"Martyr!"

[fiefoe]

Kaveh Akbar's novel is all about how to achieve a worthy end. At times it's more like a thought experiment than a set of real characters acting in the real world, so the fantastical ending doesn't come as a surprise, but still I don't think it contributes to the overall cause.

• He wondered if it had maybe been the sheer weight of his wanting, or his watching, that strained his eyes till they saw what they’d wanted to see. He wondered if maybe that was how God worked now in the new world. Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest, through CVS handles of bourbon and little pink pills with G 31 written on their side.
• Lying there reflecting on the possible miracle he’d just experienced, Cyrus asked God to do it again. Confirmation, like typing your password in twice to a web browser.
• he had been playing at dying. Not in the Plath “I have done it again, one year in every ten” way. Cyrus was working as a medical actor at the Keady University Hospital. Twenty dollars an hour, fifteen hours a week, Cyrus pretended to be “of those who perish.” He liked how the Quran put it that way, not “until you die” but “until you are of those who perish.” Like an arrival into a new community, one that had been eagerly waiting for you.
• Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated. That was one of the vague axioms from his drinking days to which Cyrus still clung, even in sobriety. It wasn’t fair that just because he was sober, everyone expected him to exhaustively interrogate his every decision. This job or that job, this life or that. Not drinking was Herculean enough on its own.
• A drunk horse thief who stops drinking is just a sober horse thief, Cyrus’d said, feeling proud to have thought it. He’d use versions of that line later in two different poems.
• “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.
• “Well, like I said, we offer a wide range of palliative options,” she hissed, staring at Cyrus, Cyrus-Cyrus, beneath Mrs. Kaufmann, willing him toward compliance.
• ooze worked that way sometimes, clarifying—briefly—what his mind couldn’t. It was like sitting in the optometrist’s office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it’d be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom. That was the clarity alcohol, and nothing else, gave. Seeing life as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you. But of course a second later it’d zoom past clarity
• remember sitting there feeling, not happy exactly but simple, maybe? Like a jellyfish just floating along. Someone said alcohol reduces the ‘fatal intensity’ of living. Maybe it was that.”
• And you know? It felt good. It felt so good, putting her on her heels like that. Being in control. We’re always talking in here about surrendering, surrendering. ‘Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do thy will.’ Giving up control. But it’s those moments of rushing the cockpit where I actually feel anything anymore, where I remember who I am.
• There was something in it, a kind of old man punk “fuck-it”-ness Cyrus had long admired, even if it meant Gabe sometimes danced well past the third rail of political correctness. Still, however abstractly he envied Gabe’s ability to speak unencumbered by the rhetorical hygienics du jour,
• He drove home thinking of better alternatives: limp-dicked Republican church, coven of racist crones. It was soothing, to stop time and rework memory, imagining through the thesaurus multiverse. Vapid temple of words. Scumbag Caesars vivisecting God. He thought about all the poets he’d read whose rapturous ecstasy overwhelmed even language’s ability to transcribe it.
• It was hard for Cyrus not to see waking as the enemy. The way it corroded your power to exist—to live and think with acuity—until you finally submitted. Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote.
• Ali’s anger—a moon. It grew so vast it scared him, so deep it felt like terror. On the news he saw the vice president of the United States say: “I don’t care what the facts are. I’m not an apologize for America kind of guy.” <> That Ali’s family, his friends, could put words around their anger meant it was a different thing entirely from what he was feeling. Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones.
• In that one, a full-page photograph of a winged stone sphinx. “From the Palace of Dariush,” said the caption underneath, “Older than the Roman Colosseum!” Some solace in history, perhaps, knowing other civilizations had also destroyed themselves. In fact, the record seemed to suggest such destruction was inevitable, the endpoint of every people.
• In Isfahan, the old capital, soldiers showed up unannounced at the doors of old women, saying, “Congratulations, your sons have been martyred.” <> The mothers would have to hold back their tears, wringing their lips into the eerie not-quite-smiles they’d spend the rest of their lives perfecting. They were the lucky ones. Inside Tehran’s Revolution Square, the sons of other mothers hung from cranes.
• One month Ali bought a Big Mouth Billy Bass with the “extra money.” It was a cheap mounted rubber fish that would move its lips to a digitized version of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” It was a ridiculous extravagance, one the two Shams men loved with a chilling lack of irony.
• * the strangest job in the Persian army. 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... For hundreds of dying Iranian men, Arash on horseback was the last thing they saw. Which meant Arash watched hundreds of men die.
• under the best conditions, he’d be fully dreaming the interaction—his characters would talk to each other for his benefit, a movie he’d cast and staged himself.
• It became a way of visiting the titans of his psychic life, a Faustian trade-off with his insomnia. It was the only way he could spend time with Marie Curie, Allen Iverson, Kurt Cobain. It was the only time he got to hear his mother’s voice.
• Cyrus created a miniature economy out of these drugs, trading them for street drugs like weed or cocaine or MDMA or heroin. Often, he’d then trade those for booze. The drugs were exciting new lovers, each with fresh ways to touch him, new ways to turn him on. They came and went and came and came. But Cyrus’s true love, his bedrock, his soulmate, was alcohol. Alcohol was faithful, omnipresent, predictable. Alcohol didn’t demand monogamy like opiates or meth. Alcohol demanded only that you came back home to it at the end of the night.
• Often Cyrus would piss himself as a result of these unconscious drinks. He’d wake up, feel the coldness—always the coldness first, coldness being so much of wet—and clean his mess with the exasperated resolve of someone digging their car out of ice. It was the unpleasant but necessary cost of being able to move through the world.
• * “Right. 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.”
• We treat our minds like crowns, these magnificent crowns on our magnificent autonomies. But our minds aren’t crowns. They’re clocks. It’s why we invest everything in our stories. Stories are the excrement of time. Someone said that.” <> “Adélia Prado,” said Lisa.
• “One day I saw pictures of a coral reef in a book from the Tehran library, and I decided I would be the first florist who cut and arranged coral into beautiful bouquets. Taking my uncle’s idea and improving it.”
  “Aw, that’s very sweet,” Lisa said. “But coral is alive!”
  “So were flowers, I figured. So was yeast. I didn’t really understand coral. I just wanted to swim in it, to put my fingers through it.”
  “Soon there won’t be any left,” said Lisa.
• * “I’m really not sure yet. But my whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her. That’s what I’m after.”
• Like in Iran, there are these schools for the children of men killed in the war, who they call ‘martyrs.’ Those martyr schools are the good schools, the fancy schools, you try to get your kids into them. Kids with healthy parents grow up jealous of orphans, because the children of martyrs get automatic college admission, all this special treatment. I’ve heard of children of martyrs trying to hide it, like they’re ashamed of all the privilege. Like trust fund kids, except instead of trust funds they have dead parents.
• On the left side of the flyer was a woman’s face, a face dusted with the cosmic jaggedness so often found on the dying.
• * But something in his father’s smirk suggested to Cyrus that he knew exactly what he was saying. There was a kind of pride in Ali’s face when he said it, that Iranians were uglier. There was a satisfaction that took Cyrus years to unpack.... But ugliness, the Iranian ugliness Ali had meant, was earned... The hardness of a smile line, softness in the folds under an eye.
• Cyrus called our Saturday visits to Jude “grocery shopping.”
  “Like volunteering in a co-op,” he’d said once on our way to Jude’s house.
  “Except sexier,” I added.
  “Oh my god,” said Cyrus. “Yeah. Are we doing sex work? Is this sex work? Are we selling our bodies?”
  “Angela Davis would say we’re all selling our bodies,” I said, smiling.
• “Sixty-four tidy doses!” he beamed, holding up the chessboard once his tincture finished drying. He took such pride in being “good at drugs.” I could take them or leave them; my mom was always fucked up on some combination of prescriptions and ayurvedic snake oil, benzos, and traditional Egyptian remedies based on the Book of Thoth.
• * “It honestly doesn’t even hurt,” said Cyrus, stunned, staring at his bloody shoe.
  “That’s not a good thing,” I said, shooting him a look to remind him we’d been licking potent pain meds designed for the terminally ill.
• “Do you have any coconut juice?” Cyrus asked Jude. Then to me, “That’s a thing, right? Coconut juice is the same thing as blood? Or blood plasma? When you drink it?” <> I shrugged. Jude said, “I’m not a Trader Joe’s either. I might have some dried coconut for baking, maybe.”
• Something delicate released in my chest, like a gold ring dropping in a bowl of milk.
• The chimes sounded in his hands, their delicate plunky clinks an odd sonic consequence of Jude’s furiously thrusting them toward Cyrus.
• there’s a Bobby Sands Street in Tehran
  one block over from Ferdowsi Avenue,
  that’s true, Ireland, Iran, interchangeable mythos,
  petrostates, and besides, nonviolence
  is for the pepper trees—violence, that’s what the church called
  your hunger strike, and Thatcher called you a convicted criminal
• “Do you worry,” Orkideh began, after another long pause, “about becoming a cliché?” “How do you mean?” “Another death-obsessed Iranian man?”... “See, that’s the thing. I didn’t even know about all that cult-of-the-martyr stuff until relatively recently. Families picnicking at cemeteries of the war dead, the state hiring poets to read at their graves.
• I just want to write an epic. A book. Something about secular, pacifist martyrs. People who gave their lives to something larger than themselves. No swords in their hands.” “Oh my God, so you’re a poet too! All the Persian checkboxes.”
• He had thought of this, reading about Malcolm X, the Tiananmen Tank Man, and Hypatia of Alexandria. He’d stared at picture after picture of Bhagat Singh, the Souliot Women, and Emily Wilding Davison. {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_Zalongo}
• You’re talking about people who die for other people. Not dying for glory or an impressable God. Not the promise of a sunny afterlife for themselves. You’re talking about earth martyrs.”
• chicken plant: biosecurity meant we couldn’t bring our own food in. What they gave us was all vegetarian; meat had too many germs.
• I used to think slow, slower than language moved. By the time I settled into an idea about anything, the moment for me to say something had passed. Roya used to say I was a good listener. Mostly, though, I was just a bad talker.
• * For all our advances in science—chickens that can go from egg to harvest in a month, planes to cross the world, missiles to shoot them down—we’ve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper delivery. How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating. <> Maybe it’s because we could pass along science... You couldn’t do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.
• Cyrus believed a hyper-focus on occasions for gratitude would make his eventual death more poignant, more valuable. When a sad-sack who hated life killed themselves, what were they really giving up? The life they hated? Far more meaningful, thought Cyrus, to lift yourself out of a life you enjoyed—the tea still warm, the honey still sweet. That was real sacrifice.
• * Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?
• And then, if the girl herself was rubbled by an errant mortar shell, her eyes full of tears and aimed in their final living moment at that flower, which would weigh more on the cosmic scales: a tear of gratitude at the great beauty of a flower lifting through ash, or a tear of delirious rage?
• It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life. Even the platitudes offered after a tragedy—a divorce, a dead pet—seemed built around the expectation that gratitude was a base level to which you returned after passing through some requisite interval of grief:
• The unforgivable vanity of fantasizing about one’s own death.
• * So much of his psychic bandwidth was taken up with conflicting thoughts about political prepositions. The morality of almond milk. The ethics of yoga. The politics of sonnets. There was nothing in his life that wasn’t contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called “late capitalism.” He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen.
• She would never be what I was, a boy, a burgeoning man, with all the manlinesses, the tolerance for pain that implied. It was better she learned this from me than from the world.
• Alireza was killed in a training accident. Alireza, martyred. At least with his own name.... It is a funny story, I think, funny the way crows are funny birds, more knowing than they let on. The story pretends to be about names but it’s actually a story about time, how time flattens everything. Family, duty, whatever. Into dirt.
• that transformation, potential energy into motion, is what makes stones powerful, terrible, how they can crush people. Sometimes I feel like that, like I’m walking around all stuffed up with potential energy, a stone hanging in the air with no knife sharp enough to cut the rope.
• Fajr was always my favorite of those prayers because it was so short, only two rakats. The whole experience of the prayer fit tidily into the span of a single dream, a fifteen-minute sleepwalk into surrender, obedience, God, whatever. Smart, I thought, for God to demand prayer from his servants while their minds were still gummy with dream,
• the water stripping not just the dream from my head but my head itself, until by the end I’m just scrubbing whatever vanity isn’t, whatever to be is, whatever’s beneath my body and all its equipment for keeping me here, that’s what I imagine myself washing. I get the sense my is is filthier than other people’s.
• * Gilles Deleuze called elegy LA GRANDE PLAINTE, “the great complaint,” a way of saying “what is happening is too much for me.” In Iran, Ashura is a day of elegy where people fast and mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, killed in 680 CE on his fifty-fifth birthday in the Battle of Karbala. A day of elegy. “What happened thirteen centuries ago is still too much for us,” Iranians say.
• * At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else... Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder.
• When they slept together, she would just kind of lie back and smile a little, like, you’re welcome. That sort of beautiful... That her groceries came from Whole Foods, not Aldi. The fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice alone was almost worth the cognitive dissonance.
• Jean Valentine: “I came to you, Lord, because of the fucking reticence of the world.”
• the algorithm is inexorable. A drug works till it doesn’t. Dependence grows until it eclipses everything else in the addict’s life. Rotten sun. Joy withers in the absence of light. Passion, jobs, freedom, family. We all have the snorting-spilled-coke-off-bathroom-tile stories. That stuff is only interesting to those blessed with a rare cosmic remove from knowing actual addicts. Active addiction is an algorithm, a crushing sameness. The story is what comes after.
• * QU YUAN 340 BCE–278 BCE    you laureate of tongue and stone, / among the rarer hues
• * Persian mirror art: Instead of great panes of mirror, the shah’s architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches.”... These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred.” ... That maybe we’ve been training for a long time in sitting in the complicated multiplicities of ourselves, of our natures. At least for a time.
• //KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR AND BEETHOVEN SHAMS dream: How much of the people’s kindness had to do with their own sense of responsibility, their obsession with their own goodness? Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about ‘the politics of personal exoneration…
• who had spent his life fighting a war he never understood and lived his final hours suffering so painfully on earth was sent to the other Hereafter, the place-name Arman won’t even say when he tells me this story, like the name of a djinn, better not to even say it. How saying it calls on language to represent it, this sound is that thing, how some things rebuke sound, rebuke representation,... to remind them to suffer manfully, men like me preserve for them their hereafter
• he bursts into tears, bursts yes like a lotus bursting into a tantrum of blades,
• I asked her about whether she plots out her books in advance and just fills in the details, or if she moves through the story as she writes it. She looked at me and without skipping a second, she answered like an oracle: ‘Behind me is silence, and ahead of me is silence.’... “What I mean is, I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said.
• * said Orkideh. “It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.”
• * Ferdowsi called his poem Shahnehmeh, “The Book of Kings.” He filled it with ancient histories of Persia’s kings and heroes, epic battles and romances, fantastical magic and treacherous deceits. He also put his son, Sohrab, in it. Ferdowsi’s love for his lost son colored the whole text, like deep wine spilled across its pages. {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdowsi}
• All around us, handsome new parks and plazas effervesced in the night. Many of these fresh constructions, I knew, were converted cemeteries full of the regime’s executed political prisoners. Paving over those unmarked mass graves with turf, with water features, to show the world how happy and pristine Tehran had become. 
• * “It’s the backside of the zoo, Roya jaan,” she said. “This is the fence. Just watch.” <> Two giraffes were chewing lazily. Totally uninterested in us. The largest of the three was on the ground sleeping with its giant neck looped around to its backside. It looked like a colossal purse. Each giraffe had the long eyelashes of horses, and those same sad eyes, like they knew they weren’t made for this world. Or worse, like they knew they were.
• I was too flustered, too suddenly dizzy to say anything back, so I just let her head rest there. The giraffe that had been lying there still was, lazily blinking his eyes open and closed. Its great neck curled like some alien punctuation.
• * Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power—a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt. <> Even Jesus doubted, his moment of “eloi eloi lama sabachthani” on the cross, incredulous with grief and doubt at his own suffering, calling up Psalm 22 to try to self-soothe, to assuage his own agony.
• “Well, of course I changed my mind, I was presented with new information, that’s the definition of critical thinking.” That it seemed impossible to conceive of a political leader making such a statement made Cyrus mad, then sad. <> Of course, Cyrus himself wasn’t impervious to this way of thinking. That was the whole martyr book. He wanted to live perfectly enough to die without creating a ripple of pain behind him, like an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool.
• Cyrus prided himself in descending from people comfortable sitting in uncertainty. He himself knew little about anything and tried to remember that. He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.”
• “I reread the The Bell Jar a year ago, and yikes,” Zee said. “There were pages I just had to flip past.”... That scene where she kicks the guy for serving two different kinds of beans?”
• * “You act like you live in this vacuum. Like there’s already this frame hanging around your life. But you can’t use history to rationalize everything. You realize that’s what countries do, right? What America does? And what Iran does, specifically?” ... the Iranian government putting an image of the plane crash that had killed Cyrus’s mother on a state postage stamp to stoke anti-American sentiment. How one nation flattened history into a statistical anomaly, collateral damage, and the other minted it into propaganda.
• the man he quietly loved, the gentle writer with whom he’d spent years swinging from joy to joy, despair to despair... “Cyrus, for months, every song I’ve listened to has been directly about me. About my life. And my stupid fucking life with you. Every flower has been blooming straight into my fucking face. Do you know what that is? It’s like being insane. Like the fucking pigeons are speaking to me. Have you ever felt that? Do you have any idea what I’m even talking about?”
• * Allegri’s Miserere: “Nothing. It felt like a miracle every time. It didn’t matter if I came in just for the last minute, the last ninety seconds of the tape. There were five voices and I heard something new every time. The idea that someone, a child, could hear it once or twice and remember everything, and I could hear it a thousand times like I’d never heard it once before? What does that tell you?”... “You wouldn’t understand even if you heard it, nephew. Get it? I listen to it and see God in it because I’ve been God. I’ve spoken to those same angels, right? But you see a picture of an angel and a sword and think only of your crazy uncle.
• During the deepest stages of his drinking this had been a regular occurrence; in the night he’d sleepwalk to get more beer, more booze, but his lizard brain cared more about the alcohol’s acquisition than its orderly discharge. That was just life then, waking into the familiar braid of self-loathing and duty that governed his living
• self-pity and resentments being the “dubious luxuries” of normal people, but for alcoholics, they were poison... His best friend was gone. He was in a cold war with his sponsor, with recovery in general. His book—if it could even be called that—was going nowhere. His life was too fucked at present for his death to even count toward anything. A meaningless life meant a meaningless death.
• the booming immediacy of physical pleasure. “Paradise is mine today, as cash in hand,” Hafez had written. “Why should I count upon the puritan’s pledge of tomorrow?” Cyrus wasn’t sure how many tomorrows he had left and considered briefly that Zee might have been right, that he might not be fully inhabiting his todays. <> It felt like the only time Cyrus ever really felt now-ness was when he was using. When now was physiologically, chemically discernible from before. Otherwise he felt completely awash in time: stuck between birth and death, an interval where he’d never quite gotten his footing. But he was also awash in the world and its checkboxes—neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk nor in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight.
• * That first kiss between Leila and me was a strange and foreign word, one someone might clumsily translate as “sky” but that actually meant something closer to “heaven.”
• Jagger pleaded, “Tell me you’re coming back to me, you gotta tell me you’re coming back to me.” How it felt like the perfect song then, even though we were together, the bud of us just starting to open. Something in the song’s plaintive yearning, that’s what it was, bone-deep yearning. We held the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle, swaying as its flame smocked the wick, our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends you, buckles you, like waves or miracles.
• * His whole life was a conspiracy of other people helping him, other people teaching him this or that. He felt like Hamlet, just moping around waiting for the world to assuage his grief, petulantly soliloquizing and fainting while everyone else fed him bananas and candy bars. Hamlet died at the end, of course. “The rest is silence,” Hamlet declared, though he also demanded his best friend tell everyone else his story. Cyrus felt that full of shit.
• * 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.
• Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed.
• 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. <> If so much of my language is junk, both the language of my speech and the language of my body, it seems like a not insignificant portion of my living must be doomed to junk... But in terms of earnest, mellifluous human communication involving the least junk, sex reigns. It’s where the comprehension density is the greatest. A discerning lover can read an Odyssey in a gasp, a Shahnehmeh in a sigh... When Leila’s fingers first crept down and met an unconscious stiffening of my stomach, she read as robust an autobiography as I’ll ever write. And then she added her own movement, her own chapters to it. She changed the text of my living.
• “I do not care about the pistachios, Roya jaan. I do not care about the tree. He owes us the fifty years of sun, fifty years of water inside that tree. Fifty years of sun and water. That is the price.” <> She said it in English. I woke screaming. English, fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. 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.
• Light washes of big colors, bold shapes. Then details. Playing with value, hue. Fat dark blues, arthritic grays. <> It was a place to put myself. The less time I spent in my higher brain, in the abyss, the safer I was.
• the painting that had become the bedrock upon which I’d built my new life,
• Cyrus’s mother was another one of those just-stepping-out-for-a-pack-of-cigs family abandoners. He’d been a tiny baby. It felt so pulverizingly mundane. Roya Shams, the deadbeat mom. Or at least, she’d planned to be a deadbeat, before her lover—her lover!—Leila!!—was shot out of the sky... Then at himself, for feeling angry instead of something more enlightened: acceptance, or perhaps compassion. That’s where he quickly settled, the vector of his rage, his hurt, pointed directly back at himself.
• * Fear made me work hard, get better. It’s a dirty fuel, but it works. .. You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.
• The wind stirred up a flurry of snowflakes, lifting them off the dead grass like sparks rising off a beach fire.
• Satan’s laughing and laughing. Rolling around. He passes all the way through the first man and he’s rolling around laughing, in tears, and he says to God, ‘This is what you’ve made? He’s all empty! All hollow!’ He can’t believe his luck. How easy his job is going to be. Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.”... “Oh, I don’t know about ‘should.’ But mostly, it’s a cleaner fuel than getting high. Cleaner than art too, mostly.”“Is that yours then?” Cyrus asked. “How you filled your hollow?” “What, love?”
• Cyrus once read an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another. It was an attractive idea.
• * For our species, the idea of art as ornament is a relatively new one. 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... This idea that beauty is the horizon toward which all great art must march. I’ve never been interested in that.
• I had really loved watching her love me. Which sounds terrible, but it’s not. It’s easy to resent those who love you. Those who are over eager with their affection. Too performative. But I loved how Sang loved me, easily, like it was its own soul in her chest, pumping that love through her, animating her as naturally as blood.
• * Even when I was subject to the murderous whims of patently evil nations, men, I knew the badness for how different it was from the goodness. I was not often “a person to whom things happened.” And when I was, I had the sanctuary of imagination, of art. <> When I say “nations,” I mean “armed marketplaces.” Always.
• Cyrus’s prayer in the park was not much more advanced than that. But it was a prayer all the same, recognizable—like an Archimedian scale—by the heft of what it displaced...  He prayed for an end to the tyranny of all symbols, beginning with language. He understood, with a clarity that had until that moment in his life eluded him, that he was not at all made for the world in which he lived, that art and writing had gotten him only trivially closer to compensating for that fundamental defectiveness, the way standing on a roof gets one only trivially closer to grabbing the moon than standing in the dirt.
• Whatever was merciful in the universe lived in Zee, Cyrus suddenly realized. The way Zee held, understood, knew, him. Grace... “Are you seeing this?” asked Zee, gesturing to the wilding world around them.
• 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.”