Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”

“Angela Davis would say we’re all selling our bodies,” I said, smiling. “That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And misogyny.”

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.

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

She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.

She was gorgeous in that aggressively American way, the kind of woman you might see in an ad for cold medicine.

It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire. —from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams

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.

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

His whole life was a conspiracy of other people helping him, other people teaching him this or that.

The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not.

The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.

I had words—enough to say “please” and “sorry” and “thank you”—all you need in any language, really, unless you’re a philosopher.

Like a natural disaster. Not “massacre.” Not even “murder.” The imprecision of American justice was a given, even to Americans.

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.

Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.

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.

“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.”

“It’s just. 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.”