Last Lizard and the Language of the Great Pyramid

By Anton Winsor Lignell

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 23, 2004
• ISBN: 9781469106236

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LAST LIZARD

AND THE

LANGUAGE OF THE

GREAT PYRAMID

Anton Winsor Lignell

Copyright © 2004 by Anton Winsor Lignell.

Cover art and Illustrations by Anton Winsor Lignell

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Contents

TO THE PALACE

SNOW LIZARD HISTORY

RYERSON FOX’S HOBO ADVENTURE

RUN, BANKER, RUN

MIDNIGHT’S TALE

ALABASTER BONES, ARTIST

THE GAME OF POOL

THE MOTHER OF ALL CIRCLES

THE GREAT PYRAMID

BYE BYE LIZARDOM

VELVET BONES

BLUE LIGHT SHOT

TO THE PALACE

I’m a lizard, he said, a Snow Lizard. Bones is my name, billiards my game. I know numbers, he added to no one in particular, numbers that will make you weep for their beauty.

Thus did Alabaster Bones, artist, master pool shark, and lover of everything, formally announce his presence to the world at large via the bustling noontime crowd of downtown San Francisco. He was the last of the Snow Lizards, an eccentric white scaled species with more brains than they knew what to do with. Reputed, at least in their own minds, to be on the way up the evolutionary ladder, they were without question, the most bizarre collection of individuals to ever walk the planet Earth.

Alabaster, who claimed to have discovered that very same planet by virtue of his numbers, was exceptionally strange, even by Snow Lizard standards. As the sole representative of nonexistent constituents, he appointed himself ambassador for all who had been and carried himself accordingly, walking with the assured gait of a well meaning samurai.

Except for his deep purple eyes, his physical appearance was nothing out of the ordinary. He was of average human height and tailless. The choice of regrowing ones tail when it dropped off during adolescence was each individuals personal option and was controlled by mind alone. Due to his species unique ability to mask their lizardness by altering their inner attitude, he appeared to be no different than anyone else walking down the street. Much as their distant cousins, the chameleons, change color to match their environment, Snow Lizards somehow caused their physical appearance to give the fool proof impression of humanness, by simply pretending internally that they were human.

He had arrived on a fast freight, slightly the worse for wear, having sent his single item of luggage, an ancient typewriter, on ahead to the Palace Hotel where a room, booked in his name, awaited him. The room, the typewriter, and the credit card in his pocket were his inheritance from the great benevolent Banker, his species only trusted friend.

His only other possessions were his mother’s silver baby spoon, his father’s ornate pocket watch, and a threadbare zoot suit, missing much of the zoot. This suit had belonged to his famous uncle, Ryerson Fox, the first and only other Snow Lizard ever to venture down from their secret winter wonderland in the arctic, to mingle with the humans. All his other possessions were in his mind, for safekeeping.

He had left his arctic home to see if he could get an idea that had found its way into his mind, out of his mind and into someone else’s, preferably everyone’s. The idea, which he had found encoded in the irrational numbers of the Great Pyramid, was, in Alabaster’s not so humble view, worthy of knowing. This was no small undertaking considering the nature of the idea and the nature of the particular mind in which it had become lodged. Communication was not his strong suit. Besides, he was a lizard.

But his lofty purpose fell to the wayside after his long trek down from the barren white wasteland in which he had grown up. The green landscape of the temperate latitudes beckoned him to see all. So, putting his best intentions on back burners, he instead hoboed around the North American continent drinking in its emerald green landscape. He always steered clear of cities, scrupulously avoiding contact with the humans. Alabaster, of course, knew the human language, but he had no sustained first hand experience in using it as a means of communication.

His only knowledge on the art of getting along with humans came from books, his uncle’s stories, and from a talking dog with whom he had the good fortune to share more the a few box cars. He learned a lot from this dog. His entire philosophy of how to increase your life expectancy amongst the human species was to keep moving at all times. And this timely wisdom came from a dog whose only real interest in life was the stock market. A dog that talks, Alabaster still couldn’t get over it.

His only sustained interaction with humans occurred in a backroom pool hall with the twelve Angels who claimed to have come from Hell. Alabaster thought otherwise. Maybe they had visited Hell, but all things considered, a nicer bunch of guys couldn’t be found for his first trial run at inter species communication. Alabaster passed his first test with flying colors, supplying the encouragement he needed to tackle a city and all its inhabitants on his own.

But, instead of going directly to the city as he had intended, he spent an entire year cruising the back roads of the great American Midwest on Silver, his pet Harley whose liberation he had won in the pool hall, looking at the proportions of barns. As a passionate lover of all forms of the third dimension, the crisp geometry of barns, with their clean, straight forward, utilitarian lines and broad expansive planes, were to Alabaster, the equivalent of a single cell, the simplest and most complicated structure rolled into one.

However, it wasn’t just his love of form that drove him to seek out every barn in the land. It was also his training ground for learning to merge two great opposites, art and science, into one. While feeling the impact of their beautiful proportions with his entire body, he would simultaneously calculate the mathematical relationships between length, width and height. It took him the whole year to unify the numerical spread sheet in his mind with the emotional panorama in his body, but when he finally did, the whole universe became his museum. This accomplished, he was ready for the city.

The city, however, blew him away. No preparation in the world could have prepared him for the enormity of it all. Although he had viewed them from a distance within the safety of a moving boxcar and had seen many two dimensional pictures of city architecture, the sheer magnitude of its reality in the third dimension overwhelmed him. It was like being in the center of some massive geometric sculpture garden, each building a different exotic flower. Just the arrangement of windows in the old factories that he passed as he made his way from the freight yards to the center of the city, and the division of lights within the window, set his eyes rolling with delight. He wished his father, Chief Architect, was alive to share the joy of it all.

The jewels at the bottom of every canyon he walked through were the street level windows. Each was a passion play between horizontal and vertical, and each contained a diorama of colorful three dimensional objects of every description. They were nothing short of little museums within the larger museum of the building itself, which was within the great museum, the city. Museums within museums within museums. Alabaster knew he was going to like his new home. Already he was delirious at the prospect of getting to know each and every building intimately, on a first name basis, building to lizard.

But impressive as the buildings were, none could hold a candle to the creatures who conceived, built and inhabited them. No mere monkeys with car keys, they were clearly the most beautiful of all species, with endless variations on every aspect of their form, each a work of art. They were also the luckiest species of all because the two versions of the same thing, female human and male human, were the most perfect equal but opposite complimentary design to ever come off the drawing board. They contained a magnetism so powerful it kept the earth spinning.

Throwing caution to the winds, he dove into this river of human beauty and swam upstream, like a salmon, towards the patch of green that was the center of the city. Though no one could see through his invisible disguise to his lizardness, many strongly reacted subconsciously to his essence.

Some men, sensing something, but knowing not what, played the subtle game of sidewalk chicken over a few inches of walking space, always eager to dominate any time any place, war being their middle name. Although Alabaster was no longer filled with hatred towards the humans for their responsibility in making him the last of his species, he nevertheless rewarded their aggression with a simple lesson in the laws of physics as applied to collisions between egos and hard shoulders. Due to the particular style of pool he had developed, the muscles holding together his deceptively spare frame were ribbons of steel, and he bowed to no mere mortal man.

Women, on the other hand, the equal but opposite side of the equation, played bingo with his nervous system, showering him with smiles and hints of hot romance, leaving him intoxicated, lucky to be walking the earth in their company. He fell instantly and completely in love with each and every one of them. He attempted to put to practical use the year of training he had spent unifying the thinking and feeling part of his mind. But these were not barns walking down the street, these were the real thing, curves galore and none of them measurable. Each was a whirl of golden proportioned numbers that flashed through his mind and body like a shooting star. The only missing numbers were their phone numbers. Alabaster could see that it was going to be difficult work sorting all this out, but he was one lizard up for the task.

I’ll take the assignment he said to a passing woman who lit up like the fourth of July. I can start right away.

She moved like the waves of Wiamea Bay, a bicycle built for two, but after showering him with an all encompassing smile of total approval she left him catatonic in her aromatic wake. Alabaster’s heart rang like a cash register as he deposited her smile.

When he could absorb no more beauty, he wished sweet dreams to all he had encountered and ducked into a department store, seeking refuge. His first thought once inside the store was that maybe, just maybe, in spite of his many shortcomings in life, he had been a good enough little lizard to have made it to heaven. Stepping across the door’s magical threshold was apparently tantamount to stepping out of the darkness of deep space directly into the heart of a star. Momentarily blinded by the refracted light of the crystal chandeliers, the rare air, ladened with a thousand perfumes, knocked him to his knees with the force of a hurricane, jumbling and conquering his senses. The fabled treasure chest containing jewels of every description, lay open before him.

My chest, it said, is yours. I am every color, I am every shape, I dazzle, I do tricks, I am the garden. Welcome.

Leaping lizards, he thought, the promised land. Then, out of the prismatic mist of sunrise, Paradise herself walked straight towards Alabaster. She was wearing a million dollar dress but as to just where the woman left off and the decoration began was anyone’s guess. Struggling to gain his sea legs, he frantically searched his normally unreliable mind for something to say, only to find the cupboard once again bare. She came to a stop in front of him.

Your passion is my pleasure he blurted out inanely, realizing instantly that he should have simply asked for her hand in marriage. I’ll do the dishes, he added.

I appreciate that, loverboy, Paradise answered, her eyebrows going up and down like a window shade out of control. But first get a life. In the meantime would you care to sample our new cologne?

Nodding assent like an idiot, Alabaster was shot with a jet of elixir, leaving him delirious. He wondered whether they would next meet in his dreams or hers. The spritzer dismissed him with her every day beautific smile and then moved on to the next customer coming through the magic doors.

On a roll, Alabaster deposited her smile in his piggy bank and headed off into the depths of the Promised Land. Before he knew it, he bumped into a woman even more beautiful than the last. A quick study, determined to do it right this time, he pulled himself up into his most dignified and austere self, cleared his throat, and looked her straight in the eyes. Then, he diplomatically queried . . . Do you glow in the dark or does night cool your fire, is your laughter out of control and your passion a racehorse, do children start dancing and old men’s hearts skip a beat when they see you coming, does your breathing heave the tides back and forth and does the workings of your mind keep the earth spinning, do butterflies rest their wings when you shut your eyes, is your spine straight and your strength fierce, do roses seek your hair, is it your heartbeat that winds the universe’s clockworks, your smile that primes the sun, are you softer than all measure, do songs tumble from your lips, does your voice soothe, your touch heal, are you friend to the crazed and worn, do you walk through the day like the procession of the heavens, every step a dance, can you climb a tree, embrace thunder, do chandeliers dangle from your ears and red shoes clove your feet, are you smart as a whip, with a temper world famous, do you smell like the grass after rain, . . . in other words . . . are you a hot little number that wants to dance on my chest, or are you just sugar and spice and everything nice.

Clearly unmoved by his eloquence, the mannequin continued her silent vigil, and Alabaster, to whom God had forgotten to give an attention span, mourned for exactly one second the loss of a future filled with her love, winked goodbye, and strode off to the perfume counter, credit card in hand.

After making a few timely purchases, he headed off in search of the men’s department. An hour later, he emerged from the store wearing a distinguished navy blue pin striped, flared collared, double breasted suit. But for the bold tie depicting lurid jungle scenes and the black and white winged tip Fred Astaire shoes in which he stood, he appeared the very pillar of respectability.

Carrying a shopping bag in one hand and the sports page of the morning paper in the other, he retraced his steps for a few blocks in search of a particular alley he had spotted earlier. When he found it, he looked for a cool place to rest his weary alabaster bones, and read about the upcoming game two of the Great Bay World Series. Then he would contemplated the stupefying events of his first day in a city. Finding a secure spot between a couple of garbage cans, he made himself comfortable and proceeded to read the sports page. He wondered if his room at the Palace would have a TV. When he finished, he sat silently for a few moments absorbing the quiet serenity. Then addressed the contents of his shopping bag.

Producing a bottle of Chanel No. 5, he opened it, took a deep sniff of its contents, and held it out at arms length.

To Silver, he said, the best horse a lizard ever had.

Then he placed it to his lips, tilted his head back and drank it’s contents in one shot, poison for one species being pleasure for another. After arranging his substantial collection of lizard liquor in front of him in neat orderly rows, he selected his next aperitif and examined its label, My Sin.

Hmmm, said Alabaster the Innocent, to an alley cat that had taken up residence right next to him, I wonder what that means, and downed it straight off. By the time he got around to toasting Angels and barns he was firmly enconced in never-never land.

He woke the next morning knowing instantly that he had again gone too far and it was too late to change his ways. His eyes seemed to work but there was nothing to see except empty black space extending for billions of miles in all directions. He tried to move but some kind of metallic straightjacket compressed his body into a tight fetal position and couldn’t budge an inch. Then the truth dawned on him.

I’m dead, he said, and I think I know where this express is going.

He got ready to explain his strange life to his maker. As tears started to roll down his cheek, a great thunderous crashing burst his eardrums, followed by a light so blinding that he surmised he could only be at the gates of either Heaven or Hell.

Nothing in this can said Grace Fully, formerly from the sunny side of the street, as she looked Alabaster straight in the eyes and slammed down the lid.

Sensing redemption in the air, Alabaster, who habitually crossed that very fine line between genius and idiot with such regularity that he was no longer required to show his passport, struggled mightily to put two and two together. He huffed and he puffed and he wiggled and squiggled. Finally, the celestial garbage can overturned, spilling its distinguished contents, Alabaster Bones, the biggest fool in the world, into the alley.

Grateful to be on earth rather than either heaven or hell he spent a few moments in cogent reflection on his penchant for always going all the way with what ever he did. I must reform my ways, he thought, or I am lost. Salvation and hope flashed through his mind as he remembered his favorite prayer. Standing up straight he opened his arms wide to the alley and gave voice to Black Elks wondrous words. Teach me to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that live, sweeten my heart, and fill me with light. Give me the strength to understand and the eyes to see. Help me, for without you I am nothing.

Then, after a quick check to determine whether he still had his spoon and watch in his pockets and his numbers in his head, the Emperor of the North Pole dusted himself off and headed for the Palace.

SNOW LIZARD HISTORY

Snow Lizards originally lived in the lush tropical rain forest of the Great Amazon Basin, but as they were a gifted species with an abundance of intelligence and intuition, they astutely realized that their snowblinding whiteness was a dead giveaway in the emerald jungle, and resolved straight away to remedy the situation with a change of address. This towering decision after a mere million or so years. Desiring only a little peace and quiet, they sent Other, Alabaster’s thirty-first antecedent on his mother’s side, in search of a new home.

He was gone so long that when he returned one evening at dinner time, few were still alive who remembered who he was or why he had gone. Camouflage, gasped the great explorer with his last breath, Go north till you start heading south. Avoid the humans at all costs. They all look alike but some are good and some are bad, and you can’t tell which is which until it’s too late. Always sleep with one eye open. Then, like Pheidippides at the gate of Athens, he dropped dead.

So they headed north, keeping a low profile, with nary a word to strangers except for the occasional encounter with one of the lesser lizard species, whom they would routinely bedazzle with their superior wit and wisdom, leaving them spellbound in their wake.

Finally, after an adventure-filled journey that would take on mythical proportions after only a few generations of continuous exaggeration, their long migratory march came to an end. They ran smack into what Other had pointed them towards, the quintessential camouflage of the Arctic’s pristine ice and snow. They blended in perfectly. Except for their lavender eyes which became luminescent in the midnight sun, they were for all practical purposes invisible, even to each other. Having exchanged one paradise for another, home was now the North Pole.

Recognizing the numbing cold as the number one factor inhibiting their attainment of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they consciously brought about a spontaneous species adaptation by mastering their own internal climate control, making mind the thermostat, adjustable at will.

That accomplished, everything came together as if it were meant to be. They discovered vast fleets of fish silently cruising just under foot that could be coaxed into the frying pan without too much trouble. Although the fish were not quite up to the high class culinary delights they were used to in the jungle, at least they didn’t bite back.

Housing was plentiful, a buyers’ market really. They found a place where the ice was so thick that they could build straight down, leaving no trace of their presence on the surface except for a well disguised entrance. After eons of being on red alert for one predator or another, this satisfied a real gut level need for secure privacy, although hardly necessary considering the vast emptiness of the barren polar wasteland. Having lived so long in the densely packed jungle where life jammed itself into every available square inch, their newly found space was like gold. As a result they became super conscious of all aspects of space, since it was now theirs to love and cherish, not to mention occupy.

Over the years they became what could only be called space specialists, so sensitive to the feel of empty volume that it became their major art form. They called it sculpted silence. What better way to live could there be than to live in the center of your finest work of art? They came to believe that the shape of the space that your body occupies as a home has to be as perfectly suited to the individual as the individual’s body is suited as home base for its soul. So although each space had commonality in that all were basically rectangular cubes with six sides, the similarity ended there, for no two were the same, just like themselves.

Of course when they arrived in the arctic, their first architectural efforts were little better than crude formless chambers since speedy occupancy was foremost in everyone’s mind. As time went on, the learning acquired through experience refined space carving into an art. This development came about because of a gnawing discomfort they felt once they were actually in the space they created and called home. Considering all the back-breaking work and the years of dreaming of a home of their own, this discomfort was a major disappointment. Something was very much wrong but they couldn’t put their finger on it.

They were right on the verge of concluding that there must be something fundamentally wrong with themselves, a notion extremely hard to swallow for a species reputedly on the way up, when just in the nick of time, their fabled astuteness kicked in with the answer. It had to do with shape.

This realization jump-started an endless round of experimentation. Each lizard doctored the length, breadth, and height of the six sides until their relationship arrived at the specific harmonic tension and balance necessary for the occupant’s peace of mind. This often took years of continual refinement to accomplish. For some, it took a lifetime. Everyone eventually found that if they were persistent enough and true to their own sensitivity of the feel of space, they could go far beyond mere peace of mind. They found they could actually create downright pleasure, ecstasy even, with a space whose shape and volume was so wedded to their own personality that it positively hummed in sympathetic resonance.

Unfortunately, each lizard was so tuned into his own space that he thought anyone living in a space that was too radical a departure from their own, must be totally mad. It was in trying to reconcile this aloofness through the near impossible task of expanding their consciousness to include the appreciation of their neighbor’s space, that they discovered something very, very curious . . . geometry.

Of course they didn’t know the word geometry at that point in their history, using instead the phrase proportional relationship. That was what it was all about anyway, the emotional impact resulting from the proportional relationship between one thing and another, the height of a wall to its length, for starters. This impact was determined by how it looked and felt to the individual lizard, not by some predetermined rule of measure, since they had no rules of measure other than their own feelings, much less a standard unit of measure. The closest thing they had to a unit of measure were their own bodies, which were hardly standard due to their differing sizes. This was used to determine the ceiling height.

They discovered that although all ceiling heights were different, all wound up having what appeared to be the same proportion of space above their heads. When they realized this might be a common denominator among them, they each made an exact determination of their own ceiling height in terms of one unit of themselves plus precisely that part of another unit of themselves. When the smoke of their calculations cleared, they found they were face to face with one of the most famous proportions that ever lived: one to .618033989.

After a lot of serious head scratching they came to understand that .618033989 was the perfect unequal division of a line so that the small part is in the same proportion to the big part as the big part is to the whole, allowing an infinite progression with all parts proportional to its neighbors, the most harmonious of growth factors: equal inequality. Like all the advanced societies of the world they called it the golden proportion. It would be many centuries before they would have access to the humans’ massive documentation of nature’s saturation with the golden proportion.

At that point in their burgeoning civilization, it was more than enough to contemplate that each one of them, with only their feelings to guide them, had included in the most personal sculpture outside of their own body, a singular proportion that had both an intangible beauty to it, and was at the same time the embodiment of the mathematical principal of harmonious growth. It was so just in its rule that it could only be regarded as the numerical equivalent of the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do to unto you. So mind-boggling was its beauty that the only possible conclusion was that it must come from heaven.

With that declaration, they were off and running on what was to become a passionate love affair with numbers. This voyage was predicated on the notion that at the very minimum, every number was unique, even if that uniqueness was simply that it was the only number that was that number. To exist at all was justification of importance and grounds for investigation. Each number, like each of themselves, had a story totally unlike anyone else’s. Some stories were obviously more interesting than others, each lizard secretly referring to his own story as living proof. For sure they had found a diamond on their first shot but the possibility that there were other numbers out there that had multiple functions, exotic jobs, or impossible roles to play, unleashed the detective in them, catapulting them on a treasure hunt for all the numerical gems of the unknown world.

These explorations eventually led them to unforeseen revelations about their own selves, codified many years later by Alabasters tenth antecedent, Providence, who stated that each beings thoughts, feelings and beliefs concerning their relationship to God, was as individual as any numbers relationship was to the first and most important of all numbers . . . . the number ONE. This inverse proportion, as one divided by any number is called, is unique, and just as each numbers relationship to its origin is sacrosanct, so is each lizards relationship to God, no matter how different and strange it may seem to ones next door neighbor. Interfering with that relationship in any way what so ever, he went on to proclaim, is nothing short of bloody persecution.

Snow Lizards believed that there were as many ways to concieve of, and to relate to God as there were lizards. Because of this they did not subject their young to their own beliefs by proselytizing. This was considered mind control and a definite no-no. Each lizard was born with freedom of choice, along with the wherewithal to find their own way. There were no dogmatic rules dictating ways and means as this might put God behind locked doors, negating the possibility of a direct, personal relationship with God. Generally, lizards felt the proper way to show appreciation for the gift of life was to be conscious of that privilege, practice the golden rule by honoring their neighbors right to figure out their own understanding of their relationship to God, and to live as fully as they possibly could in the temple of their own being. However, although each was a religion of their own self, they were no angels, they were lizards.

So, to counterbalance their holy thoughts and the ethereal world of numbers,