Until we part, my reader, put
What is called reality aside.
Instead,
Picture a ten foot wall made of wattled reeds
Faced with red clay and split by a double doored gate.
See a naked man half-walk half-trot past its guard.
And, having vanished from their sight.
Run with what seems to crack the speed of light
Across a mile of dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath wrist deep waves that glide
Over each other’s luminescent panes.
Then kneel in them, beggar his arms, and pray:
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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