Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation? To make everyone else lurch from crisis to crisis, desperately alone?

He liked how the Quran put it that way, not “until you die” but “until you are of those who perish.” Like an arrival into a new community, one that had been eagerly waiting for you.

“There’s no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more.”

When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, ‘gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.’ But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff.” Roya was working herself up. “Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”

“How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?”

When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul.

You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn’t do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.

Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.

So much of his psychic bandwidth was taken up with conflicting thoughts about political prepositions. The morality of almond milk. The ethics of yoga. The politics of sonnets. There was nothing in his life that wasn’t contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called “late capitalism.” He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen.

He wanted to be on “the right side of history,” whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history.

“Expendable” may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

It was invented, of course, language. The first baby didn’t come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.

Smart, I thought, for God to demand prayer from his servants while their minds were still gummy with dream, while the partition between our world and his was thinnest.

It was like Americans had another organ for it, that hate-fear. It pulsed out of their chests like a second heart.

“Why are you worried about what people who hate you think about your art?” “Well, because the people who hate me also own all the guns and all the prisons.”