If you’re not causing problems, it means you have a problem.
If you’re not causing problems, it means you have a problem.
―
Atrona Grizel
As soon as I
entered adolescence, I began to see the world through the eyes of an idealist:
everything was wrong and needed correction, people’s conversations, the
alignment of buildings, the layout of streets, the school system, the structure
of society. And if it could not be corrected, that was madness. But I decided
not to express this and instead to observe, because to me it was a world where
even expressing this was dangerous, since questioning what everyone accepts was
“abnormal.” When I drew my first invisible wall between myself and people and
hid behind my observations, what I saw became so wrong that even things simple
for others, like going to a café, turned into a philosophical insult for me. I
looked at the world so much through the eyes of an activist that I saw only
wrongness and things that could be better. And I had become convinced that the
entire world consisted of this: a mistake that everyone considers correct. But
as the years passed, this lost its fire. The sense of activism is still inside
me, but only that much, because I know that being an adult means being forced
by life’s conditions to ignore it.
―
Atrona Grizel
People do not
change. This is spoken by a soul that waited for them to change for a very long
time, witnessed not the slightest difference, and thus stopped waiting and
began to grow weary of all people. If you leave those types who flap their
mouths from morning to night to their own devices, and somehow grant them the
necessary lifespan, they will create conversational noise from morning to night
for a hundred years if necessary.
―
Atrona Grizel
People had
diminished me. But I could not diminish people in the physical world. So I
moved the battlefield to another realm: the mind. And yes… I won this war. If I
had not defeated them in my mind, my end could even have been like those young
people who storm schools with weapons, even though I know very well that I do
not possess such impulsiveness.
―
Atrona Grizel
Society
normalizes emotional games by making them appear as if they are already a part
of relationships. Even song lyrics contain lines about getting lost in the
“game of love.” What is this? It means accepting that love is a “game,”
expressing it, and expecting others to empathize with it. And given how many
people are devoted to such songs, it works. As long as they are not disturbed
by these lyrics, they too must be seeing love as a “game.” But I cannot
understand why games are played at all. Adult relationships consist entirely of
games in which each side tries to manage emotions like jealousy, envy, and
superiority. Children, on the other hand, simply… sit next to each other, and
saying “Can we be friends?” is enough for them to become best friends.
―
Atrona Grizel
When I discovered
that sex is not only lust but also love, I stopped feeling disgust toward it.
But sex does not, by itself, mean love. There are two types of sex: “lustful
sex” and “affectionate sex.” The first can generally be likened to what
pornographic actors do in front of cameras: complete domination by instinct and
the worship of the body rather than the soul. The second is the union of two
separate souls behind closed doors on romantic nights, and this, that is, not
having intercourse like animals, is quite rare.
―
Atrona Grizel
A person can be
quite self-admiring even while truly knowing their own soul and being aware of
every aspect of it. That is, a pride that comes from self-awareness. In fact,
this kind of pride may even be necessary rather than something that should be
cursed, because it is very different from showy, blind arrogance. The
explanation of this type of egoism does not lie in simplistic thinking but, on
the contrary, in complex thinking. For example, being influenced by primitive
impulses, even if one denies them, is not in itself something “two-faced”; it
only appears that way at first glance. If one frees oneself from
narrow-mindedness, it becomes apparent that all of this carries depth and
aesthetics on a metaphysical level, assuming, of course, that one has eyes
capable of seeing it. If a person were purified of filth, only then would they
become truly slovenly, because there is no such thing as a clean person, and
anyone who claims to be clean is dirty. Filth means cleanliness, and
cleanliness means filth, because one is honest while the other is a lie. And
besides… even these things are art. A person’s value should not be determined
by whether they are a liar or not. This should remain merely a trait. Yet of
course, this does not apply to ordinary souls.
―
Atrona Grizel
I felt so
compressed within the society I am in, it reduced me so much, that in the end,
like a dense mass of energy concentrated at a single point exploding and
scattering outward to form a massive star, I shed my human self and became
cosmic. Now, even when I hear the name of the country I live in, it sounds to
me like the name of some other country, because I am no longer there; I am
living in my own country. Physically, I am still a citizen of whatever-it-is,
but mentally I am stateless, or rather, a citizen of my own homeland.
―
Atrona Grizel
There were
moments when, during class at school, I would leave the lesson for certain
reasons. In those moments, I would wander the school corridors. And I would
notice something: in every classroom, the same things are said over and over,
and this becomes strikingly visible only when one is outside it, that is, not
inside the classroom but looking at it from the outside. When I pass by the
classrooms where my former teachers are teaching small children, I hear them
saying the exact same things they said back then: “You must take your future
seriously,” “Exam periods are approaching,” “Being hardworking and being
intelligent are different,” and so on. What I see here is nothing but
automatism. It is as if sincerity has died. Teachers have turned into parrots,
endlessly repeating the same things, which is already what their profession
requires of them.
―
Atrona Grizel
This society is
not suitable for classical music. That is, classical music cannot take root
here. For example, I cannot walk through the streets listening to classical
music. It would seem excessively ridiculous. Because while classical music
means nobility, elegance, refinement, and loftiness, what greets me instead is
vulgarity, colorlessness, concrete, and noise. This might not be a problem,
because if there is sincerity among people in a gloomy environment, that
environment is always beautiful, like the friendships formed in concentration
camps. But here there is no trace of such a thing in people either. There are
only types who constantly exhale cigarette smoke, who are always busy with some
task, who roam around like aggressive animals shouting and laughing loudly.
There is neither aesthetics nor emotion nor thought. I believe a society’s
nobility can be measured by its compatibility with classical music, and in this
case it means I am clinging to life on barren soil where there is no trace of art.
I am like water in hell. I do not know whether I will evaporate. The only thing
I know is that, contrary to the laws of physics, I have not yet evaporated.
―
Atrona Grizel
Art must be
rule-bound. It must carry strict criteria. But in a structural sense, not in a
aesthetic sense: that is, the content should be as free as possible, but access
to this freedom should be allowed to as few people as possible. Otherwise
anyone can become an “artist,” even a flat-minded, gray, mechanical person.
This is not art; it is art being trampled underfoot. Art must never be a toy in
the hands of the masses. The masses will ruin it in every case. It must remain
exclusive to higher levels. But by “higher levels” I do not mean social
classes; I mean “spiritual classes,” and these “classes” exist. Not everyone
can be an artist. Not everyone is artistic. Everyone feels, yes, but the
expressions of these feelings differ: while most express them by shouting and
fighting, that is, through conflict and resentment, a minority stores them and
transforms them into philosophy and art. Art is precisely the masterpieces
produced by such people. A monkey should not be given a pen or a brush. Even if
what it produces could be called “art,” it is clearly scribbling, because it
does not possess the soul required to create art. Handing art over to such
monkeys is an insult to art. Art must rise so that they can never reach it.
―
Atrona Grizel
Children engaging
in socially inappropriate behaviors, for example shouting in a library, picking
their noses in class, or pulling down their pants in the street, is clearly far
more common than among adults, because they are not yet “individuals”
integrated into society. They are still innocent because they have not been
assimilated. Even if adults were to perform the same actions, at most this
would be rudeness or a deliberate form of “rebellion,” but it could never be
something naturally spontaneous, because social rules force adults to monitor
every movement they make. Even when they feel emotions, they think less about
what they are feeling and more about what feelings this will arouse in others.
That is to say, someone who loves another person despite being married will
constantly police this feeling so that it does not spill outward, for example,
because they have learned that society does not accept raw emotion. A child, on
the other hand, simply… lives.
―
Atrona Grizel
The reason most
people who suffer cannot endure suffering is that they remember a period before
the pain and are attached to it, such as childhood. I too had a relatively
happy and social childhood, but pain was not even something that caught my
attention. I was only observing. Pain and the absence of pain did not matter to
me at all. Consequently, I have no past that I long for. Even if I had had a
very full past, I still would not long for it, at least not actively. Because
the past, for me, is an archive: what happened has happened and is filed away
and placed on shelves, perhaps to be reopened and read someday and remembered
with nostalgia, but never to be lived in again.
― Atrona Grizel