How lost spirits wander from panic to magic to grace on 20 stepping stones.

1

(T)here was once an iron lid in the street of a city. It was proud of being of solid iron.

Proud to be a child of the great iron core of the Earth, whose magnetic field - like an invisible halo - protects our planet and makes life possible.

Proud of its two great eyes, gazing at the streetlife in the city. Day and night. It lived there for many years.

Deep under the lid was an underground lake, full of fresh water. The iron lid protected the lake from the dirt and dust of the city.

So the inmates of the city always had clean and fresh water.

2

The iron lid was not the only one. All over the city, like lines in a hand, were motley crews of iron lids.

Mirroring the size of the lake deep down under.

Quietly they shared their lives with each other, gathering dust, raindrops, leaves and shadows of birds.

At night - when the city sleeps - their great eyes observed the moon and the many stars, against the dark cosmic background.

Now and then, carried away by a moonlight shadow, they start joking about rabbit holes for local lunatics, on the dark side of the moon.

They preferred the star-studded pensive and soft night above the eye-hurting sunlight of the day.

3

All their lives these iron lids shared the emotions of the people of the city.

As if all the sorrows and joys of the people - in all the years and all the seasons - left scratches, grooves, notches and dents on the iron lids.

Traces in their faces.

They even stored in their solid bodies all the music, resonating in the streets.

Tunes they fused with the deep groans of the Earth, traveling across her tectonic plates and the underground fungi webs of her soil.

Turbulent bass line tunes to comment as a tragic chorus on the basic instincts of the city’s vanities.

But the people of the city did not notice all of this.

The iron lids were living like exiles in the main streets of the city.

Invisible visibles.

4

On a rainy day, rumours spread about city plans to renovate the streets. The city was growing fast and wanted to design its streets anew.

The iron lids were no longer needed.

This made the iron lids very sad. All these years taking care of the city’s waters and now they had to go.

Soon their lives and histories are lost forever.

Deleted, dumped, dead.

Thunder only happens when it’s raining.

5

Unlike the other iron lids, our iron lid did not panic. Silently it started looking for a new way of life.

A new mode of existing.

Seeing the people in the city busy with their devices, it was wondering if the people were willing to take pictures of it.

That way the face of the iron lid get saved in a device. And the iron lid could start a new life as an emoji.

Rise, dance, chant.

Break on through to the other side.

6

But how to attrack the attention of the people?

These days they were all hooked on their devices.
Feeding their statistic doubles in the cloud.

Swiping slick selfies, signifying nothing.

Nobody looked down on the streets any more.

The iron lid needed to unveil itself. Become an alluring force.

A strange attractor.

7

On a clear and sunny winter day, news waves of the departure of David Bowie swiftly circled our planet, and reached our city.

Bowie the great Pan is dead.

The man who fell to earth has gone back to his star. A star returning.

The iron lids - who loved Bowie and his music - were all in grief, like lonely children.

Feeling helpless more than ever, still our iron lid was ready to act.

8

Patiently, our iron lid was waiting for the daily stroller. A town figure well known by all the iron lids.

Because of arriving once on a camel - a share of a family inheritance - for a camel street race along the many pubs in the city, they named the stroller the Camel.

So when the iron lid saw the stroller coming it started whispering: “We could be heroes“.

Struck by this ambient call, a cry from the deep of the earth, the stroller stops walking.

For a moment two pairs of eyes belonged to each other in a mutual encounter.

Inviting the stroller into an unknown adventure.

And yes - willfully accepting this role - with one click, the stroller turned the face of the iron lid into a picture for an emoji.

This call, this affect shoots up this magic tale from silence.

Had it passed unnoticed there, this invication would never have been revealed on your device, here at this moment.

A cry that arose out of the basic mood of the earth.

A longing for something completely unknown. From the Earth to Heaven.

Future spirits are rising from from the underworld.

9

During these sad days after Bowie’s death, all over the city one could hear the iron lids whispering: “We could be heroes”.

But the stroller was the only person hearing those cries.

Shifting the chocking rhythm of a camel into the smooth and fast moves of a lioness, she tireless roamed the streets of the city.

And with every click she promised each iron lid a new mode of existence.

In the end, these wretched of the earth were all sheltered in the persons device.

Saved from extinction.

Panic turned into magic.

10

In the years to come, more and more of the old iron lids get removed from the city streets.

And the person was the only one in the city who felt sorrow to see the streets becoming empty. Losing their trusted iron markers. Missing their company

And sadly, even more by watching the people in the city streets - profiled by their short-circuiting devices - eating up their brain time.

Their emotions and desires captured and domesticated by new cloud masters from Hell.

These last people of the city ignorant and dis-affected of the real tragedies underneath their boot-soles. Sleepwalkers.

Even the beloved two black swans of the city had left their vast location. Forever gone!

In one of these sad nights, the person had a dream about an ancient cave full of painted double figures, half-animal and half-human. Lit by a fire.

Scenes of birth and death played on stone in an immense crypt.

Time had come to take care of the fate of the iron lids pictures.

These undead spirits, these silent forces, hibernating in some dark limbo in the person’s device.

Wondering what is it like to be an emoji?

In the twilight of that sad night, suddenly a flock of bats - thrilled by a white goat song - circled above the empty spot of the lost black swans.

As if these bats came straight from the ancient cave, dreamed up by the person.

We gotta get out of this place
If it’s the last thing we ever do
We gotta get out of this cave

(Tragic Chorus)

11

Inspired by this cave dream, the person started composing this fuzzy sets of pictures into a poster.

And called these poster pictures streetmoji’s.
All waiting for proper names for each of them over time.

For seven golden years, these streetmoji’s are living in this poster - up against an empty wall in the person’s room.

And the person is reading in this poster crypt, eye to eye, all the sorrows and joys of the previous people in the city.

Their spirits coming alive like revenances of the dead.

As if the poster spirits were compensating for the lost spirits of the last people in the city.

12

More and more the poster is sending glitches, like a trickster.
Morphing its creator.

By observing all these traces of emotions in the poster, the person learned to understand the own emotions better.

Gradually awakening from a long slumber of symbolic misery.

A self-revelation through which the heart is illuminated to its deepest recesses.

Leaving behind the frameworks of an egoistic identity.

A heart of stone - full of bad conscience - fading away.

Silencing the hellhounds in the heart. The songs of hell.

A new spirit, a new soul, like a child was born.

By magic, everything becomes easy.

Wandering without belonging.

A new rhytm, a new time.

A gift from the poster spirits.

13

But the streetmoji’s wanted more in their new lives. To be spirits for everyone.

They yearned to be back in the streets of the city. Hearing new music instead of the person's old dusty records.

Meeting new people to attach to and help them to love themselves again.

To give people a hand to win back their lost spirits.

By ringing the posterbell, they again wanted the attention of the person to help them with their wishes.

The person, now a child in time, saw in those golden years more and more poster layers unfolding.

Revealing magic hidden things, like flames in an open fire.

In an enchanted resonance ring in which child and poster feed on each.

A bell game - glockenspiel - of seven vibrant bell rings.

(To find out more about this bell game, go back to homepage). But first finish this tale; only seven stones to go.

With this bell game (Glockenspiel) we leave this magic tale behind.

The magic diversity of the bell game becomes a symbol for the divinity of the Earth.

Magic turned into a flow of grace.

From this mosaic poster - always present - this translation table, this window of our imaginations, this grail of infinite meanings, this gate to an endless process of nurturing,

from - this open spot - one day, powerful spirits of joyful wisdom rise and fly all over our planet.

Like the blue Bird in Bowie’s last song.

14

That’s why instructed through this poster gifts - initiated by the seven bells - the person started writing this poster tale.

To share its poster gracious and generous powers with all the readers of this unfolding tale.

A tale still playing shine and shade behind your glass screen.

A tale about a city in a rapid technological transition and its shifting spirits and fortunes.

So, if in a dark and moony summer night, the city is waking up by the howling of wolves ...

... may this city - who’s famous labs once composed the first electronic poems - become a benign host for these new inmates.

New spirits.

15

May this poster tale - like a wicked witch flight in a starry night - light up your spirit to express new signs.

New poster tales.

With all this new stories, the streetmoji’s are no longer exiles.

At last they can share their emotions and histories with the people and visitors of the city.

And maybe in the future the streetmoji’s speak in your language, in your tale, to all the inmates on our planet.

And may these posters symbolic and diabolic revenants give its genius to the youth of our planet

... youth, who are - as all young generations - rebellious, lazy and enslaved to everything ...

its genius to seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of Hell, are not Hell.

Resist or break away from the spell of these cloud masters from hell. Killing you softly with their lip serving algoritmic brides, sexy and docile.

Laminar language models, flatlining your thoughts, your feelings, your voices, your relations. Even your imaginations, dreams and passions.

Brides taking the place of your consciousness. like the Gods in the Trojan war.

To lease your eyes, ears, nerves and mind commercial interests is like handling over our common speech and thoughts to abced-minded tech despots.

Pretending to facilitate society, they subject society to their own laws.

Tyranny.

16

Alice: 'can words really mean anything you like?´.
Humpty Dumpty: 'the question is, which is to be master - that's all'.

To raise the question who is talking. That is the real issue of our time.

The creative power of language.

Detach your nerves from the swarms and their enclosure politics of instant stimulus and response.

With their tribal wars of us and them. Howling with hatred. Prompting narcosis.

Damn the torpedoes.

Time to tame the tools.

Create or find your own waves of time, space and values.

Rise, Dance, Chant.

Keep on rockin' in a free world.

Choose life. Choose Earth.

Stretch your back.

WALK-OUT.

Stay true to the Earth.

17

Only from frictions with the physical, bodily and analogical dimensions of human existence can love and care for the world arise.

May your poster - your analog token on your wall in your room in your beautiful house, on our planet - resonate with your body and soul, in a new vibrant reality.

But if you exempt from care, it risks sinking away. The inner heart of your poster needs your care to prolong its path of life.

To help you to start your own bell game and tales.

To call you to leave your labyrinth of exile and loneliness and return to the sacred Earth.

To renew the faces of the Earth.

Start with dreams and stories, because they are the enjoyment of living values.

Cracks towards a natural religion of the Earth's soil.

Find the cracks where it sings.

What good is living, if no one ever enchants the universe?

Create your own maps with your own words. Sowing your own dragon teeth in white spots.

Why is thy heart so sad, and why are thy features so distorted?
Why is there woe in thy heart?
And why is thy face like unto one who has made a far yourney?

We are all streetmoji’s. We all need stories like Gilgamesh to survive.

What would happen if we ceased portraying our lives to ourselves? Like Eurydice we would vanish in the underworld.

The fate of Ophilia.

We all need a tragic chorus to resonate with our feelings. Consoling spirits to enter tenderly the chambers of our inner wounds.

Quiet tunes to soften the chock between the rhythm of your heart and the merciless and naked clocktime falling over you: money.

An inner place for your words to rest. Time that invents itself. Resisting today's algorithms.

To reveal your own personal tragic bass line. Your own fate. But also the gift of a new birth. A new spirit to rise from your inner underworld.

An infinite passion for a new unknown enjoyment springing up from the deepest mystery of your soul.

A resurrection. Tears of joy.

18

To wander in time makes us free and the Earth habitable. Makes life fuller.

In open casual time, you can start anew anytime, without exhausting our planet.

Picture yourself in a streetmoji's dream.

Back to the delaying grace of story telling.

Hear the cries of the Earth and the cries of the wretched. Walk-out, think and write.

Practice the arts of noticing.

We can only restore our relation with the Earth and its inmates - our kinsfolk - when we hear its stories, songs and poems.

Learn about other landscapes and time scales. To reveal its hidden voices that always escapes our calculating eyes, blinded by spreadsheets.

To bring back its lost meanings from the depths of history. It's lost spirits.

To tell stories where the voices of non-humans are heard again. Awakening silent forces.

Till one day more than a 1000+1 new poster tales, songs, strips, clips, grafitti, dances, puppets and podcasts are to illuminate our lives, like a starry night.

Revealing the birth of a new poetic mythic time. A new vitalistic world building.

Creating internal World models; a sense awareness capacity unique for living beings.

The joy of thinking and imagining together, with others, thanks to others. As yourself.

The grace of stepping aside, like a dancer gives way to an other.

To open untold spaces for others, inspired by your poster.

Escaping the pressures of ever expanding algorithmics, imploding like torpedoes in your mind. Locking yourself in a new hypnotic mind where brides are possessing and commanding a person.

Stay out of reach of these invading torpedoes. Abide in your poster room, where a spirit of delaying grace welcomes you.

Your poster a raft in a sea of sound and fury of a hellbent poisened culture.

And helps you to wake up from a creeping techno numbness, and their contageous violence.

Shifting the hallucinating brides of your devices for the tragic chorus of your poster.

To experience the spontaneity and delight of a new conciousness of introspection and reflection.

A transedence dimension emerges and makes storytelling possible.

A force, a new anarchic spirit walking away spontaneous. To stay conscious ahead of the black boxes, the docile brides, the torpedoes.

Your poster strikes back.

19

When we make a dwelling in the evening air in which being there together is enough...

...to inspire a new symbolic community for all spirits.

Starry nights: a common revenance for all the lost spirits of our planet. Our cosmic tragic chorus.

All spirits of all times moving in silent harmony. A kaleidoscopic vision of the living, the departed and the yet to come.

A new horizon. A new contract. Natural, symbiotic, axial. Heaven, Earth, Life.

Just as you feel - when you look up from your device, to watch the starry serenity - so I felt.

Underfoot the Earth's shifting sacred soil. Overhead where the stars are lit, the merciful cosmic spirits whirling and shining.

Meaning is connection.

The tranquil ecstasy of a song.

The great chant of Being-s.

Life and music unfold in the space they occupy and move forward through the time they give rise to.

Anticipating this new epoch of thinking, caring and poetic force, child and poster left their city.

To wander in the worlds valleys and remain faithful and loyal with all the inmates - the ten thousand things - of Earth’s critical zone.

A new halo that bathes our sacred Earth in a softening veil of affection, equity and redemption through beauty.

(T)here.*

- - - - - - - - -

20

* Afterword:

Original it’s a tale full of affections and talks about a season in hell and rising spirits from the underworld.

A tale told by a young dropout lost in a stuck song syndrome. Living on a park bench, wondering why there is being and not rather nothing.

Words trying to fix the unspeakable. Handed over in a serene lament to a passing layman - during a long night - in the tender tongue Anglo-Brabanto.

GLOCKENSPIEL

(Bell game)

Cracks for open spirits into seven mosaic patterns for a new axial age.

First bell

Ambient poster bell tone announcing a force, a spirit, a turbulence, an education. Numinous moments calling for a new symbolic order. A new horizon.

The child: dreaming of the big fish, becoming the big bird.

Evocation of three interlaced layers into a new enchanting figuration:

It saw the magic fivefolds of the East.
The magic fourfolds of the West.
All the magic masks of the South.
Northern ice melting.

It followed in 50 steps the 50 years of the Buddha’s 5th and final journey - defying Darth Vader’s heart of darkness.

Tat tvam asi -That art thou.
Know your emotions.
Tame your bull.
Words spent - keep the heart.

Second bell

In the beginning is the song.

The child listening and seeing the face of “the man with the child in his eyes”.

Joining some material girls with kaleidoscope, far away and lying eyes - singing siren songs of freedom - around a red, yellow and blue branched tree.

Third bell

Objects withdraw, sink in the background, yet they appear.

That all things emits, receives, stores and processes signals and codes: a universal fourfold. 10.000 things sending one another kisses. There is kindship among rocks.

We speak. They speak. Revealing all-embracing relations, blowing out wild in the open.
Raw materials becoming terrestrial beings, times, cultures, sciences, negotiations, truths. Senses. Meanings.
Humanity started with things.
Wonderful things.

It saw nature hiding twice: between a cipher and a dexterity. Wandering through the heart of the labyrinth.
Every seeing is translation, tuning.

It cast an eye on infinite numbers passing in a jest between finite numbers.

It learned the language of Myth and Math, balancing their knowledge. Guided by Gilgamesh, Clio, and Maxwells demon.

Valley - Translation forces traveling as gradients of resistance between modes of necessity and chance. Kenyan rift. Crossing an axis. The middle of a river, a world. A threshold. Origin to exile. (T)here. A rare place scattered everywhere on the ground, in a map, a tapestry, in the flesh in the soul. Interstices. Cracks. Folds. Third places. Mar Menor. Whanganui, Maranon, Atrato. Gangroti and Yamunotri. Third spirits. Xin. Valley spirits.

Fourth bell

It shivered by the sound of a lonely bell in Viviers song.

It heard the last Canto Ostinato touching the center of the poster, awakening the sacred spirits of Prajapati - but not Durer’s grievous angel - into a funky four seasons dance. Vita nuova.

Fifth bell

The child - now a hero with a heart full of souls, a fusion of a thousand voices, a thousand faces, a thousand others. Scary monsters.

It saw the five holy mountains, the five breaths, the five and four elements. The five and four seasons. The four bases. The four sentiments. The four causes. The four truths. The four virtues. The four forces. The four germs. The four kinds of love. The four horsemen.

It learned to defuse dangerous opponents - cloaking themselves in absolutes - by composing waves of flowing spectra’s.

Enter the excluded magic Third ...

Wander - Lucy. Chimera. Krisna.
Passing Angels. Charon. Troubadour. Yeti. Joker. Queequeg. Flesh. Quetzalcoatl.
Aomame, Carmen, Ariadne.
Diotima. Baubo. Simone. Janina. Kraftwerk. Cyborg. Rumi. Cusanus. Praise of folly. Deus sive natura. Message in a bottle. A duck walk. Is it-this water. Maelstrom. Leaves of Grass. Crossroads. Sunshu Ao. Escher. Zambrano’s Guia. Dreams. 72727. Pharmakon. Homo sacer. Vagabonds. Harlequins. Everyone ...

... to anticipate the Third-Instructed Spirits.

Instructed spirits to turn the scale of The Great Chain of Being in favor of The Great Chant of Being-s.

Sixth bell

It imagined the three Graces, Billie, Janis and Amy, sharing a halo between prime twins.

Inanna, Carmelita, Camerado hold me tighter, I’m sinking down on the outskirts of town ...

(Tragic Chorus)

Seventh bell

After the goldrush. The desert grows. Old nutmeg spirits reappear, travelling through a time axis to remind us of the ongoing crisis on our planet. Silent forces.

Fragile Earth Zone
Revenge of the many-headed Gaia
Intruding turbulent tough bitches

It feared the Reaper biding his time, with the Minotaur and the Sphinx - Guess or you will be devoured.

Stone ripples in a pool. Flowers on a Paris grave. A star banner fading out a festival. A shotgun falling in a garage. Celestial chants rising from a death bed.

Here we are now. Many riddles solved. The same movement that makes us worship life, pushes us to it's denial.
The road to nowhere. Is this the End. No. No panic. One day you will leave your labyrinth of loneliness and return to our sacred Earth.
Undercurrent initiatives and ideas are growing. New fourfolds of grassroot commons will arise: containing multitudes.
Suddenly we feel that we are no longer the same forced laborers. The mimetic spell is broken. Sweet ataraxy.
Infinite capacity, infinite melody, infinite care. Infinite turbulences. Immanent power of creation continues.
Earth will not abandon us into barbarism, as long as we take away what harms the wild horses ...

If we restore Earth, Earth will restore us... incarnate its inmates again in its critical zone. A Halo, a single embrace of all the elements. No ostracism. A sign, a call, an epiphany to bring mortals to the path of thinking, hesitating, poetizing building, composing. All of a sudden a first step, a folly moment to pardon a lost spirit. Good parasite's care. And the horses rush forward.

Fragile child
Many hard road’s searching the way
The valley spirit never dies

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