My beloved Helios is leaving, see
how the hem of his robe slips from the tent
as Chaos’ daughter approaches, such
sublime generosity from which they lend
proportion to our world; and it is
our world, Maximus, never theirs who
would call it a mere dominion, our days
but work, our nights but simple sleep,
our lives but weary prologue to the most
dismal eternity ever imagined. I gave
them more Sisyphus than they wanted,
though, didn’t I, when I took our temples
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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