This is not an essay. Few of my blog posts are.
This is The Word Becoming, where words are becoming spirit, and spirit is becoming words. That might not make sense at first, but keep reading. What follows is my response to each of the pages I dog-eared and quotes I highlighted in my copy of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (2024), a novel about an Iranian-American poet in search of meaning through sacrifice and sobriety amidst cultural and historical violence after a short lifetime of tragedy and self-torture… queer awakening.
It’s early morning and I’m sitting alone at my boyfriend’s kitchen window overlooking Silver Lake, L.A. Construction is perpetually underway. Birds sing over and out head. I’m drinking iced coffee in a wine glass engraved “U.S. House of Representatives,” wearing a long black leather skirt and a multicolored scarf so plush every bitter barista turns sweet when they see it. If I wasn’t barefoot I’d be in kitten heels. You get it? I’m no expert in anything except what I know well.
Welcome to the Book Nook.
MAJOR SPOILERS
Cyrus Shams is a recovering drug addict.
Recovery is made of words, and words have all these rules.
Why are rules so hard to follow? Who wants to be told what to do?
Staying good means doing what is expected of me by myself or the people I want to please. Success means becoming an upright citizen of the world I’m making. Writing well and recovering from my sicknesses means sticking to the law, for the most part.
Understand I mean no harm.
Everything we understand is made of words and fine without them.
Words are like images and the five senses. We try to use them to express our experience, to approach the truth, because that’s always the issue. Reality resists its pure representation. Words have rules. Limitations. They need to be organized, make sense, get to the point, while order is always slipping away.
And there are things that are known that cannot be spoken. Where rules don’t exist. When we speak, we speak in gibberish. Then go, “Does that make sense?”
How can something that limited touch something as big as whatever the fuck a ’Higher Power’ is? How can it get rid of the big ball of rot inside me?
Maybe the “Higher Power” can’t be touched. Maybe words aren’t capable of ever really reaching it. The big ball of rot melts in the heat of the exercise of constantly reaching for it anyway. Words are tools for working out, stretching. But tools are limited. A hammer cannot hammer itself. You hammer it. Your body moves it. Follow through.
Through the use of tools, through language, through words, we evolve. It’s not about the words themselves, or the rules, or the limitations, or the bigness of whatever “God” means. The bigness exists. It’s felt regardless. Very hard to understand, that feeling, and the process of getting rid of the rot. It can be handled. Like any job that needs tools, getting rid of the big ball of rot inside might be done with words, with their help. And also with something else. Effort.
Cyrus and Zee do manual labor for a man who likes to watch and who repays them with canned goods from his pantry.
‘Angela Davis would say we’re all selling our bodies… That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And misogyny.’
Cyrus rolled his eyes, asked, ‘And what would Zee Novak say?’
I laughed: ‘Zee Novak says free groceries are free groceries.’
She’s right. I am selling my body for friendship, for love, for money. Like me, want me, pay me. Help me survive. I am buying attention with my expensive education, traumatic knowledge, able body. My hands don’t tremble too much. My eyes can hold your gaze.
Squat. Lift. Jump. Throw. Run. Buy me. Look how strong. Buy me. Probe me. Possess me. Fill me with the spirit of the worker you think you need me to be. How can I help you? Please let me help you. Please pay me to help you. Let’s trade. Give me something “free”. Free groceries, wine, friends, clout. Trade with me.
None of it is free. Bend over backwards, twist into a pretzel, dance money dance. None of it is free. Clap your hands and bite your lip and bat your eyelashes, shake your monkey ass. None of it is free.
What are you worth?
Retrograde puritan values… what are those? Backward conservative ideologies. Shadows, hiding behind the shadows. Religion, hiding behind religion. Virtue, hiding behind virtue. Falsity, compartmentalization, this not that, but that is this, too. Misogyny. Whoredom. The writer sells her words, her inner world, for money, for eyes, for fame, for life. Life costs money. Money! Money! Give me something worth money and I’ll try to make my words worthwhile. The world will hate me less, only because I didn’t get naked. But notice how I’m exposing, baring my soul for you, here. Touching you, touching myself. Spilling.
Brooklyn Museum, Day 1. Cyrus meets Okrideh, the artist who is dying.
I mean, death is death. It’s all a waste and none of it’s good. Immortal soul sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal, whatever.
Two friends of mine killed themselves between 2020 and 2022. As of today I’ve two grandparents — my grandma on my mom’s side, my grandpa on my dad’s.
Death takes us all. It’s got us always in its sights.
Death is notoriously mundane, everyday. What makes it meaningful, purposeful? Consider the martyr. Isn’t every death that matters to someone a martyrdom?
Maybe the meaning of a death is defined by its resonance in the heart of another, whatever the magnitude of that impact. Death is an ending, so maybe with each occurrence of death in life a new seed is planted, propelling someone to support that cycle; the way of countless vessels with a unique pace and style toward the same fate.
I read somewhere that the body is the soul’s carriage through this lifetime, and that the soul lives through many bodies. Born and dead again. Again. One ripple after another, for good or for worse.
It’s THIS quote. “Immortal soul sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal, whatever.” Our soul lives forever, has always. We share it. Must we be sick with desire? Yes, I guess it’s true, we’re cursed with wanting. It’s difficult to resist. The urge to crave to hope to dream to want to need. Needless to remind, at any moment we could die.
Death and The World are Pressing Up and All This Stuff Protects Us
Even wearing something open like sandals or heels, the soles of one’s feet were concealed, secretly pressing themselves into and pushing back against the world, as if to halt it’s ever-encroaching advance.
We protect our feet from the dirty, the dust; the floor’s speckles of stuff. Being barefoot feels good, but not stepping on rocks or collecting small stabbing things on your soles. Fresh air feels good but it doesn’t feel good to spill a drink on your toes.
From the ground up we go; the world leaves its touch, decorating us with its inconvenient inevitabilities. We shower tomorrow, and tomorrow after that. Things get dirty again.
Enjoy the feeling of sand, cool tile, hardwood. Until the wind invites a twig; until we drop food or break glass or track in grass.
We build doors and roofs, socks and shoes, to separate us from the elements we come from, that are part of us. We cannot escape the world, we cannot “halt” its advance. It is “ever-encroaching” and ever persistent in hoping to swallow us back into itself. Our pushback against this isn’t a well kept secret, if it’s secret at all. We cleanse as often as we can. That is our nature and the nature of nature. People try to sterilize, civilize, compartmentalize. We distance ourselves from the discomfort that wants to embrace and be embraced by us again.
Shoes are a girl’s best friend, though.
Ali Shams: father, widow, migrant…
God stories always seemed to work that way. Sideways, convoluted. Like one of those elaborate chain reaction machines built in the most deliberately nonsensical way, using a track and a spring and a candle and a balloon to ring a bell.
Life is one of those nonsensical chain reactions. God is the track, God is the spring, God is the candle, God is the balloon, God is the bell, God is story, God is work, God is sideways and convoluted.
Where do we go? Where is God’s direction? What are your talents? How are you called to serve? What are you compelled to create? What challenges might come as you build what you’re building? Those are the deliberate, elaborate obstacles we are meant to overcome; buttons we press to reach the bell at the end.
Back to Brooklyn, Day 1.
Cyrus considered for a moment whether it was fucked up to imagine a dead Syrian child as the foil to his relative fortune, as a prop in his psychic play about the ethics of gratitude… So much of his psychic bandwidth was taken up with conflicting thoughts about political prepositions… 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.
He wanted to be on ‘the right side of history,’ whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history.
Oscar the Grouch. To complain is the American Way. Our Birthright. Why the soldiers and civilians died.
It sucks that everything sucks sometimes, and it sucks that lots of stuff sucks more than our own stuff.
All this overthinking.
Late Capitalism is psychic contamination. Slow torture. The most cruel and unusual punishment no law will ever protect us from.
As I write this, I wonder what side of history I’ll be on someday. Ideally, I become someone who doesn’t care and is never wrong, obviously; I’m on my own right side of history.
Arash Shirazi — Khuzestan, Iran, May 1985.
A long black robe like the hair of a god, robe finer than Moroccan silk, blacker than the black you’re imagining, black like the way your mind goes black, atomic black spinning around the black like little cartoon birds, that robe to wear over all my other clothes, my uniform and gun and scabbard, yes, and even my helmet, a little black hood for that, it goes over everything. (169)
Atomic Black Playlist
“Alone / EA6” by 6LACK
“Black” by Cat Power
“All Black” by Good Charlotte
“Killing Yourself to Live” by Black Sabbath
“Black” by Pearl Jam
“Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden
Everything needs its angel, even war. A man like me in every platoon becomes an angel like this, a man like me who calls his sister once a month and sends money to his parents and eats cold rice and shits once a day like me, a man who dreams of Mira from the market with fluorescent scarves around her breasts, one man like me in every platoon sets out after battle and rides in my robe, rides with my flashlight, gallops around the war dead and the war dying, giving them a glimpse of an angel protecting them, being among them. That’s the secret, don’t you think, the amongness, to be among with an angel means you were right all along, all your wincing and kneeling, your fasting, your scowling, that amongness might send you to Jannah, an angel to send you to Jannah and Riswan with conviction in your heart and not fear of pain, suffering, nothingness, conviction, yes, of seeing an angel in black riding the wind, riding the night, conviction to remain as long as suffering demanded, to not end it, not kill yourself.
Describe your guardian angel.
La Santa Muerte? Archangel Rafael?
Is it someone you really know? A grandparent? A best friend? Maybe they’re looking down from above, or maybe they’re a spirit among us, or maybe they’re a still-living person fighting their own battles and begging their own angel for relief, protection.
Motivation. Guardian angels make it easier to keep from killing yourself.
Are they protecting you or are you protecting them?
The promise of warmth and forgiveness, light at the end of the tunnel. Some sort of promise, a contract we made when we didn’t know we signed up to hear the voice of our good shoulder; not far above us after all but right there, whispering in our ear, trying to overcome the menace mouth muttering miseries behind our other side.
This whole dance is an acknowledgement of the beyond. It’s all designed to inspire conviction; all designed to break it down. Not half-and-half but both fully real, awareness dipping between the two. The angels and heaven; the demons and hell. Here and there; now and then; always and forever.
Cyrus Shams and Zee Novak — Brooklyn, Day 3
He himself knew little about anything and tried to remember that. He read once about a Sufi prayer that went ‘Lord, increase my bewilderment.’ That was the prayer in its entirety.
Lord, increase my bewilderment.
Lord, increase my bewilderment.
Lord, increase my bewilderment.
Lord, increase my bewilderment.
Lord, thank you for increasing my bewilderment.
Lord, increase their bewilderment.
Lord,
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.
You know that line: “If you want to make the world a better place, you better look at yourself and make that change.”
You know the other one: “Be the change you want to see…”
Lately I’ve been thinking about how that starts with what we put in our bodies, including sex and sleep. Food, obviously; that’s the first thing we think of. Harmful habits harm us. It’s simple to understand yet stupidly difficult to act on, until it’s easy, thanks to helpful, healthy habits. Thanks to practice.
Time with friends and family, regular exercise and stretching, creativity, solitary recharging, vitamins.
Blame every establishment and social structure and tradition and imposition for the fact that you can’t find “peace” until your brain melts. What I see is that people need to know their enemy in order to fight them, and people are often their own worst enemy, and rarely do people come close to knowing themselves. To me this means that the greatest obstacle to freedom is the mental prisons we are largely unable to tear down within ourselves, for ourselves.
If Americans or people anywhere are starving for a fight they could win, my spirit twists in sympathy, drenched in tears, for they need only turn inwards and start working there; there are a million easy, free fights available to win every day, ever minute, each time we are presented with the opportunity to better care for ourselves.
Choose self respect.
Roya Shams — Tehran, August 1987
The kiss lasted three seconds, maybe four, but it set everything else in motion. My life was a painting I’d been staring at upside down until that moment, that moment when Leila wandered in and flipped it right-side up for me. Just like that. Everything clicked into place, the picture came into clarity.
After that first kiss, I wouldn’t have questioned anything. Possibility, freedom. If a great winged angel had come up from the earth and burst apart, I would have gathered its feathers.
The kiss lasted three months, maybe five, and then a lifetime.
If a great tornado had torn through the fields, I would have replanted each crop by hand.
[MISSING]
When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, ‘It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.’
I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?
Chisel away all that isn’t you and choose to love what’s left.
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 means 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… Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet.
How do you go from doing something every day to not doing it at all? To not thinking about or craving it again?
How do you gain freedom from something that you chose and taught yourself to depend on?
Thankfully I know I can. I don’t exactly know how, but I know I can.
My personality when I’m free is happy, glowing. I know my face moves naturally and my fingers are capable of anything, like the rest of my body, especially my mind.
I know how to eat; I can feed myself; I can “speak among people” and speak about people and to people and speak up for myself, “and walk” and spring and skip and hop-scotch, “and fuck” and make love and both, together; I know a little bit about stillness; I’m learning.
David? Me? Is that what we’re becoming?
I think there’s still hope. I might not need a miracle. Easily salvaged, what the last tenants trashed. Good bones, great potential, this house. Just needs a hand.
Orkideh
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 painted in grief, weeping and painting, painting and weeping. There were probably weeks, whole months when I did not smile even once. I lived in a studio so small I could smell my neighbor’s farts. I spent every penny I had on canvas, brushes, paints. I killed myself. I killed my love. I forced myself to forget my husband, my brother. My country. My son.
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.
Be ready. Be ready with your work. Let it find you working.
God rewards not the lazy. Let it find you working.
Be ready to show your work, to share what you’ve done with the one who has mind to appreciate, sight to read.
Becoming the word ready means going through all the goings on, whichever way the way turns out and around and onwards.
Prepare for the sacrifices by being grateful for it all. Now. All of it.
You know the serious face, the weird thinking one. You know the hours where you can’t come up for air. And there’s the river rushing you off toward nothing, just endless river. Maybe the cliff is the crease between your eyebrows, the frown lines on your forehead. But you aren’t melancholy, most of the time. Just focused. And when you do come up for air, having been in the zone, making art, you’re ecstatic.
hold onto your loved ones VS. create art
That’s the dichotomy she’s facing because of a complicated set of conditions including her nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, and relationship status (mother, wife).
I don’t know if this is a choice I’ll someday be forced to make.
Cyrus Shams — Brooklyn, Day 4
‘I just think about that a lot. The ugliness of anger. I don’t disagree that it can be harnessed. But it’s so irredeemably ugly.’
‘You’re a human being, Cyrus,’ Sand 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.’
Cyrus blinked. Sang was right—whatever storm of confusion, anger, betrayal he was feeling in that moment began and ended with himself.
Makes me think of Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger, Women Responding to Racism” —
Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.
Anger is part of the process of taking healing action. Creation in reaction to a loss, to a lack or death of something essential. Reparations. Step 4. Alcoholics Anonymous. Write out your life events and find your place within each story.
Come to terms with your autonomy. And everyone else’s, too. Just as real as yours. Be angry about everything angering you. Laugh if you find it all funny. How the storm outside mirrors the storm inside. How the calm mirrors the calm.
Cyrus Shams — Brooklyn, Day 4
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 defective ness, the way standing on a roof gets one only trivially closer to grabbing the moon than standing in the dirt.
It’s probable that none of us were made for the world in which we live, and that we’re all fundamentally defective. Some see it more than others, right. But who doesn’t feel it? It’s what we all respond to.
It’s possible that the divinity that extrapolated us out of itself into this corrupted-christ-conscious-wizzardy-lizzardy experience of existence is so far out of reach that we’ll only be able to share stories of trivial closeness powerful enough to inspire us to keep reaching.
But no matter where we stand, it appears we can and do often fit into these funnily perfect patterns. So, why panic? Why cut the show short? Why sacrifice anything, when all is to be had in its unique way, for a limited time only. Stand on the roof, on the dirt, on a fence, on the toilet, on the head of authority, stand with integrity.
Kaveh Akbar’s Staggering Debut
A honest look at addiction, artistry, abandonment, apathy, war, migration, isolation, family, friendship, queer love. That’s all I have to say about this novel for now. Let me know what you think of my thoughts. If you haven’t yet, go read Martyr! You’ll be better for it.
Thanks for visiting my Book Nook; catch you in the next post.
Love, MECHE
06/24/26