Existence is something that must be “handled,” not celebrated or negated.
Existence is something that must be “handled,” not celebrated or negated.
―
Atrona Grizel
When an artist
begins to gather “fans” around themselves, they stop being an artist and
transform into something else, because the artist is a solitary human being.
You cannot be both social and creative; you must choose one.
―
Atrona Grizel
I do not deny
life’s worth; I deny life’s authority.
―
Atrona Grizel
If everyone
started saying the right thing, I would get bored and start expecting a
different answer. I would even accept it if it were wrong, because nothing
anyone says can ever truly be right. If correctness becomes correct, it ceases
to be correct. Reality is only real when condemned as unreal.
―
Atrona Grizel
If my writings
are not understood, that is simply because most cannot understand them. Those
who understand will understand. I will not bother trying to explain them to
those who do not.
―
Atrona Grizel
I am optimized
for the post-apocalypse; of course I will not be understood within the
pre-apocalypse. One day everything will be reduced to rubble, and then my soul
will wander among the ruins, acclimating everyone one by one to the beauty of
destruction with a single touch, because it will finally remind them that
destruction is the only lasting construction.
―
Atrona Grizel
He has seen
everything.
He has been everywhere.
Now he is returning.
Only I sense the weight in his movements.
He is not satisfied.
With a calm disgust,
he turns away,
returns to where he came from.
Another passes by
him.
An adventurous young man.
He looks around in wonder.
He goes to the place from which the other returned.
He thinks paradise awaits him.
The other knows
this, as he passes by in silence.
But the place he went taught him not to interfere with anyone.
So he does not act.
He only knows.
―
Atrona Grizel
What would make
every pain I have lived and will live through endurable would be the experience
of something like this at its core: encountering someone who is suicidal in a
desolate place, and there, just as they are about to end their life, entering
into a profound existential conversation. Then, afterward, both of us walking
away alive and intact: I convincing them to exist “a little longer,” and they
gifting me a memory worth a treasure. We disappear into our separate paths, yet
remain a lasting presence in each other’s lives. A familiar stranger. Where are
they going? Unknown. Going together is not the point anyway. Just a friendly
coincidence between two alien souls in the fog of the dream called life.
―
Atrona Grizel
Authoritarianism,
stripped to its skeleton, is not tyranny but the centralization of power. It is
coherence enforced through hierarchy and the refusal to grant every impulse
equal legitimacy. Liberal societies claim to have escaped this condition, yet
they have merely externalized it into markets, trends, algorithms, and systems
of social approval. Authoritarianism did not disappear; it became diffuse, and
therefore invisible. Liberal nations despise totalitarian states because those
states expose the same underlying structure, only rendered explicit and
transparent. By declaring themselves “enemies of tyranny,” liberal societies
protect the illusion of freedom that depends on keeping their own mechanisms of
control concealed.
―
Atrona Grizel
Does stubbornly
rejecting comfort in a radical way also count as “being inside the comfort
zone”? Because if I form no relationships with anyone, it is because I see them
all as sunk into the mire of comfort, and I will not enter that mire together
with them by calling it a beautiful sea. If insisting on my own values, even at
the cost of being excluded from “life,” is considered a “comfort zone,” then I
am willingly and deliberately prepared to remain confined within that zone
forever.
―
Atrona Grizel
When I am
anxious, I turn that worry into sadness and make myself cry. It works because I
transform a state of excessive stress that is vigilant into melancholy, turning
it into a “sweet stress.” When I panic, the first thing I do is not to try to
calm down but to try to become sad, like being moved by contemplating the
futility of humanity. In this way, since my focus shifts to the fleeting
beauties of life, I find a hidden pleasure even in the thing that panics me,
because I see everything as tragically beautiful. This also works in managing
my worry, because the two emotions are very close to each other, and melancholy
can take its place. Both are noble emotions that never betray the person, and
for this reason, by not insisting on themselves, they can continuously
transform into one another. This is an alchemy of pain, and to be the master of
emotions, one must be the alchemist of the inner world.
―
Atrona Grizel
I still have
roughly 50 years ahead of me. Fifty years. What am I supposed to do for that
long in this uninhabitable world? Besides, at least 40 of those years will
already be spent in compulsory work from morning to night. This is a “9 to 5”
world, after all, a liberal dungeon in the late stage of capitalism. Being
inside such a society makes me feel pressure in my chest every second, and
there are times when I can clearly feel my heart being strained when I
experience palpitations. And this dungeon once again forces me to worry only
about my salary, not about my heart. The prisoners of this dungeon, meanwhile,
mock and curse my heart wound simply because they are obsessed only with
material things. Because, frankly, I do not even have rights. If a slave is tired,
that is only his or her own fault, because a slave exists to be exploited
anyway. Totalitarian regimes were accused of forcing workers to labor under
inhumane conditions in concentration camps, but now those camps have become the
entire world itself, and this has been normalized because their slaves have
been taught to internalize the value of being “hard-working.” This is what is
considered normal. In other words, the world being a prison. Outside the
northern forests of Canada and Siberia, there is nowhere left where I can
breathe, because everywhere there is an excessive density of slaves and
therefore an excessive density of bureaucratic pressure. Yet even in those
forests the condition for absolute peace is not met, because even if I withdrew
there and built a self-sufficient life, I would still have to deal with
maintaining this rickety body. Whereas I want, in effect, to “throw the body
away.” What is the point of it? I am nothing but pure consciousness. My body is
my vehicle. But what a great slavery it is that if this vehicle breaks down,
consciousness dies as well. And for this reason alone, I am expected to toil
for an entire lifetime. Thus, the most absolute peace seems to me to be this: a
simple life in a single-person prison cell where food and water are brought to
me ready-made. There, I would have my “servants,” who are supposedly trying to
punish me, and society’s sickness would not be able to reach me behind those
walls, and these two alone would be enough for happiness. I am a genius, yes, and
I truly do not deserve this treatment. But I have already moved beyond that.
This is precisely what it means for society to forcibly teach a person to stop
dreaming. My pride, however, comes from the fact that my belief in being a
genius has still preserved itself, because I have carefully protected it. I may
be a social parasite, and this gives me no shame, because people are already
“obliged” to take care of someone like me, who comes once in a hundred years.
― Atrona Grizel