Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Borges said about fathers and mirrors? They’re abominations. They both double the number of men.”

Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

What was the point if every road led back to the same shame?

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.

Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.”

But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good.

Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day.

They lacked faith in my conviction.

It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.

All of us were dying, I’d remind them. I was just dying faster.

“You think there’s some nobility in being above anger?”

Globs of snow were falling from the clouds that had begun, almost imperceptibly, growing lighter,

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.

When the world was flat, people leapt off all the time.

There is nothing remarkable about dying this way, but I hope I’ve made something interesting of my living. An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.

Reader, your attention—a measure of time, your most non-replenishable resource—is a profound gift, one I have done my best to honor. Thank you, thank you.