I swipe myself again in my rawest spot, my logical dyslexia. I cannot shape up
to formal reasoning any more than I can cope with the tax year.
But I have fee’d help with my taxes. As with this other, it must be some
deficiency in cerebral texture. I am become approximate; and, as I say
too often, hexed.
I find this shaming; and slip into something comfortable, such as self-
harming, when I am able.
The crassest form of self-harm, that I have long practiced, is the poem.
* * * * * * * * * *
On how a fact becomes a “wandering adjective”: the facts of my being are
now the adjectives of this work.
Indeed I love formal logic; it is to me a spectacle of delight, though I could
never do it.
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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