Downloadable WORD document February 8, 2025
THEMES
Stasis Point
The Dragon & Ahriman
Heron
Dateless Memory
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 composed of 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,
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 epic.
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. This can occur in different modalities; however, the personalization of these memories can never be seen or perceived within the normal flow of time-passage.
Thomas Fenn
Please, recount to me more then 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 Sapphire?
‘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.
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.