Working in a morgue could have been my therapy.
Working in a morgue could have been my therapy.
― Atrona Grizel
To be tired as if one had lived not for decades, but for millennia…
― Atrona Grizel
I have grown so accustomed to feeling alone that I can no longer tell whether I am lonely or not. When what people call “the feeling of loneliness” arises within me, even if I ask myself, “Am I lonely now?” I cannot be certain, because I cannot name it; it is nothing more than a background noise—this pain.
― Atrona Grizel
If, when a person suffers, their ego does not expand but instead contracts, then it is the pain that wields them—not they who wield the pain. Pain renders the imperial soul full and prideful, the poet who merely feels it sorrowful, and the wise who merely endure it acceptive to the point of mediocrity.
― Atrona Grizel
What people call “taking part in life” has always felt to me like getting lost inside a game. Nothing I experienced in that regard was ever real; it was nothing but a performance imposed by necessity. One thing is certain: no one works willingly. People take up work either because of an inner compulsion arising from within or because external conditions—financial hardship, for example—force it upon them. This struck me as absurd, and it still does: why is there no different system that would abolish work altogether? Am I condemned to labor for my entire life merely to fill my stomach? This preordained life of servitude exists only because others exist. If there were no people, I could have lived my entire life looting abandoned markets without even knowing how to cook. But no—what immense misfortune that I happened to be born into the most tedious era of all, the age of humans. And yet what I desire is not excessive: a box only a few meters wide, containing a bed, a desk, and a toilet. A single meal a day would suffice; after that, I should simply be allowed to write and listen to music. That is all. I could have lived my entire life in such a place, if only there had been someone willing to provide it. At times, I even find myself considering homelessness, living without working and surviving on the meals provided at shelters—because even homelessness repels me less than employment does. There is a reason why pessimistic philosophers have often, in one way or another, found a loophole—whether in the law or within their social milieu—and exploited it to evade conventional employment: only in the absence of a job are they able to devote themselves to genuine work. For that very reason, they become acutely sensitive to the absurdities of society. It is difficult for someone who has a defined place within society to truly criticize it; by refusing to enter the nine-to-five and weekday–weekend cycle, such individuals are able to observe that it is not something natural but an artificially constructed loop. If I belong to that lineage—and I feel that I do—then employment has been time unjustly stolen from my life, obstructing my real work. Do they really believe I take pleasure in those smiling faces at the workplace, in the rituals of polititeness, in the mottos of “progress and productivity”? Yet is this not a rule that governs the entire world of work? And if so, must one not stand outside it in order to avoid becoming corrupted? For those whose identity is oriented not toward social and practical tasks but toward abstract and existential pursuits, unemployment is not a state of laziness but a state of vitality.
― Atrona Grizel
My pain is caused by people, and since people are everywhere, the source of my pain is everywhere as well. After spending an entire day like this—especially in the evening, when work ends—I find the world “abandoned.” No one is there. Why? First, I am completely alien to other people, and so I see them as passing silhouettes without any interiority. If I were to die on the spot, I do not think any of them would truly care. Second, being forced to live among such beings requires me to abandon myself, because if I do not, they contaminate me and turn me into someone like them, someone who regards society as legitimate. So I retreat inward, and I do so with such expertise that throughout the day I become entirely depersonalized—stripped of my soul, as if my body were somehow moving on its own. In that state, I am no longer in the world. I have vanished. The feeling of abandonment is intense because I am all I have, and when even that departs, it leaves me with a deep loneliness that lasts all day and by the end turns into extreme fatigue. When this happens, all my fears disappear, because after a day spent in torture, I develop an unshakable conviction that no further torture is possible. Or rather, my mind almost primally shifts completely into defense mode, as if saying, “no more pain,” and gains the capacity to destroy whatever stands before it. During such times, I turn into a megalomaniac and submit to the notion that no one even has the “right” to oppose me. This is not belief; it is a form of indifference toward any alternative reality that threatens my well-being, triggered by mental burnout and the activation of my survival reflex. As a result, I come to care only about myself, and this is precisely when I am most prone to impulsiveness. If, after leaving my torture chamber and walking through the streets, someone were to disturb me for any reason—and if I were slightly more impulsive and slightly less empathetic—I might start a fight simply for the pleasure of it. I would harass everyone and take pleasure in it, because they would all appear to me as accomplices. I would want to shatter their brains to completely relieve myself—but they seem to carry no brains; they manage their lives with brainstems, and is that not the reason for my rage?
― Atrona Grizel
“Culture” is this: the echo chamber of every community and society.
― Atrona Grizel
If every word that came out of me did not pass through excessive control like the border gate of a paranoid state, I would probably write something like this: “I want to be free of this sick mind.” Yes. That. Not freedom from society. Not freedom from existence. From myself. For is it not my mind that turns society and existence into a nightmare? If I were to commit suicide, I imagine that someone who had only read my writings and never truly known me personally would simply attribute it to “intellectual mismatch” or “metaphysical alienation.” Yet at its root there is actually a single cause: jealousy. Yes. I am jealous of people—not in a self-degrading sense—but because they clearly possess love, respect, and happiness, and I feel as if I was sent into the world merely to watch these things from afar. I was never loved. I was never respected. I was never understood. Of course, even if my emotions feel this way, my mind—that dictator—always holds these feelings captive and forces them to express only what it permits. Thus, jealousy mutates into various other forms. But at its core, it is raw envy. And nothing—not the fact of death, nor the futility of desire—can prevent it. Unless I withdraw into a monastery, I will always be exposed to others, and that exposure will emphasize the multiplicity of lives, reminding me again of all the possibilities I have not lived and will never live. Yet in order to endure my pain, I tried to exclude all other possibilities through various philosophies and methods, attempting to slightly improve the slave life into which I had fallen. I minimized my relationship with the external world because whenever I remembered it, I was reminded that I stood outside of life, spending my existence inside a box. So I expelled the external world completely and declared myself a god upon my own throne, simply to endure solitude more easily. Everything I write is part of this, for I am not truly constructing a philosophy; I am weaving armor to survive. Everything I have written emerged during a siege—not in moments of calm contemplation—which means it is deeply functional, born of something painful and personal rather than merely thoughtful or exploratory. Naturally, I became unable to imagine another life. Yet communal life requires lives to intertwine, and so it throws back in my face all the pleasant things I have been deprived of and my youth I have squandered. This is why people hurt me without doing anything at all. If I were ever truly to take my own life, I believe it would be mainly for two very ordinary, very human reasons—reasons that contradict my “mythical” and “mystical” persona: social and sexual frustration.
― Atrona Grizel
When I reach the point of nearly taking my own life because of thoughts I consider serious, and I throw myself out into the street, that intensity subsides; the street’s superficiality, indifference, and constant motion remind me—almost as if saving my life—that nothing is actually serious, including me as a person.
― Atrona Grizel