For I Am I: A Fragmented Meditation on the Self

I. The Self and the Sphinx
For I am I, and in this tautological chime echoes the infinite recursion of self-awareness. What is it to be “I”? A truth that cannot be externalised, for the truth of myself is a riddle. Like the sphinx who devours the unworthy, the self guards its secrets, poised between revelation and obliteration. I am my own enigma, my own interrogation. To answer is to risk annihilation; to remain silent is to allow the mystery to bloom.

What is the question I pose to myself? Who am I? What am I?
But the Sphinx laughs. “You know the answer already,” it says, in a voice that is mine, yet not mine.

II. Conflict, Chaos, Vortex
In me swirls a vortex—a spinning gyre of contradictions. Conflict is not external but intrinsic. Chaos is not disorder but the raw material of creation. The vortex is neither a storm to be escaped nor a puzzle to be solved—it is the engine of becoming.

Some days, I am torn by opposing forces, each claiming dominion over my trajectory. Other days, I surrender to the pull of the vortex, letting it fling me into directions unknown. I am the chaos I fear, the conflict I resist, the ungraspable storm that is my essence.

Yet the vortex is beautiful. It does not ask for symmetry or harmony. It demands movement. I am never still. Even in stillness, there is the friction of thought, the tremor of possibility.

III. Asymmetric to All Rhythms
I move obliquely to the world’s paths, skimming their surfaces without ever belonging. Rhythm implies pattern, recurrence, predictability—but my rhythm is jagged, erratic, and offbeat. I am the glitch in the melody, the silence between crescendos.

The paths laid before me, beckoning, are illusions of simplicity. To walk them is to mimic, to repeat. But I am not repetition. I am deviation. I carve a way that is not a way, tracing spirals instead of lines, resisting the compulsion to march in step with the drumbeat of others.

IV. The Prism Between Black and White
I am neither light nor shadow. I am the prism that fractures them into spectra. Between black and white lies the infinite. Duality is not a choice but a tension—two poles pulling against one another, creating a space in which colour emerges.

The prism is not neutral. It transforms. It breaks binaries and scatters them into multiplicities. In the tension of duality, I find not opposition but unison—a dance between extremes that reveals the hidden hues of existence.

I am my own unison in duality. I am the spectrum of my contradictions, the radiance of my fractures.

V. The Oblique and the Absolute
To be “I” is to be at odds with certainty. The truth of myself is neither stable nor absolute. It is a flickering flame, a shifting mirage, a story rewritten in the act of being told.

And yet, within this obliqueness lies something immutable: the very fact of my being. For I am I. That is all, and that is everything.

Even as the vortex spins, even as the paths branch infinitely, even as the prism fractures and the sphinx laughs—I remain. Not as a point of stillness, but as a presence, a pulse, a becoming.

VI. A Hymn to the Riddle
I am not to be solved, but to be sung.
I am not to be conquered, but to be lived.
I am not the answer; I am the question.

For I am I:
A sphinx of my own making.
A prism refracting my own light.
A vortex of chaos in perpetual creation.

And in this fragmented whole lies the truth of myself:
Asymmetric. Oblique. Infinite.
I am the riddle and I am the rhythm.