The rain falls steadily non-stop, then in sheets.  Weeks of mounting drought, then today flood warnings.  Nature is a condition of extremes.  After all, is not “the mean” a quantity that humans judge to be “just right” for the purposes of life?  Nature, being “blind,” the feedback of cause and effect, “knows” nothing of human desire.

The universe is not dialectical: it moves toward the extremes, and not toward equilibrium; it is devoted to a radical antagonism and not to reconciliation, or to a synthesis. — Jean Baudrillard

I attended a wake last night.  The gathering was to remember a family acquaintance of some years ago.  He passed away in his sleep at 43 years of age.  The room was filled, with overflow standing in conversation just outside of the front door, and of side door of the Strang funeral home.  Christo was present in memory, in consciousness, no matter the small talk about times past, or about the challenge of raising young children.  How do you talk about death, about the void?  Words are meant for life, for the living.  Life is extraordinary, an against-the-odds, rare expression of sentience.  Death is the opposite extreme.  We disbelieve death to believe in afterlife paradise.

I am at Starbucks, my habitation of choice for finding words to begin a day.  The cup of coffee is hot, astringent to taste.  I swallow and am reminded that life is bitter.  Life is always served along with death.  But I remember the sweetness…

Yesterday in the warmth of the afternoon I walked several residential blocks here in Geneva.  This church caught my eye.  I felt there was something too perfect about the scene, as if the building, a symbol, a representation out-of-time, beautiful in its own way; nevertheless a hollow shell, irrelevant to the great rift of outlook, the fractured zeitgeist roiling our people. 

Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.

— excerpt The Society of the Spectacle, Chapt. 1 Separation Perfected #20, by Guy Debord, pub. 1967

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It is reasonable that the reader feel stunned, intellectually frozen by the words of Debord.

We live in the midst of the age technology.  Debord suggests technology adopts/adapts the myth and mystification of the old religions.  The afterlife promise of religion is translated into expectation of a paradise on earth, the recreation of “Eden” here and now, by means of technologized spectacle.  This comes at a price: separation perfected within the interior of man…  life thus becomes unbreathable.