One cannot drown in shallow waters.
One cannot drown in shallow waters.
―
Atrona Grizel
If someone who
has lived through extraordinary things still wants to have a place in society,
the only way to do this is by presenting themselves as helpless—that is,
labeling themselves with terms such as “victim,” “survivor,” in a way
psychiatry can digest, and also by defining themselves with marks such as “has
the … disorder,” “happy despite the mental illness of …,” in a way society can
digest. Because an extraordinary person shaped by extraordinary things, by
their very nature, requires detachment from society, since it is made by and
for sameness, not for difference or divergence. For such a person still to want
a place among people is like trying to mix lava with water.
―
Atrona Grizel
“Outgoing” people
leave nothing for the future; every emotion they wish to express is
externalized the moment they feel it, with no obstacles before them. Hence,
their inner world has no stored emotion for “necessary times.”
―
Atrona Grizel
If I do not
become my own fanatic, I will become others’ slave.
―
Atrona Grizel
I close my eyes.
I shake the
outside off me and plunge into my inner self.
Having outgrown
my body, I cloak myself in motionless stillness.
Those around me
think I am in a trance.
They do not know
that I am trapped on an uninhabitable planet.
And that beneath
my eyelids, I dream of universes.
―
Atrona Grizel
Trying to change
someone means nothing more than creating a new enemy. Yes, this person has
changed now: they have become a foe.
―
Atrona Grizel
The most
guaranteed way to be “successful” is to conform to conventional expectations in
every possible way: to write, to say, and to do what others want to read, want
to hear, and want to see.
―
Atrona Grizel
I destroyed the
world you come from.
―
Atrona Grizel
I feel like a
Soviet emblem in a church, like a North Korean flag in a disco. They say, “Get
help from people”; yet the capitalists can be of no aid to me.
―
Atrona Grizel
According to
natural foresight, the Sun will one day explode, the solar system will one day
cease to exist, and even long before any of that, all life on Earth will
already have come to an end. But even these do not bring me any comfort: I know
that those beings won’t stay in place, that they will leap onto other planets.
Even if their planet is destroyed, this time they will be living somewhere
else—perhaps on a different world. In other words, they will metastasize.
Because they are more than just the cancer of the Earth; they are the cancer of
space itself. Just as they spread across the Earth, so too will they spread across
the universe.
―
Atrona Grizel
There has not
been a single street I have walked through without imagining placing a long
brick in the middle of the road to send the speeding cars into crashes and
bring them to a halt, or tripping one by one the silhouettes endlessly passing
by on the sidewalk. There is not even a single city for which I have not
imagined a massive hydrogen bomb falling right on its very navel and erasing
all this nonsense while I watch it pleasantly from afar.
―
Atrona Grizel
I experienced how
it feels to be surrounded by degree-holding professors who mistake Marx for a
capitalist because of the title “Das Kapital,” who call the Soviet Union
“Soviet Russia,” who call Romanticism “Romanticisism,” or who—without the
slightest awareness of how far removed that word is from the meaning of Plato’s
cave allegory, and in a manner far from a mere slip of the tongue—seriously
call it the “cave algorithm.” For some reason, English teachers present North
American slang as a natural part of the language; geography teachers call the
United States “America”; literature teachers either don’t know or ignore the
difference between the open “e” and the closed “e” while delivering their
pre-written scripts; and history teachers call Liman von Sanders “Limon van
Sanders” repeatedly, which can only be explained by either ignorance causing
them to say it wrongly, or automatism making them say it unconsciously. What is
more, large sums are paid for me to see them. And the class cannot falsify the
authority, because they are a degenerate youth integrated with the world yet
oblivious to the universe: they have no inkling of the slightest intellectual
knowledge, think Vietnam is in Europe, imagine Greenland to be larger than
Africa, believe that the right brain and left brain are opposites like fire and
water, ask why Russia’s capital is not “in the middle,” cannot point to any
specific place on a world map, cannot even pronounce the name of the founder of
their own country, know no philosopher beyond media soundbites, possess only an
excessively optimistic “therapy-talk” understanding of psychology, think in
terms of internet memes, read nothing beyond manga, research nothing but
astrology, and know no “art” other than nudity and eroticism. These are the
kind of people who feel the urge to share any single fact they learn with a
thousand others; they carry an obsession to immediately externalize endeavours
that only skim the surface of any depth. Had they known, of course they would
have raised their voices; they would have shouted and hollered to prove their
“intelligence” and thus become “popular.” I, on the other hand, am like a
ghost-prophet, not in the sense that I wish to “enlighten” others but as an
existential anarchist; even at fifteen, I was more profound than perhaps all
the fifty-year-olds I was exposed to. Teachers might have surpassed me in
theory and knowledge, but I was always more abundant in insight and
observation. I was clearly more expert than philosophy teachers and literature
teachers in both fields, because they had only received formal, stereotypical
training, and the main thing they cared about was their salary, whereas for me
philosophy and literature were not branches but my very being. I was not
“interested” in philosophy and literature; I was directly philosophy and
literature itself. Yet when I subjected these people to criticism, the only
reply I received from society was, “Which university did you graduate from to
be so arrogant?”
―
Atrona Grizel
The conferences
where the whole school was gathered and forced to listen were, though differing
in theme, only repetitions of a single aim in dead slogans until it was
normalized at their core: “You must not give up if you want to succeed.” “You
must acquire the skill of self-expression.” “Work hard so that your family will
be proud of you.” and so forth. Even if they themselves might not have truly
felt this way, to my eyes the students were treated like machines designed for
grades. Yet “success” means nothing more than society’s opinion; “self-expression”
is not a talent but a sign of dependence on the outside, and thus closer to
weakness; and if a family’s pride in their child comes from career, that is
pitiable. But the propaganda does not stop there: “As a school, you are one
family. You are all each other’s brothers and sisters. Always be by one
another’s side. And never forget: we will always be behind you.” And
immediately, the hall resounds with applause. I must have heard those same
words perhaps thousands of times in my eternal solitude. Among that hall full
of people in suits, who could possibly have sensed that I was a hidden
Diogenes?
― Atrona Grizel