[8] Darkness As Seen Through Tiresias’ Eyes (5)

From the previous blog: “Latvians must do what the desperate but determined to live must do: Do the unpopular, the dismissed, the unacceptable (never re-examined), all those jobs that are most unpopular, like undertaker, temple keepers of unpopular gods, those who collect, then hide excrement that others excrete.”

So, how are the Latvians—dying in spirit and body, but never yet admitting to being desperate—going to do the unpopular, the dismissed, and become undertakers and all that?

To this moment in time all evidence confirms that the Latvian government is active in leading the nation to and beyond a collapse of body and spirit. The last piece of evidence—the nail in the coffin, so to speak—is the attempt to create a coalition government by various superficial political fractions. Indeed, while the political fractions apply to themselves the name of “party”, twenty-one years into renewed independence, Latvia does not have a political party, but a government made up of political fractions.

One may argue that Latvians have already begun a successful career as their own undertakers.

In the previous blog I argued that the top echelons of the current Latvian government (from the President on down) are less government officials than lobbyists for foreign governments in Latvian government positions.

Being a lobbyist for a foreign government in one’s own country is surely an “undertaker’s” position.

Curiously though, the former Latvian President Zatlers, now leading a political fraction called “Zatler’s Reform Party”, is a former surgeon or in more colloquial terms a “doctor”. What is curious about the doctor is that “im Geist” (spiritually), he is far from being a man able to imagine how medicine could help Latvians improve their economic condition.

In brief, Zatler’s Reform Fraction has never yet imagined that the fraction could become a party by lobbying for laws that would enable the European people and others (Latvians only incidentally) to exit this world when old—with the help of medicines that makes dying easy.

As the case in Switzerland and The Netherlands have illustrated, easy ways of dying are in great demand, but due to archaic prejudices in short supply. One reason for the short supply is that old prejudices force people to think of death as a negative force, something to be avoided at all costs.

However, a nation that would facilitate this process—by way of tourist ‘rest’ centers in the midst of gracious and bountiful nature—and help people rather than persecute them, would necessarily develop many services associated with humanity’s mortality.

For one, the airlines would be kept flying by a steady in-and-out flow of live and dead passengers. The countryside tourist homes would provide the forest gardens in which the individuals about to depart our Earth would reconnect with the profounder aspects of nature, in effect, by being helped to realize the ultimate oneness of physical and organic matter.

Hospitals would be able to develop high-tech cryogenic facilities to preserve the genes of the departing for possible cloning in the future.

Hotels in major cities would benefit from housing the relatives and guests who came to visit those about to take leave. In a manner of speaking, the ‘good byes’ would be like the ‘consolamentums’ practiced by the former Latvian and French Cathars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism .

Along with death there necessarily comes also desire for life. The preservation of the genes of the departed (an industry undoubtedly in demand) would, in due course, encourage the birth of birthing households, that is to say, households that would become permanent “saimes” (formerly families) to those who return to again abide on Earth.

The “copy” industry would thrive. Each departing individual who hopes to return to Earth by way of rebirth would want to provide a record of him- or herself for his-her successor by way of a diary, blogs, photographs, videos, interviews, and so on. If we have ‘email’ today, the clone could have his-her library of ‘e-life’ of indestructible disks.

Cemetaries as we have known them in the past and until today would cease to exist, and cem-(rhymes with stem) libraries would take their place. The useless megabucks building, alleged to be a library, now being constructed in Riga on the shores of the Daugava River and called “crystal mountain” would indeed earn its name by providing housing for the records of clones and their generations.

Riga would become a major center for medical research. After all, cloning is not some crude form of resurrection, but involves a study of intelligent life and the limits of its perfectability in a physical body.

Riga would become a major center for Social Anthropology studies. The University of Riga, and no doubt many additional universities, would become centers for the study of social interaction in the newly introduced and developing ‘saimes’. Experiments will become necessary, for example, at what age it is best for a man or woman to clone his-her descendant Self. This writer can imagine raising his-her son- or daughter-self until the age of ten or twelve before departing from his-her physical body and allowing his-her psyche (soul) to transmigrate to the clone.

Not least, a ‘Peace and Rest’ industry in Latvia would preserve Latvia’s ‘green’ nature.

A ‘peace and rest’’industry would facilitate the creation of a world at peace with itself. For surely no man or woman would die easily—whatever the painlessness of their medications—if they felt that their clones could not be reborn with guarantees of a kind mother, loving upbringing, an excellent education, a meaningful career, a roof of a house overhead, healthy food, and, not least, a long life.

One may argue that the higher the suicide rate in a country, the higher the misery rate of its people. While a government may not be able to improve the economic conditions of an overpopulated country facing a collapse of resources, it is arguable that it is not standing for human rights when forcing its people to practice forms of death that make death an overtly painful and tortured experience. The Latvian government is among those not only most corrupt, but among such that ignore the right of a human being to die in relative peace.   http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/suicide-costs-russia-equivalent-of-large-city/445146.html