About the Layout of the Books, a note from the author

The Alteration of Text exemplified in the PK Gallery Glimpsing a few of the styles

      During the last ten years of living in Belgium (that is, the entire 90s), I had the good fortune of making the irregularly printed pages. This (to me) exciting phenomenon came about—as I underscore once again—through some partly unconscious printing procedure where when I pushed the button to print, there would be printouts of the pages which often modified what was on the screen. This delighted me. Consequently, I endeavored to increase and capitalize on the results and turn them into illustrations which gave to the reader a bit of the experience I had, of seeing transformation of appearance become transformation of vibration and energy. How the procedure operated is still unclear, but I have made various attempts to examine and narrate it, in the Love in Transition early volumes. I will not digress here to lay the background of the “exceptional human experience” which preceded and precipitated the first printouts, offering (to me) rational explanation of the WHY. Ultimately the single- or multiple-letter “signatures” (spread throughout the books) were retained, as one of the ways in which a page was either validated (as ready for publication) or criticized as needing more energy to think it through with. This, indeed, provided me with countless supplies of energy. Or so it seemed to me, at the time. Therefore, I dedicated a full ten years to this period; which was consumed by the experiments, a time when at the touch of a finger, in this manner, energy streamed forth in endless supplies and, at the same time, printout creations. Piles of variations of the text were so numerous that only by moving to another apartment (and country) eventually did I bring order back again to the archives. Only then could I begin bringing out the current Space Encounters series of books, rather than continuing full-time, practically round the clock, this form of ever-new variation of text format, with samples multiplying like hamsters out of their cages. Each printout, like each split-second, was likely to carry some new configuration of the straight text on the screen, when this practice was operating. It was a lesson in high-speed thought, in looking for a new EMPHASIS (a new slant, some new point lifted into focal stress or into center front stage) in each constellation of the material of life; each kaleidoscopic, each subjective or peered-into, angle that each new second in fact holds. As shifting as clouds, as each new presentation of the before becomes “rewritten” by observation. By what was supposed to be “repetition.” (One could playfully, as a writer, imagine—which I didn't —a sign on a virtual printing system, which read: NO REPETITION ALLOWED.)

      There are so many innovative technologies and scales of storage systems in science theory these days that I had space enough, and more, to guess at what might have been behind these displays of technically “unprogrammed” computer reformatting, but also had the art privilege of pursuing a kind of creation that science would be able to explain only in hindsight, if it wanted to. Because I do believe there is a clear and valid explanation, with a science/metaphysical validity behind it; and that is further reason that I pursued the changing text shapes, seeing in them also a kind of sculpture, as if one could—and why not?—mold the page, as it was energy, after all, though of the manifest variety, clamped down into words. But if it were to survive, it would be what was behind the words that did so. I write in this much detail and imaginativeness, and certitude, because after all for ten years (at least) this provided much of the fuel system for my psyche, much of the mediation and outlet possibility of constant inspiration!! Any artist is loyal to the format of his/her own creativity. And certainly Jackson Pollock would not forego his style of painting for another—more mundane, less-dynamic and interactive, as opposed to “action painting.” I wanted to carry the same interactivity and dynamics over to the experience of the reader.

      “PK1” is a scan of a printed-out page in the first volume of Space Encounters. The different directions in space and the different font sizes are an identical, unmodified scan of exactly how the page printed out, whereas on the screen the text was small size and all in one direction (text and footnote). This is a sample of one style.

      “PK2” shows another style, where the text is overlaid, and blown up, to the point where the appearance is totally changed. It comes from “Having Tried to Write.”

      “PK3” is from an upcoming Space Encounters volume. The actual text on the screen was: “Then glasses be my glosses”—in fact, I had meant to write “Then glosses be my glasses.” Nevertheless, the printout is a variation of the appearance of the unintended language—with the word “glosses” coming back in at the end, in normal format. Other very intricate styles (using sequential strips of connected text, for instance) have succeeded these and even preceded them and are numerously present in the books, which partly evolved in order to showpiece them, but not entirely, by any means. The styles challenged me, because of planting questions, such as (to my inveterate curiosity) whether or not backward-connecting strips of a single page might be thought to relate to—or play with the idea of—“advanced” and “retarded” waves, and recompiling an ink drop (for instance) after it had gotten dispersed into water. The Gallery here by no means exhausts the styles and is intentionally conservative in presenting them, as I am reluctant to put them on large-scale public display before they are generally made public in the US, which is not now the case, due to lack of wide distributorship of the books. I alternate the standard text and the variations in the books—trying to use the backload of what was done in Belgium (on a succession of different printers and models of printers, including jet ink and laser, and in a succession of file formats, following a ten-year progression of computer technology). If someone wants to call this “inspiration,” that's a fine interpretation for me, but if another wants detailed notes, that's also of great interest to me, in tracking what is in fact our human potential and how the human being relates to the energy all around us, that we presently primarily explore in applied technology, as well as the theoretical level that goes with it—certainly, in the West. But the spiritual evolution (and even such things as what Kundalini promises that human potential might evolve into) are other avenues for experience, research, and the puzzle of being who we are and what our individual life pathways reveal to us. If we allow it. Many or most, in the end, either do so allow or wish perhaps that they had dropped all guards against it and explored that fascinating unmarked history of who they could be, here on the Earth. I believe that striving for one's own individuality only multiplies what the whole storehouse of human potential creates and contains—including the originality and creativity that life mysteriously holds the secrets to and the factualities we wrest from it, or leave as something which touched us, like, even, sometimes a giant fish we threw back into the sea, having caught. So these printouts are only hints at what I believe tomorrow will show us, about our huge abilities to “master” life forces (though not dominate). Or, finishing suggestively with the words of Dylan Thomas: “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.” I like to leave things thoroughly investigated and yet still “up in the air,” where they are continuing to move on—even as is the principle of all Light.

- Margaret A. Harrell