John Sandbach

A Painter John Sandbach

I have never written a book that has come to me in such piecemeal fashion as this one, which has led me to believe that I am not the only one who wrote it, and that there were, throughout its making, other forces with particular agendas they wished to express, forces who were guiding me all along in its formation. And because of this, as well as for other reasons I feel that the completed work is actually a mystical tract, much as the prophetic books of William Blake or those texts of famous alchemists of the past, such as Raymond Lull and Albertus Magnus, though I hope I have imbued it with enough humor and delight to neutralize any tendency toward didacticism, which can so easily have a dulling effect on the reader. As you might know from having read my other works I am deeply interested in numerology. This book has 92 chapters, and it came to me upon completing it that 92 is 4 times 23, and that the first 23 chapters (1 - 23) correspond to the element earth, or substantiation, the next 23 (24 - 46) correspond to water, which is the realm of intuition and emotion, the next 23 chapters (47 - 69) correspond to air, or the realm of connectivity and communication, and the last 23 chapters (70 - 92) correspond to fire, or the spiritual/creative realm. Also, in each of these four sections it is the middle chapter of each thatis the key to the section, these four middle chapters being 12, 35, 58, and 81. For those of you who have no interest in numerology or analysis of the patterns of texts there is always the direct enjoyment of what goes on in the story, and I hope I've provided in this biography an ample amount of it. An idea that occurred to me again and again while writing this was to expand the text to a gargantuan extent, making the finished book maybe 800 pages in length. I have always been enamored of big texts, and I think it is for the same reason that I like big houses and the feeling of space and possibility theyseem to contain. But I lack the patience for such voluminous writing, and also I think the readers who like such texts are in the minority. And so the finished novel you are about to read is relatively brief, but, I feel, carries the aura of a much vaster work due to the cosmic nature of the ideas contained therein.