Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“Art is where what we survive survives.”

It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. 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. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. 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.

I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?

An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.