“Good trembling,” CJ said as we
Walked along the docksides in our thin jackets
Even though it was winter on the East Coast.
We were advertising our urge for life
To ourselves and anyone else who might
Have noticed.. It wasn’t likely, but we liked
To believe that our minds had lights.
That we were intellectual Tom Swifts
And pureblooded peasants of the finer and
Tumultuous emotions. A little era babbled through us.
“I don’t want to become an anecdote,”
I said as I waved my arms at the thought
Of eternity—say being thirty and married.
A cop car slowed down beside us. Long hair.
“I can’t imagine that,” CJ said.
“It’s too cold and windy.” We looked straight ahead.
But the car drove off anyway;
It was warm in there for them. We got some coffee.
Exchanged barrages of quotations.
Vowed to rectify the inertia of everyone else.
And went out again into that clenched wind
Of portents, dogmas, and seasonable love.
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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