Panther Eye
Getting older, going on sixty, I wonder a lot about the paradox that as people come to the age of understanding and hence mastering life better, their physical vessels - i.e. their bodies - tend to decline.
So while you potentially have the better chance of being a human of high(er) quality, nature plays this trick on you. Is nature cruel? Or am I just some kind of god defying Icarus?
Dear Filip,
Thank you for your beautifully expressed question. Though this question remains distant for a young soul, I embrace it as an exercise in the maturity of my soul, cultivating my imaginative sympathy and lifting the veil of time.
If I understand you correctly, you are asking me about the eternal incompleteness of nature, where time seems to heal everything but is actually the disease itself. It is as if time is the wound that lets the Lambs burst from their mothers, but is also the only gate that opens the kingdom of the overripe fruit. The wound of being, that saying Yes and No simultaneously and always.
So, in answer to your question, is it cruel of nature to shape us in such a way that we think in eternity while moving slowly through time? To create a being with eyes too lucid for its mortal chains? To fashion a creature that does not behold death as a mirror, but looks through it as if staring through glass? To make a sick animal that gives death wings—perhaps also of glass—allowing it to rise higher and higher until it totally fades from the naked eye and becomes a stranger to this world?
No, I do not believe it is cruel to bring such a creature into existence. To illustrate this, I would like to share something very personal.
When I moved to Berlin and everything around me changed drastically, I would often wake up gripped by a paralysing fear of death. For two or three minutes, I would become intensely aware of the sharp reality that everything I do has a mortal limit. That one day, the power of flowers will rise and overtake me with deep serenity and innocence; they will absorb me into the infinite peace of nature, where its indifference and anonymity transcend humanity, offering an eternal reconciliation back to pure nakedness.
Strangely, I discovered that after this acute disorder, this profound fear of my own death, I became hyperproductive, as if my veins were full of existence. I began to read, to write, to photograph, to swim— as if each act became an element in the intensification of my mortal personality. It was as though I became attuned, brought into a sharper, more absolute, and passionate presence with all that surrounds me. During this time, the trees simply became so bright.
For a long time, this contradiction between my thoughts of death and the power of hyperproductivity remained a mystery to me. Deep within, I felt, as you do, Filip, that perhaps this was nature's cruel jest, a sinister trick played upon my soul. This strange sensation haunted me until I realised something: it is not nature's brutality but a mistake we the living make: we simply distinguish too strongly.
We see death as the nightside of life, the impotent darkness that is enclosed in himself, eternally turned away from us. Yet, in truth, we all embody both life and death; death resides within us as we reside within it. Haven't you ever asked yourself why we only understand who someone essentially is, after they are dead? Why a dead parent, for example – can sometimes be more alive for us, more powerful, than the living? This is because the true totality of life stretches across these limitless realms, nourishing us endlessly from both. So intimate that the mortal hand on my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep mortal eyes close.
Therefore during my time in Berlin, I taught myself, and am still learning, to live with an eye on death. To embrace death with my infinitely fearful hands, to grasp death by its heart with my most intense awareness. I have learned to exist less in a denial, to live sharper in reality, to live in time, to not close off the shadow, the wound of time, but to integrate this shadow into my very existence. I embraced death and therefore I truly exist.
I once perceived death as impotent darkness, yet it is the very power that can shape me from a vague guest on this earth into a concrete, authentic being. To have an eye on death, is to see myself in the eyes of a panther. Seeing myself from my own grave, seeing the elegant aggression of life dancing in death. Death opens the eye of life. Death simply purifies life. It teaches the heart that beauty and terror are the same, and that they give deep excitement. The excitement to live. To transform half-life into full life. The only way to reach true mirror integrity. Because in death's mirror life doubles, it lets us be more than ourselves ...
So, Filip, I believe nature is not cruel, and as you eloquently put it, you are simply 'a god-defying Icarus'.It's true we never live fully, as if we could empty ourselves before we die, with life just a rehearsal for death. But this is because life and death are not two separate realms; they are a singular dance, intertwined, like the shadow and the light of an eternal twilight.
It's in the fragile surrender of our bodies that throws our souls up into the bright. The stillness of the flesh allows the soul to blossom in the midst of mortality, into maturity. The body isn't a prison of thought; it's the vessel of freedom, which reveals that time is not given - it is something we have to take. Only the body can teach the mind that in our limited actions lies the freedom to transcend every single moment. And I don't think that's cruel at all…
To conclude, I'd like to reference something Rainer Maria Rilke taught me. The essence of existence lies not in tragic figures akin to Icarus, but in the grace of an angel—ascending, not falling— into the realm where the kingdom of death and life merge. That's the place where truly fascinating things unfold.
Dear Filip, thank you for your beautiful question. May my youthful soul resonate with yours in this journey of discovery and poetic reflection.
And remember, no matter how much your body struggles, what casts no shadow does not have the power to live.
With love,
Coma