When I left high school,I went out into the world to become an artist, and although I have turned out a substantial body of good art, both figurative and abstract in a variety of mediums, it is but a tiny fraction of what I could have done if I had not mismanaged my life to the extreme, every decision a wrong one, trying to make a living to support my art habit in fields where you can't possibly make a living. When I decided to leave college to become an artist my art professor warned me that becoming an artist is the hardest road you can go down. Only recently have I come to understand the reason....there is no road.

Nevertheless, I then went to the Art Institute of Chicago to get formal classical training only to find that because I was considered a "talent", having gotten the one of only two A plus' the school ever gave out in figure drawing, I got no instruction at all, their thinking being that it would be interference.

So I left, taking with me the woman I would marry and have son with, moved to Boston, worked part time at Harvard library and the Boston Public library, lived in a 37 dollar-a month four room apt two blocks from
Old North Church, and happily painted away until my son was born in 1960, whereupon I astutely realized that what I really needed was money and not more paintings.

Searching for some way of making a living that was more palatable to my temperament, I submitted myself to a five year harpsichord-making apprenticeship, in spite of having never having the patience to finish one model airplane in my youth. However, latent talent appeared and I became foreman in two and a half years, supervising a number of European craftsmen from whom I learned everything I know about woodworking. I made all the keyboards, soundboards and did all the inlaying and marquetry.

In 1966 I got divorced and moved to Berkeley where I became the first professional early instrument maker on the West Coast, making 26 instruments of my own design (harpsichords, clavichords, and virginals) each taking
approximately three months, experimenting relentlessly with the acoustics-trying to become the Stradivarius of the harpsichord world,which did not happen, until I got burned out by the egos of some of the primadonna's who
bought my instruments. Being cursed with rather extreme views on creativity due to my love of early jazz, where playing someone else's notes or even playing the same notes twice was a no-no, I felt like I was making glorified typewriters for typists who were typing other peoples manuscripts.

Resolving to simplify my life, I abandoned musical instruments and began carving rocking horses. This led to teaching classes in my own shop, at the University of Calif,Berkeley,where my overflowing classes were the first to fill up five years in a row, and at craft schools across the country. This occupation drew a lot of publicity locally and nationally, in print and t.v.

Out of the classes grew a kit and instruction manual enabling anyone to carve their own heirloom. During these woodworking years I also constructed all kinds of objects including the case for the transcontinental railroads
golden spike and a grizzly bear mascot for the nuclear powered escort cruiser California, formally presented to the navy by Nancy Reagan. Since harpsichords and rocking horses were clearly quite beautiful( the horses are
arguably the best in world) everyone thought of them as art--everyone except me, as they were just a means of getting me time for the real art, which it never really fulfilled.What art I did get done in those years was in the
short space of time between carving horses or harpsichords, so I guess it did work, only just not enough.

And then-- Shazam-- my life totally changed, because one night I had a powerful dream stating in no uncertain terms that the geometry of the Great Pyramid was a language, and that the language said something important. I literally woke the next morning, dug up my grandfather's architectural tools and began re-teaching myself the geometry I learned in Frank carving's class.

Since then I have been pretty much been living in my calculator, tracking down the irrational numbers which turn out to be both the language and the genetic makeup of which every dimension in the Great Pyramid is composed. Abandoning most everything else in my life,(rocking horse carving being replaced by house painting in order to counter balance the lofty voyage into Sacred Geometry) I became a discovery junky, not only doing the very last thing I thought I would be ever wind up doing, but actually feeling more like an artist when doing mathematics than I ever felt when doing art.

But the time finally came when I had to put down on paper everything I had discovered in understandable form. This proved to be a hopeless task due to my own inability to put one word in front of the last and the unusual nature of the subject, the mathematics of the transformation of Spirit into Matter, which in everyday terms is the mathematics of how any idea(spirit) in one's mind gets transformed into any expression (matter) of that idea...in other words, creation. Whether the idea is to bake a cake or create the physical universe, the mathematics of the process is the same.

After a couple of years of failing to write a single sentence that made any sense, I gave up on sense, and wrote the first thing that came into my head that didn't have to do with the pyramid,or so I thought. "I'm a lizard," he
said," a Snow Lizard. I know numbers that will make you weep for their beauty." I pursued this line thinking that at least I might learn to put one word in front of another. That line became a book called "Last Lizard and
the Language of the Great Pyramid" , a fable in which the principles of the concept are presented without any mathematics getting in the way, a primer really, and will be in print in late 03.

Highly autobiographical, as I am the protagonist Alabaster Bones, the last of an eccentric species of human sized Snow Lizards, it is clearly one of the strangest books ever written due to the fact that almost all of the highly unusual events which read like total fantasy, are actually true, and that all of it's bizarre characters are
members of my family, including one that established the separation of church and state in this country in 1643 and one going back to the year 890,(see 9th extract,Moby Dick) each one doing what they did in their real
lives.

I gave Jim McDonough, the only high school friend I have stayed in touch with, a small cameo role as a pool shark in honor of our marathon pool games we play when we get together.

Having finally learned to write, I am now half way through the book I couldn't write in the first place, the actual mathematics in organized form, which I will most likely finish in a couple of hundred years from now, after
which I start on the rest of the Giza Plaza complex.

Meanwhile, I squeeze in as much art as possible, (the long awaited enough time to paint being just around the corner in some other universe) listen to my ancient jazz while facing the fact that all I ever wanted to do in life
was play cornet in a 1920's jazz band, dream of living in a boat on the rivers and canals of Europe, have been married and divorced twice, have a son and three grandchildren, the two girls each being one half of my book's
heroine, Velvet Bones a fashion model possessing a photographic memory but is too beautiful for her own good, and my grandson, who at only 8 years old has already surpassed me in eccentricity.

I took up flying on the trapezewhen 55, nearly crippled myself at 57 training for pole vaulting in the Masters, and had to be paddled back to life three times after massive heart attack while in an M.R.I machine on (appropriately, since I have lived in Berkeley for almost 40 years) election day 2000. Thus, my life, and real
happy to still have it, on the strange road that didn't exist until I walked it.

Anton Winsor Lignell
2022 Los Angeles Ave.
Berkeley,Calif. 94707

510-526-6621

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