It was a human place. On either side
young women and young men held manmade things
contrived for widening their lives. Some held,
by way of opened books, a separate and singular repose
so much less tense than the precision of any open flower.
There were no flowers; every torso was arranged
to complement the object of its thought. It was understood
the dead could no more lean above guitars or books,
or turn their heads and speak, or list their heads to weep
again. It was among the lucid restive ones we moved,
accompanied by who was ours, through wide halls dense with
empty ornate wooden beds, into a room in red that held
the one bed and a window, where we looked away, blurred
as if two books at once were being read to us.
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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