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Cover design: Deborah Perdue

I think this may be my most ambitious book yet. And most playful. I say to myself: Who wrote this?

order at Amazon.

Sir Isaac Newton famously complained about “action at a distance.” How was it possible, he wrote, that gravity, or attraction, operated between objects without physical contact? Well, jump to the twenty-first century, and we have a lot more to say about that. Readers will enjoy a brilliant, outrageous, playful exploration of quantum physics in everyday life, from a secret interplay of TV plots with us, in electricity, to other speculations, founded in the author’s decades of initiations as well as being an original thinker and a scholar.
An unusual feature of the illustrations in AN UNDERGROUND PRINCIPIA is a technique called “computer-PK,” or mind through matter in the creation of printouts that refocus the text on-screen in the printing so that nothing happens twice. As in Einstein’s “Credo,” the author exemplifies: “The most beautiful and deepest experience can have is the sense of the mysterious.”

In SPACE ENCOUNTERS II: AN UNDERGROUND PRINCIPIA, Margaret Ann Harrell leaps beyond existentialism, beyond cellular molecular electric, beyond epistemology, beyond phenomenology, beyond quantum physics, beyond first second and third person narrative, beyond fourth person singular, beyond tragedy, beyond comedy, beyond all genres, beyond space and time, beyond yin and yang, beyond dualism in all its manufactured forms, beyond encyclopedic knowledge, beyond gravity, beyond electromagnetics, beyond nondualism, beyond death, beyond 3-D, beyond sound and light to where there is no distance to where there are no gaps to where the ever changing creative imagination is the host of all and everything. SPACE ENCOUNTERS II: AN UNDERGROUND PRINCIPIA is a masterpiece, a miracle.
From start to finish beginning to end I was blown away by the brilliance the radiance the outrageousness the playfulness the hilarity the footnotes the simultaneous multiple conversations all of it!

It’s talking my language, and it’s a language that’s never been spoken! Ha! And Aha!

—Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate

Margaret Harrell has the most open-ended and far-reaching mind of anyone I know.

—Rhea A. White, Director, the Exceptional Human Experience Network

But who is ready for this culmination of a lifetime, written with multiple spirit guides, or let’s say packs of inspiration? Master Taiji teacher points this out:

My biggest concern is that I have no idea how many people will be able to grasp the depth of the principles you describe. It is amazing enough that you take a lifetime of experiences and connect them into a driving force that leads to the realization of one’s purpose.
Even more amazing is that you include the most subtle levels of existence that play a role in these processes. An Underground Principia connects life purpose, spirituality, depth psychology, and quantum physics into one all-encompassing movement.
Most breathtakingly, by reading An Underground Principia, the reader can gain the insight that all of this is happening, not in one lifetime, whether human or universal, but in an eternal now. Amazing achievement . . .

To help with this conundrum, be on the lookout for this book in audio.

Also, Jef Crab is going to provide some Reader Notes. And maybe assist in a stronger fashion through recorded Skype sessions we are doing together. I couldn’t be more blessed.

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The light body never failed to help me adapt and stretch to any situation. This is no exaggeration. It boosts your creativity because it comes out of boundless energy. The light body is older and wiser than any of us. However, its energy, when properly focused, goes right into our everyday lives and energizes us on all levels.

I learned this course the “hard way”—by foot, train, and taxi—and in a foreign language, Dutch. I lived in Belgium. But it was fascinating that way. The energies were there with me, regardless of the language and circumstances. I was amazed that I could visualize with my eyes closed, which I hadn’t experienced before. The energies danced into “visions” when I least expected it, and they transported that excitement into me. As they transformed, that excited energy remained in me. So as soon as I moved back to the States, I began to teach the courses. Till I was teaching practically every light body course that the founders allowed any of their teachers to teach.

I offer you a free introductory hour in which you experience the energies yourself, still being guided by DaBen and Orin, the founding spirits. And now being watched over as well by Duane Packer and Sanaya Roman, who were their channels here on Earth until their recent passing. Come, enjoy. I always do. And I think you will too.

The photos comes from the CDs in the six-box home study program of Awakening Your Light Body created by LuminEssence, www.orindaben.com; there, Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer describe these courses they channeled into the Earth, which are now taught worldwide. Great attention is paid to keeping them authentic and not over-commercialized. Are you ready for this course? If so, please contact me. You can start immediately.

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Eventually, I had to try in North Carolina.

That didn’t work out either.

Finally, I reached all the way over to Portland, OR, and we were gold. The audio will be out this November for the 2024 Christmas sales!!!

Here’s a warning. If your book is complex, perhaps with multiple voices, go to an experienced professional. And even that might not work. Audio is tricky and demanding.

Ultimately, it was all for naught. Both of the first two attempts. Then I fumed in bed, and it came to me to surrender. Instantly I found the next morning an audio company that asked: Do you have a project that needs out-of-the-box thinking?  And the rest is history. For my project, I had to go right to the top. But to go back and trace my initial misadventure, which was no fault of anyone – it was just a complex project – here goes.

I went down to Louisville, KY, one of my favorite places, for six days to haunt the sound studio of Bill Hardesty, who took the above photo of me at the Brown Hotel. Staying there is always a memorable experience. Ron Whitehead sat at my side almost the whole time as I read practically every word of the massive book myself. He read a small number of pages, always a treat A huge thanks to Ron, who set everything up. And to Bill for being fearless and generous.

A trailer, based on images taken at the Brown that weekend by a young whiz named Yunier Ramirez and images in the book is just finalized except for the credits at the end. Click the link for a sneak preview.

DESCRIPTION:

The Hell’s Angels Letters is a must-have text for any Hunter S. Thompson fan. Lavishly documented and illustrated with the actual correspondence that led to the publication of his breakthrough literary effort, Hell’s Angels, this coffee-table book literally shows how HST boot-strapped his way from an impoverished nobody journalist to growing legend.

Kyle K. Mann, Gonzo Today. Print available only at norfolkpress.com.

At last, with print book and the soon-to-be-released audio of the Norfolk Press print book The Hell’s Angels Letters: Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Harrell and the Making of an American Classic, the public can go inside the experience of Hunter Thompson at Random House. This book, which focuses on his letters to his copy editor, Margaret Harrell (available nowhere else), is an important revelation in the legacy of Thompson. “If Hell’s Angels hadn’t happened I never would have been able to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or anything else . . . I felt like I got through a door just as it was closing,” Hunter told Paris Review. Check out the $9.95 Amazon E-book and (soon to be released) full-295-page audio book (Amazon).

TRAILER credits:

PUBLISHER (print BOOK): Norfolk Press of San Francisco

The Hell’s Angels Letters | Hunter Thompson, Margaret Harrell and the Making of an American Classic (norfolkpress.com)

E-book: Amazon.com

ART ILLUSTRATIONS & FRONT COVER: Grant Goodwine, https://grantgoodwine.bigcartel.com

 LICENSE RIGHTS: Excerpts from Hunter S. Thompson Letters used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC

and The Hunter S. Thompson Estate, with thanks to Juan Thompson, Hunter’s son, and George Tobia

at Burns & Levinson law firm.

 HUNTER’S FACE in trailer: Alanbeckerphotographer.com

FUN FACT: see Outlaw Poet documentary on Ron Whitehead

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The host was marvelous, keeping things lively. Robert Sharpe has very thoughtful, interesting, wide-ranging topics. And he was ready to find them in Keep This Quiet Too! – vol. II of the KTQ! series. BookLife, the indie arm of Publishers Weekly, has its verdict on the book:

With an eye for surprising detail, Harrell conjures a charged and vivid milieu, even as the story she tells is often painful . . . A journey with grand destinations throughout the globe and within the author’s consciousness. – 

BookLife further calls it: “charged, vivid, painful, grand.” I’ll take it.  Also of interest, says the reviewer, is “her abundant enticing experiences and insights, and her relationships with her subjects.” The review opens:

“I’m not crazier than you,” Harrell reports once saying to her friend Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson’s response: “No, but you talk crazier.” That exchange, recounted in an introductory author’s note, kicks off the second in a series of memoirs (after Keep This Quiet!) by Harrell that examine her relationship with three fascinating men of letters: first that gonzo icon Thompson, for whom Harrell served as an editor at Random House and maintained a friendship with through his years of covering horse races and regatas, and Milton Klonsky, the beat writer who was her literary and spiritual advisor. Finally, there is the poet Jan Mensaert, her troubled husband, whose struggle with drugs, alcohol, and mental illness overshadowed his considerable artistic abilities.

“Horse races and regatta,” that’s a funny take on all the political news tackled. Just scratching the surface.

I’m VERY appreciative of the review, with phrases that lift out beautifully. And those topics and facets were on full display in this interview.

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His wife, Susan Miner, is pulling back the curtain on aspects of his teaching and life that she observed at his side these last decades. To do this, she will have a weekly newsletter, the first one having just come out August 5, 2018. She writes:

My focus will be on what I believe is the central message of the Lama Sing Group, through all 45 years, underscored in Al’s final year +. I will reiterate their message in layman’s terms based on conversations he and I had, as well as those we had with the Group sometimes in private readings, and include accompanying excerpts from as far back as 1973 because the message never wavered. Go here to read the first newsletter. I especially love the part about the lions.

Al Miner first comes into the Keep This Quiet! series in Too! He reappears in Initiations and Ancient Secrets Revealed. Here is how he is introduced:

Midway through Keep THIS Quiet Too!, after leaving my husband in Morocco, I was living in Charlottesville, VA. Happening to take a workshop at A.R.E. (the Edgar Cayce organization), I asked who was the most reliable psychic; the first name that came up was Al’s. I was not used to psychic readings. Being a novelist at the time, I counted on getting all my information through inspiration and self-enquiry. But something had changed. I had to get some urgent questions settled. Things had become confused. I thought Milton Klonsky, after death, was guiding me. So I needed a source who saw beyond our 3-D reality. See Al, I was advised. The suggestion was unanimous. And he really came through.

On his website Al introduces his psychic journeys (with the Lama Sing group):

For over four decades, while the Lama Sing group was giving information sought by individuals and groups, Al was off  in his own incredible journeys on “the other side.” NDE descriptions (near death experiences) often depict some of this, but the remarkable thing is that Al has an “NDE” every time he does a reading and disassociates from his body so completely it is much like the process of “dying.”

The purpose of this website is to share, not only the information given by Lama Sing, but also the insights obtained by Al during his journeys and his intent to return with full Consciousness in order to incorporate that Consciousness into his life on Earth.

Mystical  Channel

Allen Joseph Miner, a Western mystic teacher of Enlightenment, is considered by many to be the foremost trance channel of his day, and the successor to Edgar Cayce. An accidental psychic at that. He is the largely anonymous originator of such terms as “sea of faces.” He became a channel (a working psychic) though a series of unexpected incidents and mishaps (or tests) that revealed unquestionably his mission and level of consciousness. Today he is the author of forty years of readings, individual as well as general-interest. And of over 15 books. The tale is best told in “Al’s Story” on his own website,  which describes the Lama Sing group he channels as a collection of spirits from God-consciousness. But for a quick overview, some highlights are below. The quotations are with permission:

ABOUT CHANNELING. What is it?

Channel is that term given generally to those who enable themselves to be, as much as possible, open and passable in terms of information that can pass through them from the Universal Consciousness, or other such which are not associated in the direct sense with their finite consciousness of the current incarnation.

Al Miner and Lama Sing

Revealing a Life Purpose

In a chance hypnosis session with Dr. E. Arthur (Art) Winkler, it was suggested  “You will go back to that time and place of greatest spiritual significance to you now.”  What happened next is recounted as follows, reprinted in extracts with permission. A shorter account is on their current website:

The next thing Al knew, he was awake, but where seemingly moments ago he’d been lying down, on the leather recliner, now he was standing. Adjusting his eyes to the dark, he realized he was outdoors, apparently under a twilight sky that was giving way to nightfall. He looked at his hands to see if he was really awake, but they were different somehow, as if not his own, and the shirt he’d had on when he’d closed his eyes as Dr. Winkler had begun talking to him in that strange measured pace, had been replaced by a heavy, simple garment of some sort that went almost down to his feet. And there, on his feet, instead of his shoes were sandals. Abruptly aware of people talking behind him, he spun around. Not far away was a small fire with a group gathered close around it, obviously warming themselves against the frigid air. A bit further away were the silhouettes of palm trees next to a small pool, and far off in the distance, he could make out sizeable dunes surrounding them in a sort of gigantic bowl of desert hills. The members of the group were talking amongst themselves with excitement, not seeming to pay any particular attention to his presence off on the outskirts of the oasis.

Something from behind seemed to call Al, shaking him loose from staring at the scene. Turning, the voices carrying on in the background, he stood, gazing out toward the skyline and into the night beyond, a feeling of joyful anticipation growing deep within, that someone he cared about very deeply was soon to arrive. As he searched the horizon for an indeterminable time, he wrestled with thoughts. ‘What is going on? Who am I and where am I? Who is this I’m waiting for that I seem to know but can’t quite remember?’ all the while the thrill inside all but bursting forth in expectation that one so dear to him would, in moments, come walking out of the darkness down the dune to him and their small, waiting group. And then he started to hear a voice, calling to him. Softly, barely audible at first, but slowly growing louder, the voice of this Dr. Winkler calling him to come back.

This chance hypnosis session revealed an astonishing gift. Continuing from the earlier website account:

 Once fully back, Al wanted to tell his friends about his incredible experience, but instead, they began to tell him of their own experience and of information he’d been giving. Al refused to believe. “Well, that can’t be true. I was in this desert oasis and…” but they weren’t listening, too excited about what he…or someone…had spoken . . .  Laughing, they told him they’d actually been having a conversation with him and he had told them many things, even about another friend of theirs, who Al had never heard of, who lived in Maine and was in deep trouble.

Confused and not able to believe what was being said by the others, Al wanted no more part of this, when Dr. Winkler said, smiling, “I’d like you to hear this”, and reached down and began playing the tape that had recorded the entire session.

When the recording started, and Al heard the voice, he wanted to jump up and run out of the room. What he heard was obviously his voice, but not only was the accent not his, how could it be that he was speaking with them while he was having his own experience in the desert? The more upset Al got, the more everyone else laughed. Finally, Dr. Winkler brought a chair over and sat down next to Al.

“It’s okay,” Dr. Winkler said softly. This kind of occurrence is rare, but it does happen. You have an uncommon ability to move in the sonambolistic state of hypnosis very easily.”

What happened when he went back to a time several centuries in the past (while simultaneously diagnosing illnesses in the “present”) became the turning point, leading up to the decades as full-time channel that occurred since. However, the conversion was not without preparation or “tests.”

It would probably be well to add in conclusion that the “chance” hypnosis session happened after several out-of-the-ordinary occurrences in Al’s earlier life, perhaps in some way preparing him, giving him more of a propensity to believe in unusual phenomena.

There was a near drowning at the age of four in an icy Wisconsin lake, in which, as Al was floating peacefully down to the bottom, looking around at the beauty in the vividly clear lake, he saw a snake swimming towards him. The last thing he recalls, before remembering waking up in his bed with a pile of blankets stuffed around him, was the snake, which sight broke his trance and scared him enough to begin his frantic climb to the surface.

When he was nine, he was not expected to survive the rheumatic fever that had been ravaging his young body for more than six months. He was aware, as he lay staring at the ceiling, of the doctor speaking with his mother in a hushed voice in the next room and that she began to weep as he consoled her. And then, as she had so many times when the pain became excruciating and the fever too much to stand, My-Lady (as he called her) came to him as he gave way to deliria, holding her hand out, lifting him out of his body and into worlds beyond.

But this time was different. Instead of returning him, as she always did when the pain subsided, they traveled far away, and when they returned, it was not to his body but to somewhere just above his home. Somehow he could look down, past the roof, the ceiling, and into the kitchen, where he saw his mother weeping, and in the next room, his body lying still on the sofa where they had temporarily moved him. As My-Lady showed him the scene, Al knew he was being given a choice—leave with her to remain in realms beyond, or return to his frail, sickly body and to the pain. It was his love for his mother that caused Al to return. There would still be quite some time of pain and recuperation remaining, but it was strangely different, and somehow bearable. That was the last time Al would see My-Lady, though unbeknownst to him, she would be born on Earth four years later, and in the autumn of their years, would return to him to become his wife, Susan.

Finally, there was the time he was coming home very early in the morning after finishing a night in a club with his band, when he got a flat tire. Not really needing to be concerned about anyone coming at this hour of night on the deserted back-country road, but pulling onto the shoulder anyway, Al had gone around to get the spare and jack, and was buried to his waist in the huge trunk of his 55 Olds.

Suddenly a flash of light shined into the trunk from behind him, and the next thing he remembers, he was sitting on the bank of a ditch about ten feet deep, about fifty feet across from where his car had been, lights flashing and people running about, talking, shouting. A sheriff, pad and pen in hand, was calling across to him, “Son! How the hell’d you get over there?”

Somewhere down the road, Al could make out the other car, its front-in totally smashed, his own car upside down in the ditch. A shaken Al was having difficulty relating the incident: “I was trying to get the stuff out to fix my flat, when I saw this glaring light and that’s the last thing I remember.” By now, Al was hearing the sheriff’s voice more and more muffled, as if miles away, “Well, son, how can that be? They were doing about 80 MPH when they came up over that hill. Could only’ve been a few seconds before they hit you. I climbed down the ditch to look at your car. Back bumper’s rammed under your back seat. If you hadn’t gotten outta the way, that car would’ve cut you in ha—…”

With the sheriff continuing to ask him questions he could not answer, Al was quietly asking himself: “My life’s savings are gone—saxophone, clarinet, car. What’ll I do? And how did I get all the way over here? What’s happened here?” as the ambulance sped away with the other car’s occupants.

In a recent reading, Lama Sing said that, among many other things, certainly Al’s choice to change course in two major points in his life—first from the entertainment business and then from corporate America—were like tests for him to move from temptations—like the lure of money and stature—that would enable him to be a pure and open channel through which these works could flow.

I had the delight of meeting Al and Susan in person, and there was no more humble yet lofty, Light-filled person. Enjoy the website that accumulates his learning and teachings.

BOOKS AND PROJECTS. See Library of Consciousness™ | By Al Miner & Lama Sing for the many projects of the Library of Consciousness, a library of readings, and published and up-coming books.

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Harrell’s bold and searching collection takes readers on an odyssey of inquiry, with the first and foremost question being ‘How to establish that / Yes, I am / One with God and God is / One with You.’ But rather than provide an answer, Harrell’s poems seek to use the question as a gateway into a thought-space where the act of seeking knowledge results in spiritual transcendence. In a note, Harrell describes her spirituality as a conscious, living thing shaped over time by a series of spiritual events she calls ‘initiations,’ and through her poetry, Harrell seeks to divulge her spiritual wisdom.

The principle spiritual tenet in Particle Piñata is that all knowledge of the universe is united in an ever-shifting entity to which all people contribute and borrow, including the poet’s literary inspirations Baudelaire, Emerson, Whitman, and Joyce, and major figures from the poet’s own life, which include Milton Klonsky and Hunter Thompson. . . .

Touching on religion, philosophy, particle physics, linguistics, and more heady concepts, Harrell’s collection is a cosmic, often esoteric whirlwind which seeks to bring the poet’s conception of a spiritual being to life.
Takeaway: A cosmic, sophisticated collection that touches on spirituality, philosophy, and physics.

Great for fans of: Milton Klonsky, Delmore Schwartz.

From the Publisher:

The Particle Piñata collection spans over forty years of Life tackled from the heart. The genesis emerged when, living in Morocco in 1980, Margaret Ann Harrell began recording her dreams. And they poured in, introducing her to image trails.” She was in deep contact with the unconscious. In it resided this poet, a “second-class citizen” of herself. The poet to whom words came easily because after all she was in the unconscious, whereas the conscious prose author struggled, edited, cut, sweated, and was published. No longer is the poet in the closet. Having been a spokesperson for “the unconscious,” or collective unconscious, before, in this poetry Harrell brings in the transpersonal nature of us all. From after-death communications to stimulating RUMI-nations to metaphysics in “a bottle,” her poems bring puzzles, thought-provoking, with depth. Many are “To the Earth,” announcing prophetically, in the 1980s, the upheaval we are seeing today. True to the brand of humor of the unconscious, there is a section of brilliant word play, narrating insights about the untold stories of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, theChrist spirit, and the universal Christ consciousness.

From—Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate

The time of the grandmothers, of the nurturing healing feminine energy has arrived. Patriarchy has sewn destruction long enough. We must all, female and male, become healers, seers. In her epic PARTICLE PINATA, author Margaret Ann Harrell stands in direct lineage with the desert mystics, the poet prophets of old and, simultaneously, with the contemporary cutting edge avant-garde. In a whirling dance with the creative forces of the universe Harrell draws explicit and implicit lines to Rumi, Blake, Yeats, Joyce, Jung, and others while forging mystical connections with clouds and coastlines, dancing in the borderlands of space and time, of being and not being, of embracing and letting go. And she accomplishes it all in her own distinctly original poetic voice. Through decades of carrying these poems from continent to continent, Margaret Ann Harrell has continued to add new poems and photos, to edit and revise, to transform her self into an ever evolving being, into this masterpiece book. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Go ahead, open the front cover and enter. You’ll never be the same.

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11, 12, 13

Palimpsest

Time with his old face

Death with his skull face

God with his No Face

Under my own face

—Milton Klonsky

What did William Blake have to do with The Hell’s Angels Letters book?

More than you might think. In my mind his artwork was the artbook I didn’t work on in 1971 or so. This was the artbook I did. It all went back to that.

But let’s take the story slowly.

1994. It was an unlikely event for me to be attending – called “Opening to Channel.” Living in Belgium, I had not had much experience personally with this more American practice in 1994. But I had just started taking light body experiential meditation work, which means getting to know the energy around you—your personal field—and from there subtle energy in general: how it works in us (somewhat in line with quantum theory but experientially). That’s where the first signal came that something was up about this book.

But maybe I should earlier, 1978. In the apartment of my close friend, a bit romantically, poet Milton Klonsky, whom Beat-generation author Seymour Krim described as having “an IQ that could stutter your butter.” Krim, by the way was a New Journalist, a “recorder of the scene as filtered through his intellect slanged vision.”  A fabulous author, he  taught writing a Columbia and at Iowa, and received both a Guggenheim and a Fulbright. In this somewhat shabby rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment of Klonsky, a tall bookshelf richly filled almost a wall-to-ceiling of the living room. Among the signed copies, by friends, was one by poet Marianne Moore. There he sat, in his (somewhat shabby too) maroon or gray sweater, surrounded by plates: William Blake printing plates from the Tate Gallery in London. Klonsky and Blake were two deep eccentrics, except for all his mental travels Milton did not talk to spirits the way Blake did. He did, however, get so engrossed in his work it could be almost a trance. Telling me about the illustrated manuscript, Blake’s Dante, he was working on for Harmony Books, he said: “You do the text.”

What??!! Sputter. Sputter.

The text was brief or long blocks of commentary on Blake’s engravings of Dante’s Divine Comedy. About the most erudite thing I could imagine. Certainly not housed in my brain. Plus translated excerpts. Whoo. That meant having at my fingertips all of Dante’s Comedy, plus getting into Blake’s mind at the intersections. And I didn’t know Italian. I was awed. How could he think me capable of such expertise put together wittily? He said, “Come on. I’ll introduce you to the publisher of Harmony Books. I’ll get him to give you $1,000.” $4,821 today!  Temporarily, I said yes, though I backed out when we returned from midtown, but I kept the memory. Including the awe.

Entering his apartment that afternoon now seems a kind of replica in astonishment of the opening pages of his American Review essay Art & Life: A Mennippean Paean to the Flea; or, Did Dostoevsky Kill Trotsky?—in which the natural philosopher Robert Hooke stared, in his dungeon laboratory in April 1663, as “out of the surrounding darkness” under his just-invented compound microscope he looked at a flea—“for the first time truly seen.” The flea was the carrier of the bubonic plague at the time, which he didn’t know.

Dazzled, my mind returned to Klonsky’s first Blake book: The Seer and His Visions. The erudition, the mix with street-talk, the brilliant colors and text-plus-image layout. It seered my awareness.

How does this connect to The Hell’s Angels Letters? It is one of the models underneath the book, a template peeping through, a palimpsest that started there. Or the start might have been—no, the pickup—my visit to Rome, to the da Vinci-inventions museum and the purchase of a book of illustrations/text of his imagined machines I stumbled on. Or my book of Michaelangelo’s paintings, or of my friend pop artist John (Jack) Wesley in New York. Or even, as while living in Belgium, I helped set up an exhibit for a museum, encountering their book Mozart in Belgium (in French).

Just as I began my first book by sitting in a Paris Montparnasse restaurant, Le Dôme, frequented in the past by Hemingway and Sartre, great writers and thinkers, painters, you name it, here was another, older flock of artists, this time visual, with texts digging into their great works. Sitting in that pond of art of the past ties in to The Hell’s Angels Letters, how? Underlying it in palimpsest mode. “Palimpsest,” a word I learned from Milton.

So let’s get down to it. At the channeling workshop in Ghent, Belgium, in 1994, I casually asked—in an exercise in twos—would my book be published? That is, Love in Transition: Voyage of Ulysses—Letters to Penelope, which I had worked on for nineteen years, unfinished because—what else?—of the death of Milton Klonsky (after whom my protagonist was named), after which he seemed to “come back from the dead” to initiate me. Are you following? There are a lot of winding trails like this leading up to the Letters.

The male in my Ghent channeling workshop answered, “I see a book by you in a bookstore window.” Wow.

A year later at the one hundredth-birthday celebration of the famous laboratory parapsychologist J. B. Rhine at the Parapsychology  Association convention in Durham, NC, in 1995, I had been asked to contribute, as I had known and corresponded with Rhine—letters again—and while at an evening event there I asked a parapsychologist, who said she looked for lost children for the New York City police sometimes, the same question. “Will my book be published?” SAME ANSWER. Twice now: “I see a book by you in a bookstore window.” 1995.

Fast forward to 2014. It takes patience to follow how the Universe plants. The players are getting ready in the wings as I enter Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville and a friend says, “Look, Margaret, your book is in the window!” Not just one book, but my two memoirs, just published in 2011, 2012, with Hunter S. Thompson as a key character, at last. In Love in Transition it had been Milton whose strange embodiments I had “memorialized.” But here came Hunter.

There, before a sparse audience on a Sunday morning (!) with most all the Gonzo Fest attendees in bed, I gave my presentation of his letters to me, the originals carried inside the plane from NC to Louisville, Kentucky. Spreading the collection, worth tens of thousands of dollars, out, I enthusiastically elaborated, letter by letter. In the audience Jinn Bug, a poet/photographer/graphic artist and importantly for our story, one who could receive energy messages, sat transfixed.

“Remember the spaces,” Hunter had written me: it meant tell the Random House production crew of Hell’s Angels (the printer worked from the manuscript hard copy) to reproduce the space around his newspaper-width quotations. Exactly. That’s an order. In the talented Jinn Bug’s mind, a vision of an artbook, formed. First of all, it was unlikely she would even be there, not often stepping into the Gonzo world. But she did. And that proved vital.

“Remember the spaces” opened up before her into—what else in our scenario?—an ART book, say, like, The Gorgeous Nothings (Emily Dickinson’s scribblings on envelopes, surrounded by barrels of space). Now, Jinn and her husband, Ron Whitehead, the founder/organizer of the Gonzo Fest, who had invited me to speak, together approached me. I had sometime back decided to write no more books without being asked, so as to get readers, not just good critical reviews. Jinn conveyed her vision, intending her role to be then complete. I stood still, rooted to the spot, captured by the image of the artbooks of the past.

A couple of years passed. I did nothing. How could I without my layout templates? Jim Bug had no interest in creating any templates, even one. But reluctantly, one day, hurrying down the airport corridor with me, she relented. (Probably to keep me interested.)

Now the winding trail wound into new corners. Keeping the waning project alive, investing it with dynamite, though so far not a single step in it had been taken, one day Jinn Bug got the idea of inviing in in Ron and Juan Thompson. She broached the idea. I said yes. They said yes. Juan’s entry miraculously guaranteed that the reprint permissions from the Estate.

Without Juan’s nod and generosity, no book.

And everyone felt the book was Hunter’s wish!

The ducks were in a row. But another year passed. I was still in that living room of Blake’s plates from the Tate Museum, or in Leonardo’s book of drawings with text, waiting for my template, the palimpsest of art books in the past standing with me. My stuck brain thought of no one to ask for templates, not yet even thinking of going to a designer. That would have been the obvious act. But I knew no Gonzo-inspired designer.  And I wanted text and template to go hand in hand.

Finally, Jinn and Ron said it was time for the editing—in the form of questions. That meant I had to write text, which was actually easy, given the familiarity I now had with the topic. Immediately, Jinn began drawing my own personal story into the book, where I had not planned on including it much. To bring me in, to widen the audience outside Gonzo, was her idea. Also, that I answer questions in written form in back-of-the-book Notes. Notes to be deleted later.

Then Ron announced he had a narrow opening to read the manuscript in six weeks. Could I be ready? Jinn added: forget waiting for the templates, she and Ron would drag text from my manuscript under and beside each illustration. All they needed was the text to drag, let them choose which. Wow. My heart dropped to the floor. My first reaction was, what a lot of trust that required of me, introvert that I was (extrovert in some ways too). But trust I had (the extroverted me) and in fact wasn’t this a collaboration? I said yes.

Also, they both insisted I leave excess material in for them to see. This required to restrain me in chains, as it were. I, of all people, identified myself by my ability to cut. One author I edited called me “scizzors lady.” How ironic. Because 1) I am an expert in cutting. It was like a trademark, my TM. A footprint of me.

I remember (painfully but gratefully) a lesson—shortcut—from Alan Rinzler, one of Hunter’s editors, who around 2009 read my memoir Keep This Quiet! in manuscript when what would become the first two volumes were still one long text. He berated the excess “ephemera.” Yes! My intuition had already told me that. So I raced through the book, cut one third, slashing away as in an overgrown vacant lot, without a glance backward, with nary a pittance of regret. This sealed the deal for me to always listen to my own intuition at a certain point—siding with it, as it nodded vigorously, if needed.

Now, with trust, trepidation, gratitude and curiosity as well, I turned in the text—at the very same time the Universe granted Ron an artist-in-residence assignment in Estonia, alone! No sooner had I turned it in than off he went.

Well, he would not back out, he soon informed me. He would edit it there, but what would happen to the plan? Unbeknownst to me he knew nothing about the plan.

So he received a text with no chapters, thus no chapter openings and closings. Now, those are  a fabulous tool I refresh myself on in bedtime mystery novels nightly. But this manuscript had no chapters, because (I thought) he was now to “place” portions of text under and around and in between the illustrations! Ron didn’t know! And I didn’t know he didn’t know. As I had only seen him a few times in person and found him rather intimidating (I admit), we had had no long phone conversations (a difficult feat in itself, as he is like a fire hydrant, the words pouring over each other).

I said, “Ron, cut anything—a paragraph, a page, a section—move paragraphs around. But please just do no line editing.

He said, “Thanks. Good to know. OK.” End of instructions.

That was the extent of the communication, except he repeated I was not to cut excess material, as he needed to see it to decide if it belonged in or not (not, definitely!).

So over in Estonia he weighed, wrestled, wondering how the text could be made “conversational,” he later said. I now know he must have meant to deemphasize any hint of anything academic. That was fine with me. A good idea.

I didn’t mention the plan that he and Jinn—now himself alone—were to drag and cut and paste my text under and beside and between illustrations. I mistakenly just assumed he had been told. Possibly Jinn thought I told him. Or that, no matter, it would all fall into place. (Which it did.)

Regardless, he sweated, then returned the manuscript with no markings. Just the finished product. A clean text. No questions.  I looked. YES.  As if my mind had been glued to his (and perhaps it was), he 100 percent agreed. Eye to eye. He deleted everything I’d shuddered at leaving in. And left in what I loved. Talk about mind meld.

But Ron was now emailing out the text for early reading. Ye gods! I hastily made chapters – with openings and closings created for dramatic effect. And by luck found designer Deborah Purdue to do Sample Pages. She just fell out of the sky. Deborah happened to live in Medford, Oregon, I soon realized—the headquarters of my light body work, from whence the Opening to Channel workshop had stemmed.

So now we entered the Art Book arena—layout, color, design fantasia. And lo and behold, as the self-organizing Universe would have it, it fell to me to drag and place the text! We were off to the races.

In the next year, in combing through agent options, I butted against my karma. I reached the spot where with earlier books I would give up. Was it karma? I began to think so. A stone wall I had to blast through. Ron masterfully pushed me, always upbeat, past every rejection letter.

Ron said, “No, keep going.” Jinn: “I think there’s a publisher out there.” What? I believed in her hunches.

And lurking in San Francisco, a needle in a haystack, he was.

(If you do not understand why the book was noncommercial, just imagine the cost of color printing. For sure, traditional publishers would, cost effectively, destroy the whole purpose of the project, by retyping, in black and white, excerpts of letters. Excerpts only. No scans. No primary documents on display, no doodles, no color. No coffee table book. Keep This Quiet! all over again. Why bother? No dice. Imagine the yawning of the Gonzo community!)

Grant Goodwine, the perfect illustrator, came in.

One year later in a phone call magic happened. I thought I was dialing a printing house to test what the color printing fee (in any case unaffordable by me; still, it didn’t hurt to ask) would be.

But the printer had a publishing arm. I’d dialed that by accident; by chance he himself picked up. He interrupted: “I’m the publisher of Norfolk Press. I want to publish your book. Do you have a manuscript?” And that was it. Next day, a contract waited. The book would come home to roost in San Francisco. Ah ha. Home to where Hunter typed the very first letter to me.  Closing the circle.

But that wasn’t the last hurdle. I signed in March 2020. COVID lurked. Frowning and forbidding. We got the book out July 18, 2020—no launch allowed.

However, then another hurdle, another karmic stop, as it were, remained. This one still in effect. Will this roadblock get lightly lifted as well? A proud, open highway? The hurdle now is how readers can get the book—available on just the publisher’s website. Ever mindful of dropping hints, the Universe showed its hand here too. An Amazon distribution center popped up right outside the Norfolk Press window—in 2021, saying: See how accessible I am. Take the leap! Charles Cunningham, the insightful, risk-taking publisher, noted the “hint.” But didn’t budge. Yet. Then one day Fat City Gallery, run by DJ Watkins out of Aspen, offered to put the book up on its site for sale. Ah ha. Another surprise in store. Moving now to Aspen, just miles from Hunter’s Woody Creek home. Are we tracing a trajectory on a map?

As we started with Blake, I think of the plots of the Universe: After his exile from Florence, “poet and politician Dante Alighieri . . . wrote his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family in town after town.”

The Gospel of Thomas: (29) “Jesus says: “If the flesh was produced for the sake of the spirit, it is a miracle. But if the spirit . . . for the sake of the body, it is a miracle of a miracle.”

That is, this winding road is the path of the art of old. Hunter won fame. Celebrity. Notoriety. But for a taste of the “old way,” this might round out the picture. Michaelangelo was enormously wealthy. But most artists were not.

I cannot thank Ron enough for pushing and pushing, never washing his hands of this project. Ron always available to give his suggestions, out of years of experience. Quick, unhesitant. If I would doubt, the solution was: Ask Ron. Quick, snap of the finger, he fired back. And I would go back now to nod at my first publisher, Didi Cenuser, in Romania, as he appreciates being remembered. Who could forget him? Jinn Bug, of course, for capturing several Universe messages during this long journey, without which I don’t think the book would exist.  Thanx, one and all.

To Be Continued.

https://www.beatsupernovarasa.com/thebeats/thebeats.htm
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dante-is-exiled-from-florence

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About the Silly Sutras website, it is described as

a great new place – in cyberspace,
where Dr. Seuss will meet Einstein, and Rumi – and many others too –
just like you,
mystically musing, and whimsically wondering
about Life’s perennial puzzlements.

Here you’ll find Ageless Adages For Every New Age,
With Whimsical Rhymes For Our Times;
Plus Paradoxical Answers to Life’s Unanswerable Questions,
With Speculations and Ruminations Pondering Perennial Puzzlement

Try reading some of the posts. You will find them difficult to turn away from. Sutras, he explains, in its Sanskrit and Latin root means “to sew.” His sutras “join issues.” The result is “a tapestry of insight from direct experience and perennial precepts.  Sometimes sutras are concise epigrammatic and enigmatic aphorisms, with vast significance.  Sometimes they are grouped to refer to a common category like Yoga or Tao, or as in Buddhist sutras, to record oral teachings of Gautama Buddha.” Ron is also a poet. Sample his site and you will find ancient wisdoms he collects like pearls like those below:

There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe. 
The horizontal threads are in space.
 The vertical threads are in time.
 At every crossing of the threads, there is an individual.
 And every individual is a crystal bead. 
And every crystal bead reflects not only the light 
from every other crystal in the net,
 but also every other reflection throughout the entire universe.
~ Indra’s Net – from the Vedas of ancient India, 7000 years old

All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.
~ Buddha

The post A “grand Synthesizer” – Ron Rattner’s review appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

Fortunately, I discovered there was more of myself. After exhaustively covering much of my life, I had not peered closely enough into the 1990s, that grand period when my life was pretty haywire by normal standards. Was one book enough to cover it? My garage said no. It revealed forgotten mysteries, thoughts, convictions. I geared up to go in hot pursuit. Here is a glimpse of the new edition of Keep This Quiet! IV: Ancient Secrets Revealed that is just about to come out!

Author’s Note to the 2018 Edition 

I am peering into the past in this edition, at times trying to decipher—from newly retrieved materials in my garage—who I was back then; who this person writing in my name was, this person that I absorbed into me and spoke for, when—uncovering these writings “she” made for herself—I find I didn’t exactly remember “her.” I “remembered” who I am now, and how I thought I got there. Ah. It’s not the case at all. Often, when she speaks for herself, resurrected from the past, I find a different voice. And, I ask myself, if I can’t even remember myself properly, interpret myself in the “past” properly, how on Earth can I speak for someone else? How can any of us? Thus, it is really true, from what I’ve learned in revising Keep This Quiet! IV, that everything is subjective. Even, my internal records of me are subjective, my memory is, with only these newly discovered documents, these confessions and accounts, guiding me into the “past” this time—steering as into an old mine but with a real miner’s light.

The boxes piled up. Some from 2001, when I packed up, left Belgium, and prophetically came to North Carolina, to live. But I never opened them. They went through two moves and one day as they sat in the garage in their original boxes, guarding their secrets, someone warned me they could attract termites. Cardboard could. That did it. Slowly I would move them into other containers. Hopefully throwing out a lot. But that’s not exactly what happened. In writing Keep This Quiet!, volumes one and two, I had the foolproof chronology of Hunter’s letters. But what about Keep This Quiet! IV. Not at all. But I had something else. Letters from me to me. I hadn’t known I was writing them to me, to my future self or my “inner masculine” (animus) energy. To my shadow, whoever. From my shadow even.

So what did I leave, as in a bottle, for my “future self,” me, right now? It fills in a lot of details. For in an Awakening, a lot that we’re  not ready for we discard, interpret wrongly. Now my mature self is ready—for what I recorded fresh off the inner waves: an unexplored, documented history I would never have reconstructed exactly this way. In fact, I didn’t. These writings, some twenty-five years old, inform the previously published edition, shedding new light on spots I dimly recalled; also, time has finally caught up to what was ahead of the times (such as when I, with spirit guides, predicted—in the future—“out of control events,” in particular, grave dangers from misunderstood, highly energized, on-the-move archetypes, such as “Home”).

Inserting them into the earlier account, I listen as with a conch shell to those waves of information my greater self brought, planted,  sometimes prophesizing—that would all have been lost had I not beckoned myself back with interest. This includes what appears to be almost fairytale narrations, of multidimensional meanings. And in this way, looking at these records, I synched my life’s advance notices with now, listening to this very bold, out-of-the-box thinking “past self,” who, indeed, was quite different than what I thought, as you will find out. As she made her records before nontime became Time and unity consciousness and my multidimensional self expressed itself further (as we all do) in real-time variations of some of these and other insights all over the globe NOW.

 

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