Downloadable WORD document March 11, 2025
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 from 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.