Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“Maybe you don’t believe God wants you to be happy? God, your mother, poetry, whatever. What makes you so special that everyone else deserves that except you?”

“Coral. It’s all dying.” They both paused. “How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?” asked Roya.

“Her death is tragic on the human level,” Sad James countered. “That difference was tragic to you, to your dad, to your families.” “Sure, sure, but that level of tragedy wasn’t legible to the U.S. or to Iran. It’s not legible to empire. Meaningless at the level of empire is what I mean by meaningless.

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

Yes, the sheer dumb luck, as many have said, as I’ve said myself. To get such a chance from a gallery, even a small one, is one in a million. To catch the attention of a Times critic as a nobody, with no connections, no experience. Impossible. Except when Sang asked me to show her a painting, I had one. When she’d asked to see the paintings in my apartment, I had dozens. I’d worked my whole life to acquire the technical, the emotional skills to make those paintings.

“You’re a human being, Cyrus,” Sang said, gently. “So was your mother. So am I. Not cartoon characters. There’s no pressure for us to be ethically pure, noble. Or, God forbid, aspirational. We’re people. We get mad, we get cowardly. Ugly. We self-obsess.”

Any volcano that has erupted since the Holocene, ancient history, is considered active. I haven’t. Does that make me inert? Or overdue?

“All those severe poets talking big about the wages of sin all the time,” Zee added, “but nobody ever brought up the wages of virtue. The toll of trying really really hard to be good in a game that’s totally rigged against goodness.”

Where does all our effort go? It’s hard not to envy the monsters when you see how good they have it. And how unbothered they are at being monsters.”

Often in my life, in the throes of despair, of my husband’s abuse, I have held the certainty of the damned, that sense of “everything is going to be just this, this misery forever, till I die.” An irrepressible inescapable horror stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that way.