The third poem of 'Tag och skriv'

You say ‘I’ and ‘it has to do with me’

but it has to do with a what:

In reality you are no one.

So I-less, naked and formless is reality!

It was out of fear of it you started to clothe yourself,

started to comport yourself and call yourself ‘I’

to cling to a straw.

In reality you are no one.

A rule of law, human value, freedom of will,

all are images painted with fear in reality’s empty hall,

fear of acknowledging something beyond justice and injustice,

            beyond thesis and antithesis!

In reality you are no one.

Even beyond good and evil a battlefield for good and evil,

the upper wild animal’s fight against the lower –

the truth you suspect at times like an abyss by the roadside,

without daring to know, without wanting to know,

you who feel giddy at the slightest hollow!

In reality you are no one.

A place, a piece of clothing, a name –

everything else is merely your wish,

your I a wish, your unredemption one, your redemption another:

All that you have taken in advance!

Redemption, there is no redemption! You dream up redemption

stammer the Resurrection! And Holy! – for such is your wish.

And human destiny is unchangeably fixed

But you have now taken one more step in building your wishing:

Yet another wish of all the conceivable thousands and thousands

has become possible for you, necessary, certain and finally a fact,

Just as you yourself who also were a wish from the start,

Just as the magical name your parents have given you

To protect you from darkness and I-lessness,

To distinguish just you from a thousand similar and almost the same.

And yet you are basically as nameless as the night and the darkness:

In reality you are no one.