…Death too.
The cut-rate mime walkin’ through the dirty streets
Of Paris in the hot, August heat
Sun meltin’ the fake smile away
Just lookin’ for a place to stay
The actress gave up all her old dreams
And traded up, now she is a queen
Royal families don’t have time for that shit
Your crystal ball, you keep it hid
The tractor trailer driver radios
“Help me someone, I’m out here all alone
Truck drivin’ the black night away
Prayin’ for the light of day”
“The kid in the mall works at hot dog on a stick
His hat is a funny shape, his heart is a brick
Takin’ your order, he will look away
He doesn’t have a thing to say
Grace Kelly Blues by Eels…a song about all the inevitably meaningless, troublesome, and useless lives of people outside of the pre-ordered economic systems are—at least from the perspective of the machine. Beyond the internal imagination is real reality. Where the real players play…the big boys, men of renown…lawmakers.
The law controls everything in the world, the physical world. Even where one feels free, the feeling is naive to the realities behind all things under American and western jurisprudence (the entire Earth if the system or its bureaucrats decide to act).
If you feel that life, culture, meaning, and/or purpose of your own existence is self-ascribed, think again.
The world has been manufactured by civilization’s utter dominance over all physical resources and social products through complex systems. Nature is no longer natural. An overly sophisticated bureaucracy (necessarily so to those in positions of power) monitors every aspect of life and directs everything from traffic, zoning, uses of materials, to the nature of the individual, even things people wrongly assume are deeply personal like sexuality, reproduction, love and dating. These can all be influenced in ways we don’t see with our ordinary cognitive functioning in the physical world…looking around and interacting with other people in the public sphere. That doesn’t mean its not there.
Determinism as an philosophical conception of the ultimate destination of all things aside, established institutions dictate all of our life courses and tell us what is socially acceptable, not merely formally “lawful.” Essentially, there is a machine that controls all of our potential pathways through the preset human universe like the lanes in a pinball machine…when not following them, people are merely bouncing around the play-field aimlessly and risking being drained.
So what do we have? Death?
Yes, we can live well beyond our years in the hearts and minds of generations to come. One thing is for sure regarding the monolithical institutions of the present west…there are many people striving in them. The list of names of institutions that are part of the globo-industrial imperial world—the institutional level financial network that cannot fail but from unknowable mystery—are renowned by their respective participants. Often labeled by surname, those who established and devoted their lives to the development of whatever “business” as they call it, create a legacy. Even a slogan of a major sport-entertainment organization is “leave a legacy.”
The problem for all the people who want to be “successful” using established models, is they lose the meaning of life by way of ignorance of death. Simplified, they aren’t even living a unique and genuine life…they fear poverty and are kept in line by the dead…failing to realize the magnates whose establishments they adorn were done so through truly living, engaging with society and the world, which is how the culture they existed in morphed.
It seems to me, judging as a person who has teleported through the ages via unwilling academic requirements, the modern age is the least familiar with death of them all. That is not to say the greats of antiquity who’ve now influenced several millennia in ways that famed persons of the 20th and 21st centuries will never touch will not also be forgotten, too…eventually.
What does any of this have to do with the law? Well, if you must ask…
The law doesn’t know shit about death or dying. It just tries to control. Remember how we are pinballs bouncing around aimlessly and eventually will either enter a pathway or get drained? Well, even that draining is covered by the law and not under one’s own control.
Cultures across the planet since the beginning of time have had various ways to treat bodies at death. Funerary rites are wildly vast. The machine of modern industry (because of the domineering grip the law has over all material and nature) is death in life, or rather never-having-been-alive-at-all. People assume we have the rights to our own body, somehow…we don’t. We can’t care for our bodies the way our advanced world knows is best, because the heuristics puts financial circuitry first, always. Funerary rites of the various cultures were not mere routine, but a part of the communal grieving process, each situation taking uniqueness…because the people really lived, and so death too was real. More deeply appreciated than a society that hides death and discussion of it. Since the system controls our life, one might find sanctity in the right to do with our bodies as we please…but:
Minnesota Statute § 149A.94 FINAL DISPOSITION.
Every dead human body lying within the state, except unclaimed bodies delivered for dissection by the medical examiner, those delivered for anatomical study pursuant to section 149A.81, subdivision 2, or lawfully carried through the state for the purpose of disposition elsewhere; and the remains of any dead human body after dissection or anatomical study, shall be decently buried or entombed in a public or private cemetery, alkaline hydrolyzed, or cremated within a reasonable time after death. Where final disposition of a body will not be accomplished within 72 hours following death or release of the body by a competent authority with jurisdiction over the body, the body must be properly embalmed, refrigerated, or packed with dry ice. A body may not be kept in refrigeration for a period exceeding six calendar days, or packed in dry ice for a period that exceeds four calendar days, from the time of death or release of the body from the coroner or medical examiner.
Every state has some similar requirement. Perhaps the governors fear another resurrection of biblical proportions will happen again and threaten their world. It won’t. There will be conflict with these statutes if any of the people from the background of the diversity-promoted machinery decide to maintain their historic culture…which they rarely if ever do. Everything gets lost in time.
Ordinary westerners who have never thought about it, the dominate norm of will-making is an old-age thing, and the focus is by no means on bodily disposition, but rather property disposition. This is why it would be impossible to have a sincere conversation with any one of them, nevermind their overarching system that imposes its will on anyone who has anything distinctly in conflict with the laws.
What if one had a dear loved one whose body they want to hold until they feel right? Whose bodily death marks the end of everything in the experiential realm of one whose body remains alive? What if 72 hours wasn’t enough, not because of the time, but of the spirit inside of the particular grieving individual? What if the concept of a time-limit imposed on them hindered the ability of their spirit to properly adapt, for emotional depth of a person is an internal clock independent of universal time-keeping systems.
The people separate themselves from the law they create as a way to impose their will on one another and certainly any others outside their system. It is not feeling nor sincere. We know in life that personal progression is standardized by cultural normalization…but can they assert the same power over death? These powers are a result of the people either endorsing laws or remaining ignorant of what they are, effectuated in law, likely by clandestine operations manipulating “the law” with no societal disapproval due to unawareness. That is not life…real life is fluid and spiritual.
The law itself is a possum, playing dead. Really, it is a slow moving machine…a river forming a grand canyon that we will all fall into and meet our individual and collective demise. It may take twists and turns, but it not a space-shuttle allowing us to escape its dominance. We can barely take a drink from it, for it is drying up, leaving nothing but cliffs and layers of various sediments. It is imperfect and earthly…never entirely dead, but neither rushing with life. To damn it up and fill it with life is temporal, still…anyone who has the slightest sense of eternity, the wonder of worlds beyond, and feels suppressed at the soul-level by dominating social institutions should review all law in askance. In a world of billions of people knowing the earth won’t provide material kingdoms for them all, it is more important than ever.