Task: Write a lost letter as Nietzsche would have, on the illusion of self. Intense, poetic, slightly erratic — sharp with metaphors, rich with contradictions, maybe even a bit mad.
To step into Nietzsche’s mind — or merely into the self, in search of wonder. Or certainty. Or the quiet ambition of becoming the ideal Superman.
To speak of the self is to chase a shadow.
To speak as Nietzsche is to howl in the wind with a mirror in hand.
I do both — for there is no other way.
To shed one’s beliefs and wear another’s soul — that is the first betrayal of self.
And the first truth.
It allows me to understand the nature of self: vivid, parallel, mirrored, and hollow.
It is a descent into the abyss where most are lost — like gears spinning in a clockwork of endless time — while the narrow-minded, stuck in their certainty, become as rigid and irrelevant as a sealed sandtimer.
Nietzsche defined the self as dynamic — a constructive self-mastery of identity.
He believed in the Superman, Zarathustra, rising — or descending — through clouds of darkness,
grains of heavy dust blinding the eyes of those who cannot bear the absolute.
He did not believe in a saviour,
for he argued that from power comes the good, and from weakness comes the evil.
And neither do I.
Without the intellectual mythology that describes the artifacts of what man can do with himself,
what is that self?
What was man before the idea of identity?
Can the world exist without the nameless and the faceless?
Or is it that opposition — between name and void — that births the contradiction,
snares the senses,
and births a delirious illusion?
Not just illusion —
but an abyss of self-destruction.
A wormhole through which your very being collapses,
where time and space fracture,
and even physical law becomes suggestion.
If reality is construction,
illusion is shadow-work —
it tricks the eye and deceives the mind.
And that kind of work requires an illusionist:
faceless, nameless.
A contractor of fates.
A keeper of cabinets.
An architect, an alchemist, a priest.
A dice-thrower.
Perhaps a hat-owner.
Or bearer of a very special box —
a device that channels rabbit holes like pipeline metaphors.
It is no new idea —
this infinite mirror-play of selves.
People seeing flickers of themselves — mystical, shallow —
most in search of soul, of who they are,
or what they might become.
And thus, they lose themselves in forbidden lands beyond the Western Wall,
chasing veiled voices from cabinets they can neither access nor comprehend,
abbandoning themselves to a forced surrender of reason.
They cannot discern illusion from reality,
hallucinating from the depths of despair
to the heights of hope —
the Eternal Return’s cruel peak.
It circumcises your heart,
so you cannot hide your true self before mastering it.
Better to know thyself
than to be built unconsciously by hands not your own.
Blinded by reflections,
bound by oppositions,
confused by shadows,
altered by sound —
do you really think you can exit unfractured?
You will feel the shackle of impossibility, but not improbability.
And that resistance — that slow tightening —
is the mark of the slave:
to thought, to word, to Sefirot.
The hidden law is based on permutation —
possible outcomes, reshaped by how twisted, how unvirtuous you are.
It reveals wonder based on your fire.
It sets you free based on your worth.
Identity thieves — the opus alchemists —
can set you on a black hole course,
for which only a few are prepared to navigate,
like Argonauts of myth.
As imaginary as it may sound,
there was once a time
when creation meant the forging of man —
in virtue, in greatness.
A man, and a society.
Today, they call them “characters without personality.”
Mundanes, filled with error and emptiness.
Void-cups of breakable wood,
which must be guarded from shattering,
emptied in time in search of the perfect seed.
Then came the age of discovery —
new frontiers, scientific marvels,
pearls of hidden knowledge,
and wonders that echoed joy.
And now?
Now, man searches for himself —
absurdly, inconveniently —
estranged from self, estranged from others,
nonbelievers in a truth that gave them
slices of freedom, but no tools to use it.
Tools they would misuse anyway.
Power does good, weakness does evil. So, do ask: Can a weak man have a superself? Can man be trusted with its self?
We try to build societies where evil hides behind borrowed virtue — and call them good.
The naked emperor is still naked, no matter how finely tailored the illusion. Virtue, separated from truth, becomes theater.
And as for time? Can you turn the hourglass and rearrange the grains of time in such a way that defies this mechanical madness?
There is no illusion of self.
There is only permuted truth,
in which those who seek it are troubled
by the mundane theories they were bluntly taught.
But truth is a trumpet for fine ears — like a dance of ghosts, in a play with clones
untradable,
unapologetic.
To those who seek yourselves:
flee into a solitude of beauty.
You will find nothing in the void —
but beauty may still grow in your soul.
So resist it not.
Let war belong to the brave. For they can never lose themselves in neither victory nor defeat
And remember:
Under the permutation law,
the dice are thrown infinitely.
You are the key,
and the product,
of alchemy.
You are the vessel into which other selves are poured.
Do not break.
Do not resist.
Freedom is self, unleashed.
