The Stony Stage

By Thomas Pagonis

Peter travels the world with his guitar and harmonica, searching for a sense of belonging in a remote and mysterious place called Belonging Sun. Along the way, he encounters obstacles that test his determination and resourcefulness. But he remains determined to fulfil his principle: that progress comes from taking action and not just waiting. Join Peter on his journey to find belonging in this inspiring tale of self-discovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781528982955

Thomas Pagonis

Thomas Pagonis was born in Athens in 1974. He studied sports science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The first contact with the art of writing was channelled on the paper via versification including two collections, Ceremonial Ship Launching and Blue Rope Ladder. The Stony Stage constitutes an unwritten arena which invites every traveller to be united with it and to give there his own battle. The specific nature of The Stony Stage is made apparent in the expressing, in the flow, in the connection of the tiles into picture and feeling as well as in its innovation, where there are quotes expressed with mathematical operations.

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About the Author

Thomas Pagonis was born in Athens in 1974. He studied sports science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The first contact with the art of writing was channelled on the paper via versification including two collections, Ceremonial Ship Launching and Blue Rope Ladder.

The Stony Stage constitutes an unwritten arena which invites every traveller to be united with it and to give there his own battle.

The specific nature of The Stony Stage is made apparent in the expressing, in the flow, in the connection of the tiles into picture and feeling as well as in its innovation, where there are quotes expressed with mathematical operations.

Dedication

To my family, to Kostis, to Isidorus, to Jim, to Thomas, to Irene, to Kristina, to Nicole, to Maria, to the people of the street, to the reader.

Copyright Information ©

Thomas Pagonis 2023

The right of Thomas Pagonis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528935579 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528982955 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge my family, my friends,

the site Glosbe and Austin Macauley Publishers.

What are you going to be when you grow up?

A musical instrument.

Peter’s father paused for a moment reflecting on his fourteen years old son’s answer and afterwards with an astonished life-sparkle he turned to plumb him. He looked at his casual clothing with the most inconvenient combinations and colorations, one shirt collar being under his blouse, the other outside, the uplifted right trouser leg of the corduroy, the untied cord, the untidy hair, the flying ears, the penetrating and aggressive glance of a beast throbbing with oomph, and he felt that safety of the childhood world.

A musical instrument?

Yes.

That stable and certain message he took bred a roofless joy to him and a page of admiration as well, not only because of the art it was contained, but also because of the turns which seemed at the background of this answer. He knew when his son was joking and when he was talking seriously, and now he could see clearly into his stare a truth to be floated, a truth made from lead.

And what kind of instrument are you going to be?

I don’t know yet, but for sure an instrument which will make a real fuss.

That’s for sure, but what about…

It can wait Peter interrupted him, There are other things coming before.

Like what? Questions like this gave satisfaction and space to the young man expressing and sharing his already known world.

Music, football. And now we have spoken about football, I should go, we’ve got a soccer game.

They walked a good deal in the narrow dirt roads of the parkland talking about the winds and the waters. Football was in the place of winds, music was in the place of waters.

The walk completed, and into the fresh evening saunter of all, a slalom of a hyperactive boy seemed between the passers-by overtaking them with erratic acrobatics as well as every hurdle standing in front of him.

Markedly, the first magnetic field that Peter was attracted by, through which he approached all the others, was athletics. Restless, jumpy, hunting one, he was finding out the peace into the bays and the fields, with the abilities, physical and spiritual ones, balanced upon the rails and gone hand-in-hand like train’s pistons in search of the Olympic flame.

The match started with the familiar boiling and it finished as usual with a quarrel, which was nothing else than a kind of communication and fulfilment of the nature of the play.

When the spirit of the mess has receded, what were left were the marks and their reward, the satisfaction of another precious souvenir’s acquirement.

Peter licked the blood of his lip which was opened and he wiped with the reverse of his palm.

Coming out from the yard he moved with loose jogging towards square, and since he crossed it, he turned to his known paving alleyway, till he came in front of a display window full of musical instruments, setting up to observe each one singly as if he was seeing something from another world.

Full of excitement by the curves of the percussion he snuck into the store with a red line crossing his jaw.

How much do the drums cost?

Five hundred thousand drachmas.

Five hundred thousand drachmas? he exclaimed with remarkable query which turned in record time into a grin of discontentment.

He came out and started the estimations. After an exhaustive contemplation he resulted that it will take at least six months of saving money. It’s not a long time. And it begins… right now.

He bade the display window farewell with a nod of his head upwards as he would bid farewell some friend of him and he moved towards home.

Under the most favourable circumstances this plan has been set in motion.

Naturally Peter didn’t have good relations with the food. He was spending all day by running from the bays to the music display window and from the music display window again back to bays without putting into his mouth a single bite.

He had such a drive for action that it was like being satisfied by the very relief. So, with no deprivation and hard work he was saving day by day his lust.

Wherever he was, he didn’t fail to collect related information about music issues as if each of those was a precious ingredient of a survival elixir.

He has learned that this four-string instrument called bass, that this is what makes the heart trembling, that in combination with drums constituted the track’s stroke, that the tuning in the same tonality gives rise to the correct acoustics.

The information he was assembling was not sufficient to raise the tree from where the sprigs would have popped up, but it was quite enough in finding the ground.

After each hard daily challenge on the road, he always ended up to the wanted dark balcony in order to listen to the awake sounds that coming and going on the piste of the restless mind like bumper cars.

The pictures have been painted one behind the other, alive, real, the football field, the music stage, and then Maria, shinning like a ransom threat as he stuck her on him, as he twirled her into his hands, she is moving away, then she’s coming back again, with her smile setting and rising at the same moment.

All this directing and the unbridled desire for action hadn’t been staying upon the shelf of fantasy, but also into the sphere of reality, and if something seemed somehow distant, the will brought it in distance between two breaths.

In the spectre of friendship music existed like an individual entity as well. And as Kostis used to loud don’t worry if Joy blew you out my friend, because this will make you stronger or Themis it doesn’t matter if we lost that game, don’t let it down, let it up alike music has been speaking even when the words were missing.

So, the soundcolor painting became pieces of the existence, steps of the steps.

The team spirit has been moving steadily the gears of the machine. Whenever the effort sparkled into the glance Peter felt power into his left fist, but whenever the effort has been sharing, even in thought that Maria or Kostis or Themis was close, then Peter felt power into his right fist as well.

The peaceful dusk was coming and the pavement drove once more in front of the musical components’ sight, and as he looked at the drums, he felt them hitting into his vein like a stroke.

His figure reflected on the window pane like incorporeal set of graphics revealing into them the indefinite substance of tragicalness which, when the spirit achieved to penetrate it is confirmed with such a power so that it is able to see the real face of Life, the adventurous beauty of Flame and through the union with it to do work, to compose the indelible.

The look crossed with that of himself in the glass and he wanted for a while to learn, but he couldn’t even imagine what was coming for him right there, what kind of mission he was about to find, how he would survive, where he would board.

He breathed out with impatience and he bided the window display farewell.

Arriving to his base, after one more all-day apathy to the need of food, instead of putting a bite in his mouth he preferred to consume energy at his dark corner, and when the time to lie down has come, he didn’t lie down to bed but on the stage he had set for once more in the arena of the mind.

Lost into the oblivion of his circle, Peter has been found under the light of a surprise, learning that some of his friends, Paul, could put him in contact with the subject of his rowdy instinct.

Let me ask you, have you ever hit a drum? Paul expressed his query.

No, Peter’s elliptical tone filled out the other details of his null experience.

And how will you learn?

By hitting, Peter answered to him picking up his shoulders.

All right. Come to my house at Saturday with Dinos and Christos for dummy run.

And what kind of music do you play?

Psychedelia.

What is that?

Peter’s eyes were filled of question marks.

Beyond a single draft, which flew on the twelve-rhythm, Peter knew nothing else.

Contrary to Paul’s open pillars, who accepted all the impulses, he hasn’t only shut the doors, but he locked them up as well, and that because of his inexperience to defend the sphere he loved.

Very soon he would learn that the whole world needs to be demolished so as to be risen new one, with everything that is beloved incorporated uniquely and eternally into its new resident.

Psychedelia, the name implies it, soul statement. Here, take a sample to listen to, said Paul giving to him something like a moist chest.

Peter, with the momentum of the repeating firings of the unexpected was found in front of the precious cassette player, he looked once more with frowning wonder the tape of the doors and he putted it into the hatch. Holding the cassette player by its shoulders and having his whole being nailed on the pores of the speaker, he was waiting.

Outside a spring rain had been started and as it rattled on the roof has been giving the impression of a rewarding nudge at the back.

The blow of the magnetic tape has sounded like a remote inhalation of some inconceivable being and then a strange percussion wave rushed in the air. Before he realises what happened, bass jumped too with sadden twirling so as to be bound with the drumsticks, and shortly after the guitar, shaping the body of an elsewhere-coming plant, made from three strands, enmeshed each other harmonically, bringing down the ceiling and climbing towards rain. Until a voice, coming out from the depths of the other edge, captured the field of hearing by releasing inside it a cluster of nerve and steel, You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day, tried to run, tried to hide, break on through to the other side.

Where is this voice coming from?

He felt that this voice was coming from another world. By the putting out of the last soundcolor painting the acquiring of a new friend has sealed.

The foursome met each other at Saturday to Paul’s house and Peter took the first taste of the drums which he’s been dreaming of so much.

When he touched the drumsticks, he touched a plain wheel. And when he sat on the stool, he was seeing the aircraft buttons flashing, inviting.

Through this contact the music ranges that already moved with their own unexplored reflectiveness began to stripping out in an elusive route, announcing their unchanged hypostasis, the travel.

The gloom scattered around like enclosed eternity in a brig, with the welcome air of unexpected intending for Peter his integration to the crew of fuss, as the trio used to call it, undertaking to give to the stroke of the soundcolor paintings their bass shades.

The night flashes covered the neighbourhood with vividness as if it had emerged from a spectacular idea. For a marble second Maria passed from Peter’s mind with her dark blue swim suit, standing on the swimming pool diving board, ready for diving. He went close to her so as to encourage her, without words, but with a deeper silent touch. She figured it out and she tended her cheek like an apocryphal magnetic refraction of her desire, which led to nothing except her Doric mouth, causing the unavoidable Peter’s manoeuvre so that the kiss comes up over there, on the lips.

That marble second abruptly has been unmarbleised by a deafening horn of a car which was close to hit him.

The street led once more before the window pane where the only sight now was the deep red bass.

Soon, the dividing glass has penetrated, and some evening the Bordeaux dream came true.

The first contacts with it mobilised the first crashes on the mind’s piste as well.

From the right side a blue bumper car seemed to come impatient, which, after some misleading manoeuvres fell upon him with clumsy anger, where to start? It will take time to me to learn.

From the left side another bleached out red bumper car has shaken him with the same uncontrolled power, I don’t know anything about notes… I don’t… he didn’t have the time to finish the thought when another green one car appeared shooting out its rush right and left so as to be crashed finally each other head on everything is all right. What I have to learn I will learn it and what I have to do I will do it.

Suddenly the cleft of infinity has cleared up. It didn’t matter anymore that he was at the beginning neither how long time it would take for the acquisition of knowledge.

Practicing and studying were in themselves sufficient to grant that in the very near future he would be in position to overcome as correctly as possible to the music requirements.

The fingerings of awareness soon informed him that he should raise the kinetic range of the fingers in order to slip from fret to fret with more agility and ease. For guaranteeing of that objective some time he tied the left-hand fingers each other with rubbers pressing them outwards, while some time he was going up and down on the strings trying with patience and fatigue to avoid the creaking by the artless yet contact with them.

Day by day the codes of action, completed by the codes of theory, enriched the route with a steady move forward, both noticeable and loveable.

But the most important was a mysterious tool pushed the horizons from inside to outside, extending Peter’s solar system, giving to the mind different turns, solving mathematical operations, perceiving the charm of logic, and something beyond it that, if now he couldn’t construe it, he hoped someday to feel it, to live it.

Indeed, that thing was there, behind the dark of the prison ward keyhole, the hyper-logical law, where 1 + 1 = 1, where four dissimilar plaits, bound to each other, can shape an escape, an encouragement, a feeling, a philosophy.

The desire to last the summer break more than two and a half minutes instead of two and a half months it didn’t materialise.

The very next day it would start something like new age, giving rise to the whole fellowship at Paul’s house, where the buzz was not long before it’s been converted into a consecutive whistling, similar to the telecommunication end, getting stronger and stronger as the silence was spread.

Do you hear it too? Kostis asked him with a grin of distress.

Which one? The phone?

No, the cop car.

Although this singular siren penetrated their skull, if somebody call them back and set everything from the beginning they would come back at once. Kostis would clamp in the corner of the balcony, and Peter beside the loudspeaker.

But the road led them at their shelters, with the humming to be sounded now like bullet travelled the vast land between the right and the left hemisphere of the brain.

Peter lay down and he imagined the form which completed his existence.

Tomorrow I will see Maria. Suddenly the distressing scream ceased ringing into his ears.

The autumnal breath raised yellowish and brownish leaves swirled into the mystery of the mist. The ancient garment flew into the thrilling air and then gradually it has been worn on the earth. The river has been swaying magically as a driving door upon the stones which had guided secretly to a marching quotation.

The white-grey dome touched the earth through its drops. Scattered water circles were shaped on the transparent figure of the river, and they were opening, they were closing, they were opening again, growing, within an excitement.

Through deep hearing the rustle could be perceptible. Yes, it was a breath, the breath of creation itself which, through its pulsing move, transported its passion for biography.

A broken thunder has cracked the dome. The liquid fire started to fall torrentially. The nape declined backwards. The face has delightfully received the drops with blank tranquillity as they rolled gradually within the shirt.

The broken thunder has come again.

Do you hear it? From somewhere sounds the trembling rhythm of a bass. It doesn’t matter where. Perhaps it comes from the ground, perhaps from the river.

The day has blinked upon the water, into infinite pieces.

Until the background began to darken and the streets leading to the warmness of the room.

When Peter entered to his shelter, only then he realised that even his bones got wet. He lay down and he let himself admiring the dead silence. Sealing the eyelids, he stayed into a hideaway impatience seabed, expecting the moment that the racket would strike again.

The look of the background has changed, like that of rain.

The snow has been swirling dense filling the window pane with white liquid stars which have been melting like clown’s tears.

The bustle of music boiled with the chemical laboratory fixation, into the whipped cream night, under a mysterious smoked crater.

When the last vestige of the buzz has been putted out, Peter followed a lonely foot walk from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.

Swayed by the same border appeal which always pulled on the edge of water or of the wind, he walked sinking in the snow, seconding again and again the vibrations of the night, with such a dedication that it operated as entirely ignorant of the frost, but also of the grotesque.

Upon hearing of the voice, he felt the presentation of a faithful friend close to him, ready to drive him, to talk to him, in another dialect, strangely known, to keep him company when, through the weird games of destiny, the time will come, the time of the flakes to fall down black or red, revealing secret passages between the pines roots and the pebbles of the river, taking him where the out of tune poundings and the incomprehensible roars cannot approach, where the violins’ hue doesn’t come out from the wood but from the soul itself.

The New Year came with a frozen mood and form. It kneeled in front of her spring board, and when the fireworks sounded it blundered out like an arrow, penetrating the winter in just four seconds, the spring in just three seconds, the summer in just two and a half seconds, and the autumn in just two.

Peter continued to exercise himself with consistency and dedication. He was finding comfortably now the notes on the frets and the stave, the fingers’ moving range has been markedly increased, going up and down the strings and the fingerboard easily, while his participation to music sequences was becoming more and more harmonic.

He loved bass and even more he loved drums, but his atoning love was voice, this living music instrument he carried everywhere, light and invaluable, which accompanied him to lonely routes, to failures and achievements, to sorrows and joys.

Maria had made full occupation into Peter’s right hemisphere and not a moment gone by without seeing her into the water, on the foliage, in the dome.

Their worlds united into a new one, autumn one, mixed on the surface of their touch, creating an explosive substance of an emotional, intellectual and spiritual filling that it broke the being of the corrosion with its frantic movement.

The sun has been found behind a black curtain and the time machine wandered again around the forest teachings, with the river rolling like a shiver and the sky opening, with the head turned upwards and the liquid fire falling down torrentially.

I would like you to be with me now, but when you’ re absent to know that you’ re waiting for me, that you’re thinking of me, that you’re looking forward to learn every detail, about how it is when the rain drops slipping from the neck to the chest, about the shirt sticking on the body, about the mire which lunged even on the hair tufts as the car passed crazy over the puddle, about the railway tracks skirmish, about the tour of the river in the universe of harmony, about the taste of the sweat which dripped in the mouth, about how the molecules that put me together are continuously pulsed for you, about how I know that you are here and telling me ‘with the waves always to start, with the waves no more apart’.

The breath of the air made the trees palms hitting one another. The