There is no such thing as “collective thought” because within collectivity there is, by necessity, no thought.
There is no such thing as “collective thought” because within collectivity there is, by necessity, no thought.
― Atrona Grizel
Closing the comments
section of posts on social media discourages casual readers, because such
people tend to read by reading how others read. They read a text and, in the
process, unconsciously drift toward the comments section to see what others
think about it. By filtering out some of those opinions and adopting others,
they construct for themselves a view borrowed from other people’s thoughts, and
then begin to see the text through that lens. Closing comments means ending
this theft of thought and forcing the individual to face the text directly,
alone with nothing but their own thoughts. Yet the majority, quite
understandably, does not trust its own thoughts—because it does not think.
―
Atrona Grizel
Psychologists
forbid pessimism and, by doing so, drive their clients into a more dangerous
madness: social assimilation. On an empty mainstream radio program to which I
was exposed for years at full volume during bus trips, a psychologist
indirectly insulted me and recluses like me by using the word “asocial,”
because, in truth, she herself does not know how to be happy alone. That is why
we are discriminated against everywhere. In a society that leaves no room to
breathe and is built on visibility and constant connection, giving greater
weight to the inner world itself becomes a “cultural violation,” and people
like us can therefore be taken to therapy and remade into something “normal.”
The primary task of psychologists is not to foster individuation but to keep
the person within society, because that is the only thing they are able to do.
Lacking the power to change society, they end up performing propaganda for the
collective by borrowing “authority” from their relationships, even when the
collective is crazy.
―
Atrona Grizel
I cannot imagine
Nietzsche alone. There is something almost comic about it. Even when he wrote
things that appeared to praise solitude, this always felt like a cover, a way
of masking a deeper deprivation. Secretly, he needed others. He lacked the kind
of monastic temperament that would allow him to remain still, silent, and
rooted in one place. Zarathustra descends from the mountain to share his
thoughts with people, and even though he advises them toward solitude, the very
reason for this advice, that is, his coming down from the mountain and
establishing contact with them, shows that he himself could not endure solitude
or that solitude was not enough. Because someone who “affirmed life” was, in
essence, affirming external life. And when that externality disappeared, he was
driven toward madness.
―
Atrona Grizel
Modernity turned
the Buddha into a “wellness mascot,” but deep down he remains the same: life as
suffering, desire as a trap, and liberation as withdrawal. Therapy, of course,
has no language to capture that, and so it reframes meditation as a packaged trend.
―
Atrona Grizel
I am not angry
with people; I am simply disturbed by them. Even if I do fall into anger, it
can never last long, because I cannot be angry at a baby for crying. A baby
exists to cry, after all. But that does not mean I will not be disturbed by its
constant noise.
―
Atrona Grizel
I understood I
had grown when I stopped responding to the urge to change the world.
―
Atrona Grizel
In schools,
because of the rigid system implemented there, there is no time to think.
Teachers rush after tasks, students keep themselves entertained waiting for
school to end, and thus no one ever deeply asks, “Why are we here?” except as
part of some ironic conversation. They are simply there; that is all. When a
class ends, there is a break in between, but this break is only an “interval,”
not a time to sit and think. It is only a void that lightens the burden of the
previous class, and this burden will increase in the next one, and this
continues until the end of the day without pause. No one thinks about what
happened in the previous class; no one evaluates it once it ends, because
schools impose living in a straight line. They sacrifice depth for speed.
During my time there, I often felt a general need to “stop.” I wanted
everything to pause just for a moment. Because they live so superficially and I
wander so deep that I cannot keep up with the absurd tempo of daily life, and
by the end of the day I leave without even understanding what happened. I have
fallen out of human time.
―
Atrona Grizel
I love religious
mystics, but “emptying oneself to make room for God” is something alien to me.
I can only be a mystic who reverses that understanding: emptying God to make
room for myself. That is, instead of watching the stage and applauding, I take
over the stage and write my own play.
― Atrona
Grizel
I am not
anti-social; I can only be anti-societal.
―
Atrona Grizel
The solution is
to eradicate the solution.
―
Atrona Grizel
What makes
someone lovable is not the person but the idea of that person; therefore, the
whole issue in love is the ability to manipulate that idea.
―
Atrona Grizel
My only way out
of school was to obtain a psychiatric diagnosis, to “prove” that I was “insane,”
and it was clear that I would refuse to do that. For this reason, I never told
anyone anything, because I knew the only thing they would do is “refer me to
professionals.” And so, I survived, not lived, my school years.
―
Atrona Grizel
I have become too
accustomed to seeing reality through dreams. Even when standing before a
landscape, I “look” at it by closing my eyes and imagining it instead of simply
watching it, because living what exists in its raw state seems to me like
passive consumption. I experience the world as a sculptor burning with the
desire to chisel and shape a rock that merely stands there. If I were a
painter, I definitely would not paint things as they are.
―
Atrona Grizel
I could not stop
caring because I naturally have a sensitive and receptive identity; I tried to
make myself controllable by burying myself in aphorisms that express iron
indifference and deliberately convincing myself that I am the person in those
aphorisms. Because I had been burned badly by this nature of mine, and it was
not helping in anything other than art and solitude anyway. On the streets
everyone hurls insults at each other. There are people taking drugs. They even
get into primal fights. Leaving a pure person in such a place and going away
insults their existence because for them to survive they must either—though
this is rarely possible because they are stubbornly honest—join them or be
completely pulled inwards, go paranoid, and look for threats beneath every word
and gesture. Because I have full authority over reality, I managed to believe
in my armor. But only in one respect. Because I have also sworn to honesty—or
rather because lying cannot take hold in me by nature—I could not lie to
myself, and naturally I know, deep down, that the person I feel pathetic to is
in some place affecting all my behaviours. At one time I used to think I had
erected a skyscraper on top of mud, because my grandiosity precisely stems from
carrying an ancient sense of inferiority, and this feeling has been carved into
my deepest root by the way people treat me. I can only cover it up. Indeed, I
am not indifferent; I am the kind of person who looks for thousands of meanings
in a single finger movement, who will think about it for months, who will even
wet their pillow by crying at night so much that they cannot sleep. Inside, I
have always remained a pure, clean, good-natured child—even if I become a
tyrant, it will remain an act of a “child’s mischief” inside me, and only I
will know this.
―
Atrona Grizel
I was taught no
practical life skills because the society I was in assumed these things are
already “learned from families.” I received twelve years of compulsory
education and still can barely fold a bedsheet properly. Then what is the point
of school? And I alone bear this pain because I cannot even manage how to hand
money to someone—they immediately see that I am not one of them. Then they mock
me as if I were their work. Of course. Who thinks about the things I think?
They will just laugh at what they see in the moment and forget it all when they
go home. Being born into such an indifferent humanity does not give those
raised outside of it knowledge of how physical life is. These people are
therefore condemned to observe, and later when they are forcibly left inside
this concreteness, they have become too abstract in their adulthood to adapt to
its routines, rhythms, and required numbness.
― Atrona Grizel