Franz Kafka
LAW
pt.2
continued
During the embalming process the brain was normally removed.
Usually a pointed instrument would be pushed up a nostril to break into the
cranial cavity. A rod with a hook on the end would then be used to slice up the
brain and discard it in a piecemeal fashion. 3-D reconstruction of cavity
confirming that the brain had been removed via the nose. Damage to the nasal
septumand ethemoid bone was clearly visible.
The cemetary occupies four blocks of land between the house and
the little downtown, sloped down into a hollow then rising to a ridge, the
newest graves at the bottom of the hollow. Most of the new gravestones of a
uniform size, granite, shiny-faced, in stark contrast to the markers from the
turn of the century: crypts, statuary, crumbling, age-blackened, lichen-covered testimonies to
an age when the figure of death still had a shadowy figure. The new graves
almost had the look of military cemeteries with their white, uniform
regularities, as if they couldn't escape the general in death even, the greatest
generalizable and generic event of all. But now it was if the whole population
of the dead was being enscripted into the great army of the beyond. Reflective,
no doubt, of the mass culture of the late twentieth century, he mused, as they
moved off the narrow macadam road through the deepening gloom of twilight, past
the occasional cedar and in amongst the palely reflective signposts of
once-lives.
Across the road from the cemetery were two small houses,
weathered white paint glowing wanly in the light of the newly risen half-moon.
Given the context, they almost seemed like crypts themselves. A shadow passed
over the curtains in one window momentarily obscuring its yellowish light. He
turned and walked up the hill to the ridge among the tombstones. He supposed
they were called 'markers' now for the newer ones. He preferred the tombstones,
redolent of gothic tales and untold, untellable intimacies now, individual
stories. How could the new markers have any stories to tell? Flat, featureless,
uniform . . . like, he thought unfairly, the population they were designed to
mark. Some new cemeteries in large cities, he knew, were simple vast expanses
of manicured grassland, with small name markers set flush into the ground. Made
them easier to maintain, mow right over them. As a kid, walking through the
cemetery at night he always observed the rule never to step on the graves. It
had nothing to do with respect but rather the fear of eliciting the ghost in
the grave. On the other hand, maybe that was a form of respect. If so, the fear
of raising the dead did not seem particularly acute these days. Perhaps several
generations of horror and zombie films had put the dead in their place. Which
didn't seem to be exactly in the ground.
Using the principles of IMHOTEP, we have created a mortuary
science that perpetuates the Vital Life Force, utilizable by the soul/spirit,
for a much longer time and in a more viable form. Lacking the knowledge of
IMHOTEP'S embalming techniques, we opted to use cyrogenic freezing. But not of
the entire body, and not of "dead" tissue. Our technique is both
scientific and religious. It provides a client (believer) with kit containing a
vial (with appropriate preservatives) and applicator probe. The applicator is
used to collect living somatic cells (semen or buccal tissue cells) and
transport them to the Sanctuary, preferrably during life. The cells are
collected and concentrated, placed in a small transparent vessel partially
coatedwith electrum, hermetically sealed and then cryogenically frozen.
These LIFE TUBES are sequestered in a temple environment and maintained
in a frozen state by prearranged contract with the client. The base of the
container of the LIFE TUBES is transparent. Below the base, and projecting
upward and through the LIFE TUBES is a pulsed light or laser with its beam
directed toward Sirius. The laser beam functions as a carrier wave for the
MYSTAR frequencies and the Vital Life Force of the specimen which will
accompany and perpetuate the transmission.
A car turned onto the road, its headlights slithering from
marker to marker, briefly illuminating each one, almost like an awakening. As
they neared the top of the ridge, clouds began to obscure the moonlight. A soft
breeze ruffled the bleached red petals, now pink, of a bunch of artificial
roses in a vase set in front of a nearby stone.
...the second fundamental aspect of the mentality of the
ancient Egyptians was precisely the principle of free substitution, of
interchangeability, of the ability to swap every element for another one. The
world was viewed as a vast combinatory system in which high and low, male and
female, light and dark, life and death, organic and inorganic never cease to
trade places and to merge. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and
Art, Mario Perniola
Although The tyranny of thing-ness was finally complete here,
flesh becoming grass, stone, strangely enough communication had not ceased he
felt, the most possible distant having become the closest. The collapse of time
was complete here, a final Now which was never and always. No wonder cemetaries
and death were gradually being banished from the world. The last refuge of a
certain infinite was too uncomfortable for a civilization which increasingly
only recognized some variant of a Hegelian BAD infinite, a boundlessness
constrained and made comfortable. Even the stars were made invisible in the
great cities, strained for most through video screens. And yet here...he looked
up from peering at an eroded inscription. The bowl of grass, once-flesh, and
granite teeth glimmered under a half-canopy of stars, clouds beginning to
rumble up from the west on the horizon. Shards of light illuminated the clouds
from within as lightning flashed beneath the horizon. Eerily, he heard no
rumble. The juxtaposition of the stars, the storm and the dead was almost too
much for him to bear, perhaps too much infinity.
His face is turned
towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single
catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of
his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what
has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in
his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm
irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
And still the dead are buried facing east, the better to rise to
meet their Savior on the Final Day of Reckoning which will also be the great
day of Awakening, no longer chased by the great storm of History (which
ironically enough, arose in the west, in myth always the Land of the Dead).
Flesh, stone and stars meeting in the Great Collapsing beyond the little
collapse of earthly death.
Here, in this place, am earthly which merges with all the other
places of its kind throughout human time, all the fables of desire disappear
into the demands of history and then the fable of history itself succumbs to a
far greater demand. Here, in this place, the ancient stony lineaments of a face
without a visage begins to appear, the face of thingness, ridged with the
planet itself, a fierce pagan thing more akin to the storm on the horizon as it
encounters the stars. The gap toothed grin of the graveyard only served as mute
testimony to its immutable power, silent witness to the inexorable fate of
life's final crap shoot.
There, in that place, across a divide which doesn't or does
exist, begins a new elemental combinatoric. There, the great line of flesh
extending 'backward' meets its chiasmatic match, disappearing into the vortex
of matter made mute, stripped even of its ability to sign, replaced with phone
lines, cut and frayed where they enter that gathering storm. But even the
machine perhaps must fall silent before such forces--or at the very least
continually defer their confrontation. Or even, at the maximum, embody the
catastrophe itself, to 'write the dis-aster' (meaning literally 'away from the
stars'). That mute stumbling at the end of every individual particular becoming
becomes, or is becoming, or has become a slide into the mechanical. The machine
stoops to cradle us long before we reach that final dis-aster, easing the
transition, as it were, into the final universal interface of 'death' (always
placed in quotes now). Was it ever so, even when the first proto-human picked
up the first flaked stone? Probably. The infinite distance within slowly
beginning to round on itself with that bad infinity (hand 'speaking' to stone
-- the better version may be vice versa --, stone colliding to head, then
finally headstone: it's the most ancient story there is, the primal human
contract.) Then, matter mutters, matter speaks, mind matters.
to be continued
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