Grim, and surrendered to their purposes,
their tangibilities of pulp or stone,
the houses, chairs and tables rise again—
the mute inflexible realities
that never died. Although our lightest touch
or smallest word had pared them paper-thin,
or seared them to a smudge of scenery,
their massive life endured beneath our much—
ados. And now, compact and free
of us who might have felled them where they stood,
they rear the monuments death cannot hide,
being no more than their immensities—
no more, within the darkness of their clutch,
than these sad ultimates of stone or grain.
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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