawful resonance with the moon tone? Or shall that earth tone disperse? And should the earth tone disperse into fragmented slivers of sound, then the sun star must disintegrate into cacophony whilst the great theatre of transformation, the epic, must be buried beneath  the creation of Lucifer and his underling, Ahriman. As a consequence humanity would be imprisoned inside an enclosed tomb-like cube frozen in the three dimensions of physicality likened only to a cell in a madhouse.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

The divine feminine illuminates the stage, and her tonal resonance reverberates between the sun and the earth to create a tuned interplay. If the tuning fork is not modulated correctly, the music cannot be played, nor can the poem be sung.

And now let us continue from your point of entry at 2462 California Street, Thomas, as our previous imageries and explanations dissipate into the grand scenographic backdrop.

Thomas Fenn

Yes, I shall continue, and I am most appreciative as I feel to be on stage inside a performance that cannot be contained within the antiquated drama model or the faery tale of the prince and the princess or the voyage to the underworld, whether it be Odysseus or Orpheo. But rather to be within a setting so immeasurably large as to disappear beyond the horizons of this universe and so immeasurably tiny as to fade into invisibility.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You are welcome.

Thomas Fenn

To continue then:

As I entered 2462 California Street, I sensed a marked silence, like the silence of an auditorium before the conductor arrives. I sat down, looked at the magical book, and opened to the first page. I then placed the opened book, unread, on a table in front of the couch. I reached into my pocket to find a tiny jewel box that contained my secret dosage of the psychotropic LSD.

I had only experienced LSD one other time in my life. The experience was radically different from the mushroom and very scary – terrifying. But I was compelled.

And so I took the little piece of paper on which there was a superimposed drop of LSD. I looked at it one time and asked her to be gentle. Then I placed it in my mouth and swallowed.   I then picked up the book and read the first sentence which is quoted below:

If it were possible to accept as proven that consciousness (or, as I should call it now, intelligence) can manifest itself apart from the physical body, many other things could be proved. Only it cannot be taken as proved.

I was immediately transited over the threshold into the consciousness, manifesting apart from the physicality as though this consciousness or intelligence – as cited above –  was an enchanted chariot. In retrospect, a new identity within this etheric awareness emerged independent of the other identity lodged in human time.

The words on the page dissolved into printing press letters that melted into my eyes like burning colours, and the sentences were letterpressed onto my memory like the sumptuous print on a first-edition copy.

I continued to read the book. The words just sang to me. I watched the words harness the scampering of my thoughts in their attempt to interpret whilst the dream-self – perhaps astral body – entered more deeply into this separate intelligence or consciousness.

I had the distinct experience of watching myself read the book whilst experiencing this transcendent intelligence who, by her very nature, was the longed-for proof about which the book spoke.  

Two hours passed as I read, and still, there was complete silence in the apartment. The surrounding walls and floor beneath my feet began to melt into their internal fluidity – not sub-atomic particles swishing through the quantum dream into two places at once or physicality deconstructed into little protons, neutrons and electrons but instead a continual stream of alternating dark and light openings in the shape of hexagons each one a porthole or an opening behind which unearthly figures draped in streams of blue and red could be discerned like the mist inside a breeze.

These figures, so simple and almost flat like parchment, were compellingly beautiful; however, they provoked a deep nostalgia. My eyes became humid. I wiped the nascent tears away like erasing chalk from a blackboard and looked about.

The apartment, albeit solid in appearance with its intersecting walls, floors and ceiling, was actually breathing. I then looked down at my book, and I realized that this book, although published and readable, was a script written in invisible ink.

I went to our stereo, put on a song, and listened. The name of the song was Backstreet Girl. An accordion in the song provoked the image of the hurdy-gurdy man, and once again I felt a deep nostalgia.  The lyrics to the refrain from the song were:

Don’t want you part of my world.
Just you be my backstreet girl.  

I viewed the apartment as though through an old viewer with glass slides illuminated by the street lights coming through the misty windows, when through one of the slides, I saw a young girl who spoke to me in French. She told me her name was Lucy, and I needed to meet the magician. As I listened to the song, Backstreet Girl, for the second time and looked outwards through the second glass slide, I viewed the entire apartment dissolving into the opacity of an off-broadway experimental theatre.

The magician then appeared. He carried a kind of wand that looked like a long fluorescent light beaming on and off with an electrical ticking as if the light was at the end of its potency.

The magician was wearing a silk robe with a Chinese dragon embroidered behind, and he was androgynous but also appeared vampiric. His enunciation when he spoke shined like gold through his spoken words, as though he were a prince. He looked at me, and he said the following.

You are my lost daemon. You must return.

I still cannot truly understand the meaning behind these words, and yet I felt we were two characters on the stage reciting in front of a small group of invisible spectators.

Then, in an instant of recall, I visualized Antoine Artaud perhaps as a dateless memory, standing inside  a theatre, moon-shadows moving atop wooden structures, and echoey conversation, the aroma of backstage plaster.

Still, I did not possess the educated clairvoyant insight to know unequivocally that this figure illuminating through my astral vision was in fact, Antoine Artaud in astral form.

However, the magician, was decidedly not Antoine. He did not inhabit a withered human form in the way we see Antoine depicted in his cell at Rodez. I also intuited that the magician was a ballet dancer and that his magic wand was a sword as though he was the character Mecurtio in the ballet Romeo and Juliet. I then realized that the mist-like figures from behind the hexagonal portholes upon which I had gazed earlier were, in a manner of speaking, members of a ballet troupe.

The magician then spoke the following words quoting the old man in the mountain who said::

Nothing is real
Everything is permitted

He then said:

The only performance that makes it
that really makes it
Is the performance that achieves madness.

And then he looked me in the eyes and asked:

Am I right?

I blankly nodded affirmatively. And then he instructed me as follows:

I shall now enter your internal dome, your sentient skull. I carry this red velvet box in which there is a golden pistol. I shall lend you this golden pistol and you must point it between my eyes, and  pull the trigger. At that point the performance shall begin.

I opened my eyes, not realizing they had been closed for an unknown period. I sensed in opacity the aroma of damp old wood in an attic as the rain poured down but set against the actual apartment and the quiet night. Then I stood up. I knew I was back in 2462 California Street; here was the living room and the couch that used to be the stage. But then I heard a voice that said, in a very definite tone, ‘Ora’!

In that instant, I picked up my typewriter and threw it through a glass window onto the street below, and then I attempted to go outside. I cannot know where I would have gone, but I certainly would have been arrested if I had succeeded in exiting the apartment. George was there, in any case, and he restrained me. I went back inside and fell asleep. My friends returned to bed, and a breezy quiet pervaded the apartment. I had achieved a rite of entry. 

FADE OUT

Front Steps, 1972

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Let us pause for a moment, Thomas, and help you step back into reflection and contemplation related to this traumatic event as we pick up the pieces of the shattered window and recover the typewriter.

Is there an underlying theme you wish to follow?

Thomas Fenn

Yes. Indeed, I have many questions, yet I must reiterate that these questions do not arise from empty fascination but instead the extreme tension between the bodily experience of time, the transience of dreams, the forgetfulness of it all and the unending journey through death into discovery.

How does one survive this illimitable hugeness that presses against the tininess of human experience without being swallowed?  

I realize these questions are not designed for an answer. They are more like thumping heartbeats.

So I will be more specific.

What is the connection between memory, the memory- image, and time? This question concerns Dixie Brooks, whom I would never see again after 1971. Three years later, in a letter, she described losing her just-born baby after childbirth. In retrospect, I realized this would have occurred in 1972. Perhaps this is serendipity or a subjective interpretation, but somehow, I feel that the loss of her baby is related to the events about which we speak. And yet this intuition arises from my inner awareness of her magic within the depths of my unconscious, far distant in time and space from this young woman facing the death of her just-born child.

You speak of her as an initiate to the Oracular Sistren, yet I also remember her as a young woman, mysterious, enigmatic – physical therefore mortal.

I now observe very different shades of memories as though I were unwinding them and simultaneously composing them whilst being vigilant to disallow delusory thinking, that is, to over-personalize serendipity or to try to instil a memory out of time into a memory in time.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Your enquiries and concerns are well-expressed, Thomas. Therefore, let us take a moment to read some paragraphs inscribed in an old journal we have held in abeyance until now. We offer these paragraphs to help visualize in imagery the nature of your encounter – in this case, with Dixie Brooks.

Before we proceed, however, let us ask this:

What do you believe when you are in a dream at night? And what happens to that belief when the alarm sounds? Does that dream persist within a now submerged and independent dream memory and transform behind the clockwork of the day to return in another period? And in what form would that dream recur: a strange memory, a dateless memory or a divine being from the etheric or astral plane?

Thomas Fenn

Oh Yes! Please excuse the interruption, but I must concede that my understanding continues to change as we proceed, allowing me to refresh all that you offer. As the poet said, and it is so very true: Your presence is a ‘gift that keeps on giving.’

I asked you previously, Why do we forget our dreams? Your response redirected me to reflect on the interplay between time and duration. Continuing with this reflection, I now realize that dreams do not go away because we forget them when the sun comes out; instead, they transform into intelligent living forms within the light of day.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Excellent! We will speak much more about this further on. But be assured that all of these reflections or questions will carry us back to the great epic theatre. And that is why we are here.  

Mssr?

Andrei Tarkovsky

I shall proceed, however let me offer an image beforehand to frame these words:

A wave arrives from the distant ocean and continues to be a wave until it crashes onto the shore and becomes dispersed into foam and spray, which is then absorbed into the sand. It seems a suitable image for a given lifetime. But what of a tsunami? Is the tsunami a wave on the surface of the ocean, or is the tsunami the ocean inside a wave? A wave is not discernable within a tsunami. It is swept into the tsunami. However, a tsunami is a wave. This metaphor illustrates the relationship between the human being and the initiate.

Please remember that this text we offer below is based on imagery. Later, we shall enrich this imagery as we delve further into our spiritual science.

That being said, the text is read as follows:

In the universal once before all and continual, there reigns the form and the formless. This interplay between the form and the formless is inscribed and codified into an incantation under the guidance of the Oracular Sistren. This incantation is sent whirling towards a radiant palace. This palace of multifarious geometries and names is the home of the most esteemed storytellers. A single incantation inscribed by the oracular sistren and sung by the immemorial storytellers is held distinct and wondrous. And so it is that every incantation must be continually enacted and praised within the unravelling narrative of the epic.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

And so, to continue our journey together, please proceed, Thomas.

Thomas Fenn

Yes. And do allow me to regather my senses. I become so absorbed.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Of course.

Thomas Fenn

So, I shall begin with the following morning after our performance.  

That morning was truly splendorous. I sat out on the front steps of 2462 California Street. I remember sitting on the top step and placing my feet on the step just below, so my knees were very close to my chest. I was wearing pants with a large hole in the knee, and I could feel the coolness of my hand as I massaged my knee. I watched the people going in and out of the supermarket across the street, the cars stopping at the gas station next to the supermarket, a beginning bustle. I was pure and fragile in my respiration, as though my breathing was an after-storm breeze rippling atop the grass glistening from the just-fallen rain.

I was not elated by this experience or concerned about the consequences of the previous night but simply and stunningly quiet in a sealed bubble of readiness.

George eventually came out and asked me if I was alright. I responded in the affirmative and thanked him for helping me. The two other friends came out a little later. They were not perturbed. We greeted one another and they went out. I continued sitting on the steps.

Soon thereafter, a gentleman approached me. I realized he knew what had occurred the previous evening and was there to offer his support, not out of his natural concern for my physical or psychological well-being but through his understanding of the significance of such an experience.

The gentleman’s name was Enrico. He was quite a bit older than myself. He had been a professional ballet dancer when he was younger, and he was very striking and clearly from another culture; I could not tell from where, although I would associate him with Russia despite his Italian first name.

He lived in an apartment very near the doughnut shop in California and Fillmore. I remember him entering one morning so gracefully. It was perceptible that the air he was breathing was different than our own, ever so much more rarified.

As he entered, someone asked: ‘How are you, Enrico?’ His response lacked all pretension. He said, ‘Not a care in the world.’ The way he expressed those words with such tenore had a significant impact on my soul. I remember an image coming to mind of an endless blue sky, not one puffy cloud to obscure even one drop of blue.

In this period, Enrico was painting icons and one day, he invited me to view his paintings. They were very much created in the Russian Orthodox tradition, and he had the gifted sensitivity and precision in his technique to capture the soul’s gaze in the eyes, just as we see in the icon paintings of Andrei Rublev and other Russian masters who follow.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Let us intervene, Thomas, at this point and return to our previous enquiries concerning the relationship between the people you met at the beginning of your journey and their role within your evolutionary path irrespective of the finite nature of these encounters.

Andrei Tarkovsky

I shall offer a metaphoric image if it pleases the company, which may assist in persevering through so many layers and shades of subtlety and paradox within our time and space.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Of course.

Andrei Tarkovsky

When you drop a pebble into a pond, the ripples continue independently of the pebble. If you drop a pebble into the pond specifically to create ripples, then you must be aware of the nature of the intention. It is not a question of the destination of the ripple which, in any case, must disappear into the surface of the water but rather the relationship between a ripple, and a pond from the point of view of the pebble dropper.

You will now know that Enrico is the pebble dropper. For this reason, your encounter with Enrico, irrespective of time past-future or the mortality of the physical body, was so very significant.

You had, in effect, encountered the same magician that morning whom you envisaged the previous evening. This is the key.

Thomas Fenn

Yes! Indeed!

I knew upon meeting him that I had come to rest in a safe harbour. I was simply asleep, dreaming myself to be sitting on the front steps of 2462 California Street with no interpretations. I could only know that Mr. Enrico’s presence justified everything that had occurred.

Antoine Artaud

As regards the magician, let us extrapolate and reflect upon the tarot, remembering that the magician card is the first card in the major arcana.

Thomas Fenn

I am reminded of the tarot deck I used to carry in my shoulder bag during my subsequent walks through the streets, the Marseilles tarot. Fifteen years later, I would be in Assisi, where I purchased tarot cards originating from the Italian Renaissance and those I kept for decades to follow.   

Antoine Artaud

Bien, Thomas.

However, let us remember that tarot images are etheric thought forms that help us discern between temporal and eternal encounters, irrespective of their nature.  

The major arcana depicts the sacrosanct roles that exist at the epic level. The face cards belonging to the minor arcana depict the initiate’s recurrent or heroic role, whose purpose is to serve the major arcana. The number cards represent the single lifetime under the law of individuated destiny, whose story is written in the three letters and the sixty-four three-letter words on a DNA particle.

All the face cards belonging to the minor arcana are archetypal roles governed by the four suits, which characterize the nature of their intention and service. For example, the sword can vanquish the dragon, whilst the cups can express the poetics within the imagery of the narrative poem; the wands may express dedication to the hermetic tradition, whilst the coins express the relationship between value and payment.

 Caithlin Ni Houlihan

One of the differences between the major arcana and minor arcana face cards is the dimensionality they reflect.

The minor arcana face cards are living images projected at the level of the archetypes. They are connected to the number cards in the way the human endocrine system is tuned to the planets.

To summarize:

The endocrine system interfaces with internal circulation at the level of blood and nerves as message receptors of secreted hormones; however, each endocrine gland is tuned to a corresponding planet, the moon included at the moment of one’s first breath, which is predetermined.

For example, the adrenaline gland is tuned to mars, the lymph gland to the moon, and the pituitary gland to mercury, so the face card in the minor arcana coalesces to a specified number card under a specific suit at the time of divination.  In this respect, divination is likened to the breeze that scatters the ripples irrespective of the pebble dropper. And so we must follow the eternal sylphs within the breeze behind Psyche to discover more about the great mystery of the oracle who divine the tarot and the nature of the major arcana that governs our passageway through the portal of death.

 Caithlin Ni Houlihan

This discourse will seem convoluted, but I assure you it is essential to navigate through this labyrinth of different time dimensions to reconcile who, for example, Enrico is and why his relationship with you was essential and timeless. We shall assist you in rendering these channels more and more distinct and thereby ensure your clarity, which is equal to your intention.

Thomas Fenn

Yes. My heart is filled with the most prfound trust as you speak and beats slowly like the pendulum of a grandfather’s clock. I can say now as it was then that there is no itinerary and no travelling: just voices, voices, voices singing within timeless intimacy.

And so I watched Enrico disappear as he crossed over Fillmore Street, and then I looked up to the sky—fat clouds waddled by against the blue surrounding them. I smiled and looked down at the granite step with the sparkling mineral flakes reflecting the sun from thereon. Then I went inside, picked up the book that remained open at the page I had left off, and continued. I was mesmerized with certainty as I read the following words:

There is no question of faith or belief in all this. Quite the opposite, this system teaches people to believe in absolutely nothing. You must verify everything that you see, hear and feel. Only in that way can you come to something.

FADE OUT

San Francisco Autumn, 1972

Andrei Tarkovsky

August in San Francisco, with the swirling fog and the cool breezes; August, when one looks to the other side of the month, towards September, a distant orange glow dispersing through the foggy beam of a lighthouse; August, a time when one’s breath is held in suspense.

However, the month has passed. The grandfather clock’s seasonal hands have moved as August’s meteoric forces retreat into September.

Thomas Fenn

Yes, there are so many fragmented images now, like pieces of a mosaic scattered on the floor of a church after an earthquake.

I shall be vigilant under your instruction, taking care in my heart to listen carefully to your interventions during my recount and not fall into reverie.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Thank you, Thomas. Let us enter, therefore, the seasonal atmosphere of Autumn which is so fundamental and replete. We shall replay some reflective memories that converge from various pinpoints in the past. We shall then orient more towards the architecture of our work by ensuring that the point of our compass is carefully pinned as we gracefully trace sweeping arcs like the moving feet of a child swinging through the air.   

 Thomas Fenn

Yes, I am ready to re-gather myself once again and return to this period.

I shall visualize myself as that child on the swing as you push me higher and higher.

Andrei Tarkovsky

A lovely and bright image!

Thomas Fenn

And so we are in September, 1972.

September in San Francisco is very hot, and although the light softens with the shorter days and elongated shadows, it is still very bright to the eyes, especially after the quiet greys from the foggy season.

Only by walking to Golden Gate Park could I return to the solace of the shade, which I preferred to the direct sunlight, especially during this fragile period so soon after our experience.

I would walk along the grey-coloured sidewalks, the sharp sunlight reflecting into one’s eyes off the windows of the Victorian houses and the mirrors of the parked cars to finally arrive in Golden Gate Park.

I remember walking to the same cypress tree each time, and I would crawl under the shiny green umbrella leaves and feel the pungent aroma through her scent and there I would huddle like a child in a wooden attic during an ocean storm, the rain tapping on the inclined roof.

In retrospect, however, September in San Francisco leaves little trace relative to the Autumns in New England. Here, I remember the pristine light so distinct after the cotton-like thickness in the stagnant August air.

How familiar it was to walk through the puffy piles of coloured leaves, listen to the swishing sound of one’s steps, bury oneself under a pile, and watch the sunlight blink through the spaces in between.

I particularly remember the enchanted moments of September at the very onset of junior high school, especially preparing the new notebooks with the crisp white-lined paper placed in stacks between the dividers equipped with coloured plastic inserts, then placing the stack onto the metal rings and finally clicking the metal rings shut with a large snap. How clean those notebook papers were, ready to absorb the thick ink from a new fountain pen. So many new words to copy down in cursive handwriting.

It was also during this period that my maternal grandparents invited my parents to travel for their first time to Europe. It was certain that my grandfather was the initiator and guide for this trip. He was suited for such a role. He was erudite, born at the end of the nineteenth century and received a classical education at Harvard University. He subsequently became a shoe leather distributor, travelled extensively to Europe, and became fluent in French and Italian. Interestingly, thirty years later, when I visited Boston, I would meet with him for coffee, and we would speak exclusively in Italian.

In retrospect, this is very significant. Is it not?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You are correct, Thomas.  It is especially significant that he should accompany your parents at that time, and we shall, therefore, pin another leg of our compass to this point as we uncover more interlocking events within the panorama of your perspective.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you. I shall remain vigilant as there are so many rivulets, like tiny cracks in the flat wet sand, that one is tempted to follow.

And so it was September 1963, and I was brought to stay with my uncle and aunt while my parents were on their voyage. I experienced a very deep nostalgia after their departure as though I were living my memory of them after their death. There was no traumatic anticipation that they would die; it was not like that but rather a most profound wistfulness for the distant past.

A song deeply touched me at that time whose lyrics ironically were:

 Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow
Try to remember and if you remember
Then follow, follow

My uncle, Robert and his wife, Carol, were the parents of Robin, whom I mentioned earlier; they also had a son named Lucas, who re-emerges decades later from the depths of the unconscious as a powerful force.

Notwithstanding the tall shadows hovering around Robin and Lucas, I have no direct recollection of their presence during this particular stay —not even one interaction. I find this nearly inexplicable.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Thomas, let us move further and deeper into the currents beneath September, 1963 in order to approach these blank absences appearing now as black holes penetrating your awareness

In fact, there is an absence of three years in living memory, is there not? – between the years 1958 and 1961, that is, between the age of eight and eleven.  

Thomas Fenn

Oh yes. This is troubling, really, because your are right I do not have personal memories during that period. My first glimmer of memory after age eleven was from the summer of 1962 when visiting a childhood friend on the northern coast of Massachusetts, perhaps Swampscott. I remember my friend’s name and his mother and the little house they had by the ocean. The image in this memory is associated with the summer vacation sites on the coast of Northern England with the bustling boardwalks, blustery winds, and fish and chips. But this memory is so odd like watching an old film of one’s relatives before one’s physical birth.

At this point, I cannot say whether this specific visit even occurred. I have no context for this visit nor do I recall a history of knowing this friend outside of this visit, even if he existed.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

We shall pentrate this uncomfortable perplexity by introducing another concept to which we refer as a ‘memory sequence out of context.’ This experience differs from a dateless memory, which arises within the instantaneity of perception from an inexplicable source. Instead, a memory out of context appears as a scenario of sequential events and yet retains the flavour of a dream. Of course, one may attempt to fit these sequences of events into date and time and rightfully so, but they will still be unfamiliar, like a deja vu, and one is left with the peculiar doubt as to whether they occurred.

In this regard, Thomas, do you remember reciting the Role of God in a medieval play called Everyman.

Thomas Fenn

Yes, vividly. And yet it is, as you say, very strange. I cannot place when I would have had this experience. I was involved with theatre acting when I was in my adolescence, that is true. In 1967, I participated in a summer drama workshop, a paradisial moment in my life, but I do not recall reciting a significant role in any of the productions. And two years before that, in 1965, my parents enlisted me in a tennis camp, and as an extracurricular activity, we put on a production by Sholem Aleichem. I believe I had a major role in that play.

However, my recitation in Everyman remains clear. It was most definitely an event that took place within a time-frame, as I recall memorizing the many lines for my role. Of course, as you say, I may try to fit this event somewhere into my linear past but it would be a forced conclusion like trying to explain away the pain of a tooth ache.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Yes, that is correct. You played the role of God as presented in the Prologue. You recited his lament for humanity’s downward plunge into materialism and their abandonment of the spiritual realm.

However, it is of underlying significance that this play emerges from the Tudor period, corresponding to the Italian Renaissance, marking the transition from the fourth to the fifth epoch, and it is through this recitation that we begin to witness the shadows of the major arcana appearing over the horizon of your early adolescence.

Andrei Tarkovsky

So, we are beset by a parallel world disconnected from our historical remembrances, which contain these inexplicable realities of experience.

We refer to this world as the soul world. One cannot perceive the soul world in time but rather in duration. It is the atmosphere through which the breath transforms into the world of astrality in the same way that oxygen is transformed through the sentient body to become the living vitality of humans and animals.

And so we understand that the soul world is a camera oscura that projects the astral and etheric realities within which our epic is revealed and composed.

Antoine Artaud

In the experience of the soul world, there is a resonating counterpoint between disparate realities, like echoes of owls over the deep caverns of the inner stratum. Although these echoes reverberate in a foreign tongue, they instil themselves within one’s sense of continuous identity by splicing different time dimensionalities into one continuum. Herein, we experience shades of duration.

Thomas Fenn

May I interject, please, and ask you to describe in more detail the form of the soul world. How may we discover her geometry in time?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

When one closes one’s eyes and shifts into breathing, one begins from the lower extremity of the rib cage just above the core or the abdomen and then breathes vertically into either side of the rib cage.

The initiate may simultaneously induce the single breath to proceed along the back along the length of the spine to the back of the skull; this occurs as the inhaled breath moves to the top of the nostrils so that the levels of breathing are all connected.

The initiate, having traced the three-dimensional form of the torso and skull, is now in a position to move under the skin through an intermediate sheath located at the lower extremity of the back to discover the inner space of the oval-shaped torso and then upwards to discover the inner space of the spherical skull.

This transformation of breath results in living visualization, the first glimmer of clairvoyance, and it is within this enlivened visualization that one experiences the soul world.

Remember, breath retains her relation to the physical body through sensations from the sentient realm or the sentient body. This perception of sensation lends continuity to identity in time which lends awareness of this world.

At this point, let us listen to a recitation of an entry from our old journal that paints an inner image of the soul world beyond spiritual science.

Andrei Tarkovsky

We sit in the palace of the soul. The palace of the soul is the world of spaces and horizons. In the palace of the soul, there is no drama.

Instead, the ever-undulating rings of knowledge that never repeat. In the palace of the soul, there is no time, but there is specificity. In the palace of the soul, there is no mission, but there is immediacy.

In the palace of the soul, there is no joy nor pain, but there is poignancy. In the palace of the soul, there is no fear, but oh, how beholden we remain to awe and wonder.

FADE OUT

FALLEN LEAVES AND RIPPLES, 1963

Andrei Tarkovsky

You gaze down at alternating footsteps appearing one after the other during an early morning walk when you suddenly sense the sing-song of a couplet tickling your ear from a forgotten nursery rhyme. The words are:

Don’t step on the crack,
Or you’ll break your mother’s back.

You stop momentarily, then as a counterpoint to the couplet – not opposition – you move to the crack on the sidewalk separating the asphalt squares and delicately step one foot after the other as if walking over the opening of  a deep fissure.

Antoine Artaud

As you carefully take each step, you begin to notice the asphalt squares transforming into cobblestones. You are now walking in Milan, Italy along a narrow cobblestoned street in the neighbourhood of the Brera, attempting not to slip on the uneven surfaces of the cobblestones, marvelling at the masonry of the brick-laying. The street is lined with tarot readers, mostly roundish women, sitting on small stools with candles placed inside red candle holders as spots of melted wax drip over the top.

As you exit the small street, you find yourself in front of The Brera Museum. The rain begins to fall onto the glistening cobblestones as you stand in front of the museuem and visualize a painting by Piero della Francesca housed within when you are suddenly transported to Chicago in 1983, where you are standing on a wide sidewalk atop a a large asphalt square in front of the Museum of Modern Art. You feel the autumn wind piercing through your scarf as you gaze to the museum, and then you continue your walk along the Magnificent Mile..

And now, twenty years previous, we emerge in September 1963 as you rake the fallen leaves.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Remember, you are on the swing, Thomas. And now you jump off.

And now you float through opacities of image memories to  land once again in September 1963.

Thomas Fenn

As you speak these words, for which I am left wordless, my eyes open to the pulse of my heart beating against my chest. I watch myself ascending the stairs to the box seats in a magnificent opera house and sitting myself down.

If I may, I wish to share an understanding that came to me as you were traversing through these image memories.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Please, Thomas

Thomas Fenn

To begin, this is the first time I have heard the term ‘image memory’ in nomenclature, and I am filled with its simplicity. I envision an image memory as an ornamental frame around a painting, an embellishment in a musical composition, or words between parentheses in a concept. I am encouraged as I observe the details coming into clarity as if we were turning the focus knob on a microscope. I thank you again.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You are welcome Thomas. Are you ready to continue?   

Thomas Fenn

Very much so.

I should like to begin with what appears to be an image memory.

It is Autumn 1963. I was permitted to use my father’s typewriter for the first time. The typewriter was quite imposing, like a towering throne atop the desk.

In actuality, it was a prestigious underwood typewriter, looking like a grand piano with the lid up. The metal keys were in perfect view, and they sounded like woodpeckers tapping against the black and red ribbon as I randomly pressed one after the other key, each with a black setting and white letters in stark relief. As I typed more quickly, the metal keys would jumble together, and I had to carefully extricate one key from the other.

I now visualize this typewriter, and I am astounded at the level of detail and embroidery contained within this isolated image.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

May I affectionately remind you of the typewriter you threw through the glass precisely ten years later, Thomas?

An image memory is very compact and falls directly through awareness as a pebble dropped into the lake. The awareness ripples outwards, revealing other landscapes around the lake until they disappear to the surface. And so the image memory of the underwood typewriter created ripples that were blown onward by the breeze to other events in time.

But please do not be mystified by what I say. You may approach the design by visualising the relationship between the one branch to the many smaller tributary branches, and then the relationship between every single tributary branch to the many leaves attached thereon. From this point of view, the typewriter is the node. In this way, the jumbled typewriter keys reverberate to the small typewriter with which you broke the glass.

Thomas Fenn

Please excuse me but, if I may, I would like to step back a moment and describe another memory image which perhaps can be woven into this tapestry?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Of course.

Thomas Fenn

I was waterskiing behind a boat driven by my uncle, Robert, during a family summer vacation in July 1962. I dropped one ski for the first time without falling. I allowed the boat’s velocity and curving movement to swing me over the wake and onto the green, grey water on the outside arc. I especially remember the ripples or, better, the wavelets marching forward as I skipped over them like a flat pebble.

Now, I observe that the single image of the ripples is a key linking the varied image memories to a common theme like the nodes of a tree connecting the principal branches to the tributary branches. In this regard, I wish to quote a passage your story: The Dragon & The Spider & The Enchanted Tree.

The caterpillars placed the spider at the foot of the enchanted tree, and the spider immediately set about to create a most intricate and subtle web, the filaments of which intersected and intertwined, dripping with the dew.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Excellent, Thomas. Your insight illuminates an aspect of six-dimensional thinking inside the spatial dimension of time, a new concept inserted into our nomenclature. We shall explain further. However, let us return to September 1963, using the fallen autumn leaves as our singular-image node to connect back to September 1972.  

Thomas Fenn

I shall continue then with a replete heart, having been so nourished.

My parents enrolled me in a private co-educational school that hosted students between the seventh and twelfth grades. The school offered a classical and somewhat rigorous curriculum that emphasised the arts. I am always grateful to my parents for paying the tuition rather than sending me to a public high school.

The image of the typewriter takes me back to a significant class I followed at the beginning of the new semester: geopolitics. In retrospect, this was a very advanced subject for such young adolescents.

The name of the instructor was Hans Bierman. He was an elder and cultured gentleman from Germany and certainly would have lived the drama of World War II, so the experience he could bring to such a subject was beyond reproach.

We were assigned an essay on Africa during this time, and I copied information from a magazine about birth control in Africa. My choice of subject was quite random. I could have no idea at that time what the implications were or even what birth control was.

During this exact period, I met a young girl named Erin, who I believe was from Haiti. She was dark-skinned but did not have the features of an Afro-American. My memory of her is singular and distinct. That is, I do not envision her in other circumstances. However, she was the first girl I actually kissed.

I remember the setting well; we stood behind my uncle and aunt’s home in a field. Although I was thirteen years old and began to have erotic fantasies, I do not recall this experience as erotic. I had no idea what sexuality was, only that it manifested in awkward urges. My first consummate sexual experience by myself would have occurred the following year.

However, many intersecting circles radiate outwards from this encounter.

In 1974, I worked as a dishwasher for a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During that period, I developed relations with people from Haiti, including a most wonderful friendship with a young Haitian woman. I was also befriended by a gentleman from Haiti, who was practiced in shamanism and became a guide into what we may call natural magic..

Later, in 1982, I became acquainted with a Haitian woman whose countenance reflected Erin’s. This woman, Julia, became my instructor in French, and with time, she helped me translate some of my poems into French.

What is of underlying significance, however, lies in the Irish name Erin within the context of my connection with Julia, as it appears that Ireland is the bridge between hermetic practice, oracular revelation, and shamanism.

In this respect, I treasured a book entitled A Vision by W.B. Yeats, which describes the mystical relationship with his wife, who was clairvoyant. It is through her channelled visionary communications from the astral realm that W.B. Yeats would be given the vision of the whirling gyre which corresponds to the vortex.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Thank you, Thomas. Let us conclude our recount of this period with quotations from the previous journal. You will see that the impression of the opera house you imagined at the beginning was apropos of these quotations. Please listen attentively. 

Mssr, once again, would you kindly recite?

Andrei Tarkovsky

It shall be my distinct pleasure.

These quotations describe the Roles within a six-dimensional Theatric Concept, to which we will frequently return and by which we are provided with a poetic vision of the sixth epoch. In this regard, we refer to the Bardic Theatre and the Hermetic Theatre as mirrored composites.

Please be patient. We speak in mystical images rather than concepts derived from spiritual science, so you may find them obtuse. However, we shall develop these concepts over time as your experience unfolds.

I shall begin.

The Mystic

The mystic is the feminine divine principle coalesced to a name, a time, and a context. The mystic embodies a coil-shaped opening through which sub-whispers chant-like are received. These chants spring forward, ebullient from the overseeing upturned dimensional amphitheatres.

These amphitheatres house the divine spark of creation. The stasis point is the spiral opening through which the divine spark is conducted. By allegiance to the invisible worlds of knowledge and grace, the mystic blends into the creator.

The Creator

The creator is a form projected by the mystic. Paradoxically, the creator gives visibility to the mystic through an expression thereby. This expression is vivified by personages who are assembled accordingly.

The Director

The director is projected by the creator, who attests to the mystic. The director is not a statuesque form, an initiator of events. Rather, the director is a modulated recipient who conducts initiatory sparks that are born from the creative flame, wherein, contained within the blue light upon which the flame flickers, reside the invisible spectators.

The Invisible Spectators.

The invisible spectators justify the creator to the mystic and thereby spark the very spectacle from which they radiate. The spectacle is cherished by the mystic, creator and director, who, in strict allegiance to the invisible spectators, transform the unsung into the sung. This is the heart of ritual creation.

Fade Out

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Before continuing through our journey, let us turn our eyes upwards in wondrous contemplation and reflect upon the divine feminine beginning with our individuated Psyche. In so doing, we shall recite the song of the epic as we journey through the epoch.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you, my guides, for opening my inner ear to this vast night of contemplation. Beauty lies in the recognition thereof and not in the object that it adorns. So, it remains in my nostalgic imaginings that Psyche is a simple young girl navigating through shifting currents of humanity’s dreams and nightmares – not dissimilar to Alice in her Wonderland.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Yes, Thomas, Psyche in appearance embodies the dreams of humanity, sprinkling stories gleaned from the Hermetic Palace of Unwritten Books; these stories become dateless memories that resume into epic fantasy and fairy tales.

Thomas Fenn

Then, did my intimations and inner vision of the Hermetic Palace of Unwritten Books originate with Psyche? Has she echoed these images into my dreams? And in so doing, does she shed the same dreams from her own intimate awareness and then scamper into a faery tale, leaving behind this image called The Hermetic Palace of the Unwritten Books whose very name in concept, ‘unwritten books’, chimes in minor key with the concept  ‘invisible colours’ to which you have previously alluded. In my earthly mind, I cannot comprehend an unwritten book any more than  I can perceive an invisible colour.

Andrei Tarkovsky

The Hermetic Palace of the Unwritten Books is not a star-lit palace of endless hallways leading into the celestial night but a spherical form reflecting dimensionalities beyond our six-dimensional vision limited to this galaxy.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Suppose you envisage an architectural or mathematical form as a globe over which twelve silver reflective sheaths are placed, each equidistant from the next and meeting in the middle as in the shape of the dodecagon.

You then visualize this globe divided into two half-globes, each one a cupola that fits one atop the other. We then place ourselves in the middle space of this now spherical cupola and gaze outwards; we find ourselves surrounded by twelve inverted reflective sheaths, six spanning the upper half-globe and six spanning the lower half-globe. Each sheath within each group of six represents a single epoch formed by the upper regions of angelic presence and the lower regions of the whisperer in the form of Lucifer, whose pathways lead to Ahriman.  

Now, the spherical cupola begins to spin, and the reflective sheaths rebound in vibratory atonal humming that shimmies downwards through the etheric and astral realms to the sentient ear of the young woman whose voice is thereby lifted to transform this humming into antiquities’ poetic form.

Antoine Artaud

Now, let us return to Psyche within this context.

Psyche is an elemental being who rises beyond the four elements to the realm of the sun and is attended to by the sylphs and fire spirits.

We must remember, however, that Psyche is an initiate within the Oracular Mysteries; she is an individuality who must undergo the trials of her initiation as she ascends to the upper heights to join her sisters within the hidden vaults of the Sistren Mysteries.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Let us continue now, Thomas, to weave in and out of strands of time as we compose.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you, blessed guides, for this wondrous scenography you have painted against the backdrop of our chapter. So many memories and reflections beam from years to follow like a wave returning to the ocean from another shoreline, especially regarding Psyche and Eros and the Oracular Mysteries.

And so it is under your illumination and instruction, if I may, that I return to 2462 California Street.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You may, Thomas

Thomas Fenn

And so it was: 2462 California Street was the stage setting.

I remember the large living room with a red carpet, the walls painted in bright yellows and reds, and the makeshift couch with tie-dyed sheets wrapped over the big puffy pillows whereupon one could sit.

I would always insist on keeping the apartment in order, partially out of family upbringing but mostly because I could not tolerate chaos. I needed empty spaces and sunshine.

At that time, however, I lived in a tiny room like a cell in a monastery paying fifty dollars a month, which I could afford as I received a special stipend from a family fund. Notwithstanding, I decided to look for a job, and one morning, I left early to go to the warehouse district to apply for a job.

Upon entering for the interview, I realized that it would be impossible for me to go to work there or anywhere else. I was falling into the timelessness of California-Fillmore. It was like walking through a gate into a courtyard, at the back of which would be the secret door and beyond which a grand proscenium.

I was writing every day, and this took precedence. I was grateful to be free from constraints.

I knew that I was gifted not just through the recognition of my poetic talent by others but also through my friendship with George, who was also a writer. George appeared as a magical being from some story or fable whose past disappears into the mystery of earlier epochs. As a testimony to what I say, he very quickly undertook the study of Sanskrit. He later continued with the ancient Iranian language – the mother of Persian, whose phonetics could be heard in the poetics of ancient Sanskrit texts.

In retrospect, and regarding our friendship, I reflect on Hamlet when he and his compatriots come into contact with the invisible world. Through their shared experience, they enter into a common vision from which they make a vow of secrecy to protect what they have seen.

Such was the nature of our friendship with George, a friendship based on continuity in the world of spirit, not in the world of time. Although we were sharing many untranslatable secrets, it was truer that we were connected by our vow to remember.

Andrei Tarkovsky

George, in etheric form, recites an epic role whose origin lies in the Tibetan mystery; his etheric body then awakens in ancient India at the point of convergence with the disappearance of Atlantis, and within his etheric body, he is initiated into the hermetic science of what we may call tonal phonetics which is a bridge to the Atlantean linguistic.

But now, in 1972, George remains your gifted friend with no pretensions, only untellable memories, whilst you, Thomas, would attempt to hurl yourself into the leaping flames of nullification as though Don Chisciotte, catapulting himself into the squeaking blades of the windmills.

Thomas Fenn

Yes, your stunning surmising underlines my then ruthless fearlessness in confronting death as though death was effectively another secret door through which to pass.

And so, I realized as I was returning that evening to 2462 California Street with book in hand that I was participating in an actual mystery play.

A few days before, I had purchased a book on Antoine Artaud, or, more accurately, I found a book on Antoine Artaud that I was compelled to purchase.

I remember looking at the old photographs of Mssr. Artaud. He appeared as a most striking theatric artist; afterwards, I looked at the images of himself in the insane asylum in Rodez, emaciated and aged, and I realized he had indeed surpassed the threshold of individuation and the allurement of the poetic; in other words, he had departed. Notwithstanding, I felt his wavering presence that evening as a ghostly figure in visitation from another time, which I could only have divined to be Antoine.

Antoine Artaud

Your words carry a pale light to that dark cell in Rodez, Thomas. But remember, you were sensing my own ethereal aura as you smelled the perfumes in the air. That was not me, as you know me now, but a messenger from the sylphs of the air through whom I could whisper my greetings to you as well as my assured promise that I would be at the bottom of the cavern after the performance.

Thomas Fenn

Perhaps it was through your assurance then that I had no fear, and yet, I remained in a state of limbo between this physical being walking down the street and another ethereal being walking through endless space.

As I voyage atop these memories upon your guidance, I learn to recognize the difference between the mirror and the reflection therein.

Or else, I am a portrait in a museum gazing outwards towards the observer, which is myself, and you are glowing behind the eyes of the portrait which is myself to whom I am gazing.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Please continue, Thomas, accompanied by our thoughtful recognition of all that you recount.

Thomas Fenn

I shall.

And so, as I departed the City Lights bookstore, I felt a different breath, like an undercurrent inflexion below the breeze. I was suspended in attentiveness but without trepidation. My auditory senses could discriminate between the sound of the wind and the song of the wind.

I was transfixed by this breezy atmosphere, which was slightly humid but without the customary fog, as the seductive perfume of white jasmine diffused through the shiny green leaves of the roadside bushes. I began to sense the presence of invisible spectators as though I were a marionette on strings ready to perform for the puppet show.

I remember walking downtown to the corner of Montgomery and California Street and then proceeding up the wide-open incline of California Street to the corner of Powell, where there is the Grace Cathedral.

I knew that a decision was being made. I entered the cathedral and stood at the back as I listened to the evening mass and contemplated the inner-vision image of Antoine. I was terrified.

I then left the cathedral and continued my walk over the crest of the hill crossing over Van Ness as the headlights of the cars exploded into sprays of jagged white particles and then further down to finally arrive at 2462 California Street.

Antoine Artaud

At that moment, your sentient body was tuned like a violin such that you began to hear the music of the sylphs – the elemental faeries of the air who evolve towards the mysteries of the Sybill who arrive from the Oracle.

But there in 1972, Thomas, you were with the sylphs of the air, and as you entered the apartment, your ears and eyes could breathe through their song. Our Psyche was there, too, in attendance. The candle was lit. You were ready.  

FADE OUT

FALLEN LEAVES AND RIPPLES

Andrei Tarkovsky

You gaze down at alternating footsteps appearing one after the other during an early morning walk when you suddenly sense the sing-song of a couplet tickling your ear from a forgotten nursery rhyme. The words are:

Don’t step on the crack,
Or you’ll break your mother’s back.

You stop momentarily, then as a counterpoint to the couplet – not opposition – you move to the crack on the sidewalk separating the asphalt squares and delicately step one foot after the other as if walking over the opening of  a deep fissure.

Antoine Artaud

As you carefully take each step, you begin to notice the asphalt squares transforming into cobblestones. You are now walking in Milan, Italy along a narrow cobblestoned street in the neighbourhood of the Brera, attempting not to slip on the uneven surfaces of the cobblestones, marvelling at the masonry of the brick-laying. The street is lined with tarot readers, mostly roundish women, sitting on small stools with candles placed inside red candle holders as spots of melted wax drip over the top.

As you exit the small street, you find yourself in front of The Brera Museum. The rain begins to fall onto the glistening cobblestones as you stand in front of the museuem and visualize a painting by Piero della Francesca housed within when you are suddenly transported to Chicago in 1983, where you are standing on a wide sidewalk atop a a large asphalt square in front of the Museum of Modern Art. You feel the autumn wind piercing through your scarf as you gaze to the museum, and then you continue your walk along the Magnificent Mile..

And now, twenty years previous, we emerge in September 1963 as you rake the fallen leaves.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Remember, you are on the swing, Thomas. And now you jump off.

And now you float through opacities of image memories to  land once again in September 1963.

Thomas Fenn

As you speak these words, for which I am left wordless, my eyes open to the pulse of my heart beating against my chest. I watch myself ascending the stairs to the box seats in a magnificent opera house and sitting myself down.

If I may, I wish to share an understanding that came to me as you were traversing through these image memories.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Please, Thomas

Thomas Fenn

To begin, this is the first time I have heard the term ‘image memory’ in nomenclature, and I am filled with its simplicity. I envision an image memory as an ornamental frame around a painting, an embellishment in a musical composition, or words between parentheses in a concept. I am encouraged as I observe the details coming into clarity as if we were turning the focus knob on a microscope. I thank you again.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You are welcome Thomas. Are you ready to continue?   

Thomas Fenn

Very much so.

I should like to begin with what appears to be an image memory.

It is Autumn 1963. I was permitted to use my father’s typewriter for the first time. The typewriter was quite imposing, like a towering throne atop the desk.

In actuality, it was a prestigious underwood typewriter, looking like a grand piano with the lid up. The metal keys were in perfect view, and they sounded like woodpeckers tapping against the black and red ribbon as I randomly pressed one after the other key, each with a black setting and white letters in stark relief. As I typed more quickly, the metal keys would jumble together, and I had to carefully extricate one key from the other.

I now visualize this typewriter, and I am astounded at the level of detail and embroidery contained within this isolated image.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

May I affectionately remind you of the typewriter you threw through the glass precisely ten years later, Thomas?

An image memory is very compact and falls directly through awareness as a pebble dropped into the lake. The awareness ripples outwards, revealing other landscapes around the lake until they disappear to the surface. And so the image memory of the underwood typewriter created ripples that were blown onward by the breeze to other events in time.

But please do not be mystified by what I say. You may approach the design by visualising the relationship between the one branch to the many smaller tributary branches, and then the relationship between every single tributary branch to the many leaves attached thereon. From this point of view, the typewriter is the node. In this way, the jumbled typewriter keys reverberate to the small typewriter with which you broke the glass.

Thomas Fenn

Please excuse me but, if I may, I would like to step back a moment and describe another memory image which perhaps can be woven into this tapestry?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Of course.

Thomas Fenn

I was waterskiing behind a boat driven by my uncle, Robert, during a family summer vacation in July 1962. I dropped one ski for the first time without falling. I allowed the boat’s velocity and curving movement to swing me over the wake and onto the green, grey water on the outside arc. I especially remember the ripples or, better, the wavelets marching forward as I skipped over them like a flat pebble.

Now, I observe that the single image of the ripples is a key linking the varied image memories to a common theme like the nodes of a tree connecting the principal branches to the tributary branches. In this regard, I wish to quote a passage your story: The Dragon & The Spider & The Enchanted Tree.

The caterpillars placed the spider at the foot of the enchanted tree, and the spider immediately set about to create a most intricate and subtle web, the filaments of which intersected and intertwined, dripping with the dew.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Excellent, Thomas. Your insight illuminates an aspect of six-dimensional thinking inside the spatial dimension of time, a new concept inserted into our nomenclature. We shall explain further. However, let us return to September 1963, using the fallen autumn leaves as our singular-image node to connect back to September 1972.  

Thomas Fenn

I shall continue then with a replete heart, having been so nourished.

My parents enrolled me in a private co-educational school that hosted students between the seventh and twelfth grades. The school offered a classical and somewhat rigorous curriculum that emphasised the arts. I am always grateful to my parents for paying the tuition rather than sending me to a public high school.

The image of the typewriter takes me back to a significant class I followed at the beginning of the new semester: geopolitics. In retrospect, this was a very advanced subject for such young adolescents.

The name of the instructor was Hans Bierman. He was an elder and cultured gentleman from Germany and certainly would have lived the drama of World War II, so the experience he could bring to such a subject was beyond reproach.

We were assigned an essay on Africa during this time, and I copied information from a magazine about birth control in Africa. My choice of subject was quite random. I could have no idea at that time what the implications were or even what birth control was.

During this exact period, I met a young girl named Erin, who I believe was from Haiti. She was dark-skinned but did not have the features of an Afro-American. My memory of her is singular and distinct. That is, I do not envision her in other circumstances. However, she was the first girl I actually kissed.

I remember the setting well; we stood behind my uncle and aunt’s home in a field. Although I was thirteen years old and began to have erotic fantasies, I do not recall this experience as erotic. I had no idea what sexuality was, only that it manifested in awkward urges. My first consummate sexual experience by myself would have occurred the following year.

However, many intersecting circles radiate outwards from this encounter.

In 1974, I worked as a dishwasher for a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During that period, I developed relations with people from Haiti, including a most wonderful friendship with a young Haitian woman. I was also befriended by a gentleman from Haiti, who was practiced in shamanism and became a guide into what we may call natural magic..

Later, in 1982, I became acquainted with a Haitian woman whose countenance reflected Erin’s. This woman, Julia, became my instructor in French, and with time, she helped me translate some of my poems into French.

What is of underlying significance, however, lies in the Irish name Erin within the context of my connection with Julia, as it appears that Ireland is the bridge between hermetic practice, oracular revelation, and shamanism.

In this respect, I treasured a book entitled A Vision by W.B. Yeats, which describes the mystical relationship with his wife, who was clairvoyant. It is through her channelled visionary communications from the astral realm that W.B. Yeats would be given the vision of the whirling gyre which corresponds to the vortex.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Thank you, Thomas. Let us conclude our recount of this period with quotations from the previous journal. You will see that the impression of the opera house you imagined at the beginning was apropos of these quotations. Please listen attentively. 

Mssr, once again, would you kindly recite?

Andrei Tarkovsky

It shall be my distinct pleasure.

These quotations describe the Roles within a six-dimensional Theatric Concept, to which we will frequently return and by which we are provided with a poetic vision of the sixth epoch. In this regard, we refer to the Bardic Theatre and the Hermetic Theatre as mirrored composites.

Please be patient. We speak in mystical images rather than concepts derived from spiritual science, so you may find them obtuse. However, we shall develop these concepts over time as your experience unfolds.

I shall begin.

The Mystic

The mystic is the feminine divine principle coalesced to a name, a time, and a context. The mystic embodies a coil-shaped opening through which sub-whispers chant-like are received. These chants spring forward, ebullient from the overseeing upturned dimensional amphitheatres.
These amphitheatres house the divine spark of creation. The stasis point is the spiral opening through which the divine spark is conducted. By allegiance to the invisible worlds of knowledge and grace, the mystic blends into the creator.

The Creator

The creator is a form projected by the mystic. Paradoxically, the creator gives visibility to the mystic through an expression thereby. This expression is vivified by personages who are assembled accordingly.

The Director

The director is projected by the creator, who attests to the mystic. The director is not a statuesque form, an initiator of events. Rather, the director is a modulated recipient who conducts initiatory sparks that are born from the creative flame, wherein, contained within the blue light upon which the flame flickers, reside the invisible spectators.

The Invisible Spectators.

The invisible spectators justify the creator to the mystic and thereby spark the very spectacle from which they radiate. The spectacle is cherished by the mystic, creator and director, who, in strict allegiance to the invisible spectators, transform the unsung into the sung. This is the heart of ritual creation.

Fade Out

ACT II PROLOGUE

Aiofe

Before you begin, most splendid company and performers, we express our esteemed regard towards yourselves for arriving at Act II along this illuminated pathway and in the elegant backwards and forward arcs through your delicate attendance to our choreography.

Please cherish these words within your hearts.

We shall now retreat through the etheric intelligence of the Sun to arrive at our attendance inside the listening between the tones of your poetics.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

We thank thee. We are inspired and honoured to be at thy bidding.

Aiofe

You are welcome

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Let us begin, Thomas with a poem from the old journal as a precursor to our voyage. Mssr.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Thank you

This poem transports us to September 1963, our starting point.

Thomas Fenn

May I ask a question, sir, before we begin?

Andrei Tarkovsky

Please, Thomas.

Thomas Fenn

You have referred to the old journal whose nomenclature skips over my awareness into the assumption that these compositions come from my pen.

Andrei Tarkovsky

That is correct, Thomas. The old journal derives from the nomenclature Compendium, which was a volume bound by the Oracular Sistren and more recently sung through the astral intelligence of the German poet Novalis.

Antoine Artaud

The Compendium emerged in the Fifth Century A.D. as a tributary branch originating within the Zarathustrian stream. It is carried along undercurrent epic poetics whose foundation expresses the tonal relationship between the sun and the moon.

The Compendium houses Hermetic Formulae as well as Epic Narrative and emerges within the stream of Rosicucianism. Johann Goethe was an adherent who guided Novalis.  Later, this poem would be transfigured into the script: Michael Robartes and the Dancer, composed by W.B. Teats, whilst Novalis would transmigrate to the role of Rainer Maria Rilke, about whom we will speak in detail.

However, at that time, the Compendium was carried to the astral realm of the Divine Feminine and is now emerging within the confines of the Hermetic and Bardic Theater. Your performance, for example, in 2462 California Street, is an example of Hermetic Theatre.

Andrei Tarkovsky

These poetics that we periodically recite arrive as etheric impulses with very little refinement as to form. They can only be composed and transmitted within the realm of memory sequence out of context, which is the realm of duration.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you

Andrei Tarkovsky

I shall continue.

They say the light before the dawn

It is the same as the dawn before the light,

And that in between

Rages a scurrying underflow

Of backwards-turning minutes

Like splashing rapids into a forward flow

Of forward-turning minutes all-about trilling

Into effervescent Drops

Dripping off the Aurora Borealis

Above the Bay of Naples

Mirroring the bubbly-boom

Lava

Of Mother Earth’s core

Beneath.

Thomas Fenn

Oh Yes.

I understand why you read this poem. These words assuredly carry me to September 1963 and the lessons on geopolitics. However, I visualize Hans Bierman’s wife, Herma Bierman.

Mrs Bierman taught biology, and during class, we would look through a microscope at various specimens, which we then drew in likeness to what we saw. In retrospect, the subject was very uninteresting.

However, I remember another class Mrs. Bierman taught the following year in 1964. We were assigned an essay to research the details of a major earthquake, to be selected from a list she provided. The mystery of this subject strikes me. Why would we receive such a request to report on a major earthquake?

I will add another component to this design.

At the end of the scholastic year 1964, it was decided that I should repeat the same grade, most probably because I was psychologically unprepared to enter the atmosphere of college preparation. As a result, I was always one year older than my classmates. I do not know how these two memories intersect; however, in being held back from joining the previous grade level, I was in the same grade as Neil, who, five years later, would introduce me to the System.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Excellent, Thomas. You speak of parallel memories in your recount which are two prongs on a tuning fork reverberating one to the other to create an initiating tone. In this case, the essay on the earthquake shines outwards to the epoch whilst your replay in junior high school shines upon the epic.

Let us begin, now, with a conceptual model that describes the transition of epochs.

Thomas Fenn

Thank you.

I deeply value this opportunity. I said it once before, and I will say it again. ‘I shall repose in your words.’

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

We shall continue then as we paint our fresco with a wide paintbrush.

In 869, the Roman Catholic Church held the eighth Ecumenical Council, at which point it was declared heretical to speak inclusively of body, soul, and spirit within the composite human being. The spirit or etheric body was thereby disengaged and reassigned to the sun.

In this way, human beings would no longer have direct experience of the etheric christ except through the medium of the church, which declared itself to be the conduit of the spirit.

As a result, the human sentient body was relegated to the frozen confines of the material world, bound somehow to a substance called the soul whose sense of identity should be assigned to heaven or hell by immutable laws issued from church dogma.

A tremendous reverberatory undulation through the etheric realm resulted from this church action such that the etheric sun was disengaged from the galaxy like an unsevered branch once pointing on high now pointing to the ground. In this way, the christ became absorbed into the sun as a separate etheric entity. Lucifer absorbed the christ image through the medium of the jesuit fathers, the  fathers of jesus, to whom we refer as the philistines whose sect emerged during the transition from the fourth to the fifth epoch.

Thomas Fenn

May I enquire, sir?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Please, Thomas.

Thomas Fenn

First, I wish to express my cherished gratitude in recognition of that which we have achieved to arrive at Act II.

Thank you.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

You are welcome, Thomas.

Thomas Fenn

At this point, I experience a dark rumbling in my heart, which I am unprepared to assimilate. My sentient experience since birth unwinds into the narrative of my own story. The memories I look upon through the lens of your discourse are composed of denser substances than those memory types through which we have travelled until now; these memories belong to the physical world of the Shakespearean drama with nothing but crime, betrayal and death. I fear the re-appearance of the dragon through a volatile recapitulation.

 Antoine Artaud

Excellent, Thomas. First, allow me to bring in this selection from the old journal that we have previously cited.

A single incantation inscribed by the oracular sistren and sung by the immemorial storytellers is held distinct and wondrous. And so it is that every incantation must be continually enacted and praised within the unravelling narrative of the epic.

As mentioned, we are constructing the scenography. In this regard, let us return to Aristotle’s discourse entitled The Poetics, specifically his relationship to scenography, which he advised to be simple and non-obtrusive to the living components of the drama: choreography, dialogue, character, and plot.

The Bardic Theatre presents the scenography in dynamic images that configure and reconfigure like a kaleidoscope. These images reflect the shift of the sun’s orientation towards the galaxy, which is then modulated into the architecture of the epic while it is being composed.

This process induces the suspension of human awareness into dreamless attention. In this dreamless attention, new memories reform into dateless memories.

In this way, and through time-sequence the Bardic Theatre enters through storytelling. Childhood is envisaged through the instance of recall rather than over the distance of remembrance.

We shall refer to this suspension of functional human awareness as pralaya which accompanies the transition of epochs.

Your first experience of pralaya occurred at the age of eight during the tonsillectomy. Your last memory image before entering the etheric realm was a vortex whose spinning electrical hum disappeared into the blackness and then you suddenly awoke and you were eight years old.

But you need not be concerned, Thomas, because Aristotle is correct in his statement regarding the Hermetic Theatre, which houses the Ballet of Ritualistic Transformation wherein the heart is shifted to the astral vision of the Divine Feminine. For this, we look inwards beyond the outer rather than outwards.

Thomas Fenn

Yes. My little boat is back on course or closer to shore, and I can envision the contours and nuances of 2462 California Street. I am now standing at the doorway of the apartment just before entering.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Let us continue a little more to understand the nature of scenography in terms of spiritual science attesting to the six dimensional geopolitics that manifests through this shift from the fifth epoch to the sixth epoch.

We are unveiling the storyboard that translates to the storyteller, who recites in silence unheard tonalities to images. These images are then placed as configured components within the mosaic poetics of the narrative. It is at this corner junction between the Hermetic Theatre and Bardic Theatre that we present ourselves.

Antoine Artaud

The Bardic Theatre houses a performance, whilst the Hermetic Theatre houses the performers. When the two theatres eclipse, the solar system shifts from the Copernican template to the Ptolemaic template. These two templates are non-physical images of the Sentient Body of the Solar System and are fluid; they flow through one another during these eclipses.

The Copernican Model was bestowed to humanity’s awareness during the Italian Renaissance and is the Work of the Ptolemaic Hermetic School, which emerged during the transition from the third to the fourth epoch. The Copernican Model, therefore, is the setting for the Bardic Theatre, while the Ptolemaic Model is the setting for the Hermetic Theatre.

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

We may continue and thereby add that the Copernican Model is a six-dimensional Waterford Globe enlivened through circular tonalities streaming around the given globe like the rings of Saturn and whose inner transformative process mirrors the inner circulation of the sun’s etheric intelligence between the heavenly bodies based on the marriage between tonality and octave.

This Waterford Globe is melted into an upturned sheath; similarly, the other half of the Waterford Glove is melted into a downward-turned sheath. To be succinct, they are sealed into the resultant twelve-dimensional Waterford Globe, which now inter-reflects the penultimate sub-epoch beginning in 1841, at the inception of the battle between Mikiel and the Dragon, and 1947.

In 1947, the final transition began.

Thomas Fenn

Sir, in the hopes of not interrupting, however, I feel an urgency to place another jewel in our scenographic tapestry. May I return, therefore, to 1971 to resume a significant sequential-time memory?

Caithlin Ni Houlihan

Of course Thomas. The composer must be composed into the composition. Please.

Thomas Fenn

I speak of a young man I met while attending the small college mentioned. The first week upon arrival was a period of orientation during which one meets the various incoming students.

On the first day, a young man named Geoffery approached me. I was pleased to meet him, and our friendship quickly became a point of reference.

Albeit, having arrived with Steffen Von Rosenvinge, I was quite uncomfortable finding myself within this social milieu. George and I bonded in friendship during this period; however, in the very beginning, I do not remember our interactions. I do remember that Steffen Von Rosenvinge and I were roommates, and beneath that memory, I witness George. Perhaps the three of us shared the room.

Notwithstanding, I welcomed Geoffery’s companionship.

During one very significant conversation, Geoffery asked me about my voyage across the country. It behoved me to tell him a story through intuition about meeting a woman who was hitchhiking and that we had travelled together for the entire voyage, and that indeed, her name was YouMe. I do not remember anything else I told him, but he was very open, and although the story was fantastical, he just listened.  

In November, Geoffery asked me if I wanted to experiment with mescaline. I was not apprehensive, although I had never experimented with psychotropic substances before.

I recall that Neil was experimenting with psychotropic substances, although I assume it was not LSD, and I do remember a few young women around him who were also experimenting, but there were no other men in their group.

So Geoffery procured two capsules of mescaline, one for himself and one for me. The powder was intriguing—light purple, almost like dust.

I took the capsule, lay on the bed, put on the Beatles Abbey Road and moved the needle to the song, She’s So Heavy. It was the most heavenly experience as the music began to release my sentient body from the physical.

After a few hours, we took a walk. At a certain moment, I looked up at the sky. The thin clouds were parting, revealing the silver moon. And there were a few stars. Although I had no attraction to the bible, I recall the impression to be biblical, almost like a generic painting portraying the revelation of an old testament figure looking to the heavens, when suddenly I heard my grandfather’s voice.

The voice did not belong to my paternal grandfather but rather my maternal grandfather, whose archetype was very luciferin. His first name was Isadore.

I mentioned previously that I would visit him during my visits from Europe, and although it was interesting to speak Italian with him, I did not like him or trust him. Later, we will see why.

I shall add that my paternal grandfather’s name was Barney, and by that name, I always inferred he was a messenger from Bernard of Clairvaux.

Geoffery became a part of the underground resistance during the nixon regime. I recall a small group of us going to Chicago to participate in a demonstration. Everyone knew it would be violent. Some of us went as medics. We would wear a backpack with a red cross on it, in which we carried basic supplies, especially damp cloths for the tear gas.

There was quite a fearful moment when, whilst crossing a bridge, we heard the voice of a vigilante who uttered with a scratchy voice, ‘You’ll never get over the bridge alive.’

Geoffery later enlisted in the Weather Resistance and went to New York, where he was arrested. Afterwards, he was released on bail and came to Boston. He was staying near Roxbury, where he felt safe as it was an Afro neighbourhood similar to Harlem.

One day, Geoffery called me and asked if I could request my father for some money as he decided to avoid trial and go underground. My father was sympathetic and gave me fifty dollars for a bus ticket and a roast beef sandwich.

As I was driving to meet Geoffery, I ate half the sandwich. I always felt a tinge of remorse for having eaten half the sandwich, as though I had betrayed him.

Later I read the Inferno from Divine Comedy and realized why I felt that remorse.

FADE OUT