Downloadable WORD document February 13, 2025
THEMES
Steffen and first indication of Hamlet
Description of the Soul as a reflection of light
First month in college
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 Divine 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.