Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

My God, I just remembered that we die. —Clarice Lispector

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?

“And I’m sure eventually it’ll be good for my writing too,” Cyrus added. “What’s that thing about living the poems I’m not writing yet?”

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you!”

Cyrus told his AA sponsor Gabe that he believed himself to be a fundamentally bad person. Selfish, self-seeking. Cruel, even.

“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.” “Good-person drag,” Cyrus thought out loud. That’s what they called it after that.

Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying—briefly—what his mind couldn’t.

Someone said alcohol reduces the ‘fatal intensity’ of living.

“I want to matter,” Cyrus whispered. “You and everyone else. Deeper.” “I want to make great art. Art people think matters.”

Cyrus paused, then said, finally: “I want to die. I think I always have.”

“Can you imagine having that kind of faith?” Cyrus asked. “To be that certain of something you’ve never seen? I’m not that certain of anything. I’m not that certain of gravity.” “That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”

The speech you practiced in front of the mirror was always different than the one you ended up giving.

Cyrus was born March 13, 1988, a week before Nowruz, the Persian new year.

“Emkanat.” That was the word. Possibilities.

At night, after the human wave attacks and the mustard gas left countless dozens or hundreds of Iranians dying on the battlefield, it was Arash’s job to quietly and secretly put on a long black cloak, get atop a horse, and ride around the battlefield of fallen men with a flashlight under his face. He was meant to look like an angel. He was meant to inspire the dying men to die with dignity, conviction. To keep them from suicide. The delirious dying men would see Arash on his mount, in his illuminated hood, and believe they were being visited by Gabriel himself, or the twelfth imam returning for them.

What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people.

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.”

Stories are the excrement of time.

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

“Flexible.” Sad James corrected, trying to soften Zee’s language. “You’re currently open to the vicissitudes of fate.”

“That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And misogyny.”

“You know, in Islam, Noah’s this totally messed-up prophet,” Cyrus said, eerily nonplussed. “His neighbors ignore him when he tries to convert them, so Noah asks God to drown them.”

“I think Noah was like, Methuselah’s grandson. Just asking God to kill basically all of mankind. And then he lived to be a thousand years old.”

“I’ve been thinking about dying,”

“Dying soon. Or I guess, killing myself soon, but that sounds so mechanical.”

“I’ve been practicing at it. I have this job…dying.”

It feels like such a throwaway to just die for no reason. To waste your one good death.”

“Do you worry,” Orkideh began, after another long pause, “about becoming a cliché?”

“But you want to die. And you want for that death to be glorious. Like all Iranian men.” “I mean, yeah, but doesn’t everyone want that in the end? For their deaths to matter? Or shouldn’t they?”

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.

The difference between wanting to not be alive and wanting to die.

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

“I came to you, Lord, because of the fucking reticence of the world.”

The iron law of sobriety, with apologies to Leo Tolstoy: the stories of addicts are all alike; but each person gets sober their own way.

I never really loved being alive.

And myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make living tolerable. To make shitty lives seem worth enduring. The gods lived on Olympus, a climbable mountain whose peak was in plain sight.”

sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

A photograph can say “This is what it was.” Language can only say “This is what it was like.”

“Lord, increase my bewilderment.”

each person throbs like an idiot moon: death is their job, dying is yours.

His life was too fucked at present for his death to even count toward anything. A meaningless life meant a meaningless death.

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.

It was silence louder than the music had been, silence made big by the loudness preceding it—the silence after a scream, the silence after a gunshot.

Everything green just farms us, Cyrus thought. Feeding us oxygen and eating our corpses.

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.”

of us did anything to deserve it. Being born. We spend our lives trying to figure out how to pay back the debt of being. And to whom we might pay it.

I read that our genetic code works this way, that most of the sequences are evolutionary fossils, replicated endlessly and meaninglessly, trillions of cells copying the same nothing for millennia.

A discerning lover can read an Odyssey in a gasp, a Shahnehmeh in a sigh.

That was the high. Making something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it.

Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s.