Downloadable WORD document February 9, 2025
THEMES
Secrets as Dateless Memory
Four o’clock realms
Six sheathed Waterford Sphere to create a continuum between time dimensionalities. This a a precursor to astral travel.
Attestation & Dixie Brooks
Steiner and 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.
Thomas Fenn
And 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, slapping coldly against the sandy white beach like 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 newborn.
Andrei Tarkovsky
When you saw your friends disappear into the mist, you experienced the 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 nighttime is put back into the sheath. The city streets become silky under the blanket of just before dawn. The cafe stands crooked and sways, hosting ghosts and memories of a lost night. Four o’clock. No thoughts, wishes, or 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 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?
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
This memory of Sacramento and Steiner Street is illumined inside a crystal globe, a Waterford Ball 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. The third and the sixth dimension further reflect one another, producing an interactivity of time spheres and a flexibility of movement for the initiate who remains at the centre to transport between and within these dimensional sheathes. This summary will help you to understand the mysteries of dateless memory within the context of your physical memories.
Andrei Tarkovsky
The mirroring sheaths of the Waterford ball attest to one another as the leaf attests to the branch, the branch attests to the tree, and 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 the dateless memories 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.
Antoine Artaud
In this regard, let us recall your first mystical lover 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 fell in love with her in a very different way than a young man falls in love. She exuded mystical clarity. 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 amidst the tear gas streaming through the air ventilation. Such burning in the eyes I can never forget.
And then Dixie told 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’?
All of these questions lead me to the unearthly tones of our encounters. Her strange first name, Dixie. The cross-section of time with the dateless memory that impregnates my normal recall, all seemingly non-existent and yet strikingly distinct, as though sitting in a planetarium inside a crystal ornament that shines in the immediate daytime but with no reference except when I breathe. It is as though breathing leads one to the solitude that increases as these different dimensionalities fade in and out. I feel on the edge with the most fragile resolution to continue.