He sits by the stove and practices his spectacular meditations.
On the chopping block of reason he surrenders
the fall of rain. By rigorous deduction he arrives at silence.
Having achieved an exalted, early success he doubts
everything. He is encouraged by certain maxims
penned on the wall. When suddenly he wakes full of
longing and regret he does sums in his head, subtracts
toward zero. Like this he forgets the smell of simple
grass, the kitchen of his childhood, he abandons forever
the reveries of the tongue. With much difficulty
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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