Downloadable WORD document February 14, 2025
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.