She shapes the moral traveller
A sphere where she is in command,
And on a lower level her
Rotund endowments make him stand
In circumspective paradise
As with an apodeictive hand
She leads him to the precipice;
The way her lines of force are bent
Provokes the root of his surprise,
“I did not know what danger meant
Till I was safe. Will you, again,
Roll ’round the mills of my content?”
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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