Dead Cicada
「Cicadas are always tilted upwards when they die.
Yet the cicadas' eyes are on their backs.
What is it that they see when they die.
Is it the earth that nurtures their young?
Or is it the emptiness of death?」
2020-2021
As a child, I would always enter an infinite space in my dreams, indistinguishable from above and below, and when I touched the vast expanse of space, I felt it was death.When I grew up I read Pascal's line "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." and understood what was going on
It is a sublime. The modern understanding of the 'sublime' in the aesthetic sense begins with the eighteenth-century work of Edmund Burke “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”, who distinguished the sublime from beauty, linking it instead to experiences such as awe and fear, stating that its meaning lies in stirring up the emotions of the heart rather than in the attainment of aesthetic pleasure and enjoyment.
The child lives with the fear of infinity as well as death like a cicada that has been sleeping in the soil for years, yet he knows that in the distant future he will really face the matter once again.
How does a child imagine it? Is it a tomb? Will it rise, fall, shrink itself infinitely to an invisible point?Or is it the complete absence of the person？