Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
- John Donne, Death be not proud

For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.

So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slowly dying.
The day spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party,

Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.
- Philip Larkin, Nothing to be Said

Computation offers us the chance to reach back in time further then we even have before. In E.E. Evans-Pritchard's ethnographic work on the Nuer he talks of how the Nuer's collective conception of time is enclosed with two boundaries, temporal parentheses so to speak. The boundaries of generations limiting modes of understanding the vastness of time. Computation has brought the scale of these new temporalities to a cosmic level.

In the most recent Rhizome podcast I was struck by how, in an interview with several young left-wing meme creators, they espoused such a pessimistic view of the future, of climate catastrophe. It reminds me of a Timothy Morton quote in which he talks of going against "the dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth (the real Earth) depends on it. The end of the world has already occurred."

Perhaps we have reached the end game of catastrophe, of extinction of the slow death via hyperobjects.

Morton also talks of how “Beauty is how objects end. Beauty is death.”

Even with a temporal field of view made as wide as it is now, via the wonder of computation, our clear view of our own extinction is blurred. We tell ourselves lies

The teleology of politics is reliant on the fact that there is always time, we as people can always solve the problems we have at hand, the climate crisis can be solved. Teleology is gone now our death is no(t)w in sight.
How to we wrangle with that which has become inevitability.