“My God, I just remembered that we die.” – Clarice Lispector

Last month I read (and adored) Kaveh Akbar’s novel, Martyr! My friend and I had decided to buddy-read it. It took us longer than we had intended because jobs, travel and illness – all impeded our progress (this dash is not AI, I promise). Nevertheless, we kept peppering our Whatsapp chat with observations and voice notes, thoroughly engaged in Akbar’s fiction. 

Martyr! (exclamation intentional) is the story of Cyrus Shams, a near-30, queer, Iranian poet living in Indiana, USA, recovering from addiction, and desperate to devote himself to a life that has meaning. A globalised denizen with a fleeting connection to his Iranian side, Cyrus is very much at a crossroads in his life. Still processing the senselessness of his mother’s passing in the shooting of the Iran Air Flight 655 (which I was horrified to learn was a real event), he is obsessed with death, dying, and the ideas that propel people to sacrificing themselves. 

“My father set out looking for me and found me staring at a large Cubist painting…I was smitten by Picasso and for the first time I realised my father and I had strong conflicting ideas, and I had no qualms about defending my point of view…I obediently followed my father out of the museum but held fast to an invisible transformation; I had fallen for art.“

If you have followed her life and career, she has been a supremely dedicated artist with an uncompromising voice. I do not know if Ms. Smith has martyred her life for art but I cannot see her as anything but an artist. Sadly, this symphony of skill and purpose is something that very few of us are attuned to recognize when an opportunity presents itself. But hope persists.

To understand what you’re willing to martyr yourself for, I must borrow the much abused cliche – know thyself. And whatever you don’t have the answer for, you can consult the Oracle that holds the collective wealth of human wisdom, the search engine. But the way we experience knowledge has morphed in the last decade. I was having a discussion with some friends on the pervasiveness of AI and it was brought up that an over-reliance on it is leading to the shaping of a homogenized voice. They pointed out how a good slice of what we read online now is AI-written, and what we read informs how we speak. I do not know how much proofreading goes into correcting and re-training AI content but I, too, have been bothered by how people will type a query into AI and argue with an authoritativeness that neither they nor their AI can claim. What I see happening is an erasure of doubt. 

How good is your belief in an idea which you do not wish to question? It may be an outdated example but so much of what I have learnt in school has come from friction, from being stuck at a sentence, from being unconvinced with the teacher’s statement, from wanting to hear the same thing spoken in a different way. To devote yourself to something, you ought to know it well, and for that, you ought to question it. I fear we may be outsourcing our intellectual inconvenience to a dangerous degree. I wonder if this has something to do with the abrasiveness of interactions between dissenting people. Unused to questioning, they find a disagreement with their opinion to be a primal attack on themselves.

I fear I have digressed. In Cyrus’s quest for greatness, I am reminded of a contrasting position presented in my current read, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I am re-reading it and in many ways, its narrator, Reverend John Ames, is an antithesis to Cyrus. Ames is in his 70s and reflecting upon his impending mortality. He gazes upon his life with a serenity that has no qualms about its ordinariness. In fact, the book is a celebration of it. He writes to his son –

“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.” 

In Martyr!, Cyrus conjures dreams between, say, his Mom and Lisa Simpson. I wish to envision one between him and Rev. Ames sitting face to face Jubilee style except there is no timer nor pressure to garner 1M views. I suspect there will be disagreement. I don’t doubt it. 

I shall not reveal what direction Cyrus takes in the novel. That is for you to interpret should you choose to read this book. I will be happy to discuss it. It is apparent that this story has left a mark on me. It is my philosophy that a good work of art does one of two things – it teaches you something you didn’t know or it articulates something you did in a manner you couldn’t have done yourself. This did both. 

“My God, I just remembered that we die”. “But-but me too?! “Don’t forget that for now, it’s strawberry season.” – Clarice Lispector