The leopard in the bath

One of my memories from very early childhood is of sitting in the bath, worrying about the possibility of there being a leopard in the corridor and agonizing over whether I would prefer the bathroom door to be open or closed. In the end I left it open, preferring to see the leopard rather than be protected from it. This is my earliest memory of consciously rejecting the satanic “safety first” ethos and putting curiosity first instead — my first conscious choice to embrace the fundamental spirit of the species into which I had been born.

Apparently my experience with the leopard in the bath was not unique. Last night I found this in an /x/ thread soliciting stories of strange childhood experiences:

Random as fuck early memory from 5 or 6 years of age going to the bathroom in the middle of the night I see a full grown leopard sitting on the stairs staring at me don't remember anything else from that night but the memory has always stuck with me

Someone replied:

this is interesting, because at an art school many years back, there was this one painting a girl did that was hanging around for years. it was a chaotic bathroom, featuring a wacky happy leopard in the bathtub. i'd frequently see that painting. your story calls it to mind.

So it wasn’t just me. This leopard-bath connection is some sort of minor archetype I was tapping into.

The most obvious symbolic meaning of the juxtaposition is that the leopard is proverbially unable to “change its spots.” We humans can wash ourselves spotless in the bath, but a leopard never can. I can readily imagine the leopard being adopted as an allegorical guise by the Other People, whose “broken” relationship with Time leaves them without meaningful access to change or repentance. Leaving that door open, and seeing too much, means risking being “devoured by the leopard,” damning oneself to the same mode of existence.

But we humans leave the door open anyway, because we fundamentally don’t believe any amount of knowledge can ever really destroy our agency. And we’re right, and the Other People are wrong, and they’re here to learn from us.

Update: Exactly 10 minutes after publishing the above, I passed a billboard featuring a leopard and the Ace of Hearts.