Today we are going into shelter,
we are going underground to discover the passage that leads
to the next world. We will be happy there,
or we will not worry about happiness; we will make neat designs
in skin and wool, emblems we set against the stone walls
for posterity to find. Today I picture the generations
of our kind, crossing the marshy bridge into this country,
picture the long ramble down the icy, scoured valleys,
and I wonder what made them do it, without philosophy
or belief, without even much they wanted from the earth.
I see them haggard at the edge of a muddy wallow,
their minds like notches cut into stone, the stick
they fling a kind of miracle, a glance like a handful of fire
tossed in the air, no language to back them up. Today,
from the suburbs, I salute them, as if I am drunk
and falsely exuberant, as if I am just leaving the house
of a friend who is dying, who has dragged her bed
under the window to watch the ordinary street pass by.
I could tell lies to the dying, it would be easy,
easy to say that we are at the beginning, not at the end,
that all the business in the swamps with cutthroat beasts
was only prologue, as Homer was prologue,
as Dante and Stalin and your Aunt Edna were prologue,
that the trek is just getting under way here
as we flash our knives and call
over the “great distances of our longing”
promising to love each other the way we promised.
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.
Subscribe for free: Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Google Play