To walk through society without a mask is the same as walking around stark naked.
To walk through society without a mask is the same as walking around stark naked.
― Atrona
Grizel
I spend the
entire day waiting for night.
― Atrona Grizel
The only hope I have is to make it to the next weekend, along with an almost indifferent curiosity about how I will endure the week.
― Atrona
Grizel
Collective movements exploit dissatisfaction and convert it into a supposed need for reform. This mechanism is dangerous, because that is precisely why mainly the lonely, the poor, or those who have been stripped of their humanity join such organizations: they promise a family—togetherness, happiness. For a lonely person, the first thing they think of is bonds; for a poor person, a safe shelter; for a dehumanized person, being accepted as human again. These movements promise exactly those things, and in doing so, an existential despair that should remain individual is carried onto the sociteal level. What follows is merely the same despair being drawn into a vortex, trapping the person ever more deeply within these movements, because they become unable to function without them; thus, the movements continue to grow as they replace individual identity.
― Atrona Grizel
Thanks to school, I
understood what life in a concentration camp is like, because there—on top of
ten hours of compulsory sociality—no one even asks how you are. You are
invisible, because you are not accepted as a human being; you are merely a
creature sent there to crawl through the day in exhaustion and boredom and then
brought back. Every night they came to my door and told me to go to bed early,
and every night my heart raced, because I knew this order would be repeated and
that if I didn’t comply, I would be punished—that is, taken to the
interrogation room. In the morning they would always tell me to get on the bus
immediately and not be late, and because I did all of this out of obligation,
and because no one cared about that, I felt constantly on alert again. The
thought of going outside tightened my breath, because even when I was in the
open air, I was trapped inside a narrow cage. Because I spent the entire day
there, I could allocate at most a few hours to myself during the week, and I
tried to compensate for this by secretly waking at night. Just as poets who
survived the gulags wrote whenever they found the tiniest free moment and hid
their writings, I too wrote at school whenever I could find a moment free from
maintaining the constant performance of a stable external persona. Those in the
camps were forced to work physically all day; I, on the other hand, worked
mentally all day purely to preserve myself from collapse. In this way, both of
us were reduced to being content with mere survival itself, forced to set aside
all our hopes and dreams. My family’s obsession with my going to bed early came
from their belief that I slept at school and that this would magically fix it.
At a parent–teacher meeting, a teacher complained about me, and from that day
on, for years, they stood at my door every night like a set clock, planting
panic and grief inside me. I remained silent, because if you opposed authority,
you would simply be sent to a camp with even worse conditions—because you are
not human anyway, and if you continue to see yourself as human, you only suffer
more in that situation. So I left humanity behind; now I merely exist. For
years I kept going there, and my family still doesn’t even know that despite
giving me early-bedtime warnings every night, I lay there for hours, asleep or
drifting into surreal fantasies—because frankly they don’t care about me
emotionally and therefore don’t even know what I am doing there, yet they care
excessively in a bureaucratic sense and thus make me a prisoner of someone
else’s life. The last time I listened to a lesson was years ago; I don’t need
teachers, and yet I was getting the highest grades on exams, though I assigned
no value to them and took those grades purely functionally, not as part of my
identity, because I wasn’t doing it willingly. Still, I had to go there, to
that hell filled with interchangeable dumbasses repeating the same mechanical
scripts every day without boredom, because they simply would not understand
that I already work in my room and learn better without teachers whose mere
existence is an insult to the taught, as it implies incapability or
inexperience. Time narrowed, naturally; a few months passed like a few days
because nothing new was happening—just noise, noise, and more noise. I remember
moments when, just to find something—anything—to endure with even a little
relief, I would burst into tears upon encountering dark classical music,
biographies of people who had lived similarly miserable lives across decades in
prisons, or antisocietal philosophical quotations in books; it was like finding
food in a place ruled by famine, because they were the only things that allowed
me to go on. Not optimism. Not hope. Endurance. But I made no attempts to
escape, because wherever I fled I would inevitably be a captive as well; the
problem is not a building but existence itself. I was not created for this
planet, and the conditions of the concentration camp ensured that I carried
this utter conviction every second.
― Atrona
Grizel
How can people,
in public spaces, on public transportation for instance, actually read
newspapers or books, listen to music, or simply sleep? To do that, you have to
stop caring about anyone there; your attention must be on the pages, the music,
or the sleep, not on the people around you. This requires treating others as
background noise rather than as full, complex individuals, which is a form of
dehumanization. Although tired or habituated people can easily do this, and
even sensitive people can sometimes manage it, they do so less often because
they remain aware of the environment they are in. Awareness cannot coexist with
indifference; a reaction always leaks through. Yet most people appear to leak
nothing, because they are not aware of anything, not even in the most basic
sense. For instance, most of them cannot say, “At this moment, I am within the
entity called the universe, within the galaxies of the Local Group, within the
Milky Way galaxy, within the solar system, on the planet called Earth, on this
continent, in this country, in this city, on this vehicle,” because their minds
have narrowed into that human game and they cannot see beyond it. I could never
do what they do, because I would take not caring about people personally, as
something I would feel responsible for despite everything. So many people are
born inside a huge machine, into the same bureaucratic cage, and none of them
even makes a sound about it, and this makes me feel unintentionally guilty.
They say there are “social rules.” Those unwritten rules, having reigned over
and suffocated societies for thousands of years, hesitate only slightly before
drowning them entirely. They do not realize that these rules exist to normalize
separation and indifference. Talking to strangers is supposedly foolish, for
example, because they have no place in one’s life, or worse, dangerous, because
they might do something “bad.” People also believe that “certain things should
be spoken of only in certain places,” and by dividing life into compartments
once again, they push the public transportation space completely into the
background. As a result, everyone boards that bus or train without a sound and
gets off again without a sound, ignoring even the person standing right in
front of them and treating them as just another human briefly seen in passing.
I never adapted to this rhythm. I have to make an effort not to care about
people, because it is not natural to me; they, on the other hand, do it without
effort, because this is simply what they are like. How can they be so numb?
They are all thinking about their own lives; that metro or bus is merely the
point where those lives intersect, and since they are not even conscious of
that, they can only think about their own lives anyway. I see faces there.
There are people. Yet it feels as if none of them is breathing. Though the
space is filled with bodies, there is no mind. Even if I stood right in front
of them and waved my hands at their faces, it seems as though they still would
not see. Everyone moves silently, as if bound by an unspoken agreement, from
one place to another, and even while sitting on those seats, when they stand
up, instead of realizing that this is a rush, they are already thinking about
the rush they will merge back into once they leave. And I, as always in my
invisibility, feel as though a pane of glass has been placed between them and
me, as if I am watching from behind it, unreachable, an alien precisely because
I am the only present person there. If I were to say to them, “I’m tired of all
this nonsense. I want everything to stop, even for a moment, just so it can
breathe,” I would of course be seen as insane, because in the vortex of daily
rhythm, saying such a thing is a social crime. No one there would share this
view, because what feels like hell to me feels natural to them, because they
belong to this world; they have anesthetized themselves and no longer feel the
fire.