An artist executes an act of subversion one hot afternoon while nobody is paying very much attention.
Somewhere between waking and sleeping on our journey towards the unfathomable deep, there comes a thin moment where we have one foot in the waking world and the other is in that other world where we relinquish conscious control.
Pausing here and straddled between two planets that drive one another like gears, the the attentive traveler will notice a narrow door only wide enough to sidle through.
This is the border of sleep, where imagination and reality are braided together, a chasm in the crust of consciousness, venting the hot pumice of imagery into the irresistible magma of narrative.
Welcome to episode 53 of Stories from the Borders of Sleep, a podcast of curious tales from bordersofsleep.com featuring original stories by your host Seymour Jacqueline.
You can visit the website@bordersofsleep.com to get more information and leave feedbacks or comments.
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The soundtrack on this episode is by Jay Kishore and from the album Stories from My Father's Village and that's available on magnitude.com so if you're ready to journey with me, then I shall begin.
Flee By Seymour Jacklin the town clung to the rock with its buildings clustered like crystals in their matrix.
The spires were many and called to each other through the blue air above.
The buildings were as tall as the streets were wide, giving everywhere a distinct closed openness in which the sky was as integral to the architecture as the tessellated cobbles of the streets and public squares.
In the geometric heart of the agglomeration of red brick buildings and ornate white facades, the art gallery stanced thick and wide, with twinned towers rising from its shoulders into its grey conical roofs.
In fact, this was originally the main gateway into the town.
In times past when it had been a fortress, in due course the urbanisation of the hinterland had swamped it, and much of the old true town had been levelled into several acres of formal park and public gardens where residents and visitors could stroll, picnic, perch on benches and unwrap the sticky buns that seemed to be the ubiquitous local obsession.
This particular summer Graham was footloose in Europe, on the trail of his great grandfather once again during one of the phases of his ancestors clandestine work in the war, which it was proving so tricky to Unpick.
He'd been connected with the Italian resistance, Le Resistanza, and the trail took him to the Swiss side of the famous lakes in the north.
He had very little to go on, but as previously, Graham was confident that just placing himself in that location would trigger things to unfold and he would know what to do next.
Graham thought he could feel his grandfather in this beautiful town.
It had changed very little in the half century since he'd been there, and it was a thrill to walk into the same scenery that he must have traversed on his first day in the town.