Entering a cave, or stepping outside at night,
artificial blindness, temporary
but absolute. And if I lost sight,
the long-distance sense, the avenue to color,
would speech and music be enough to live on?
No more sunsets filtered through palm branches,
no more plunge of snowflakes into the breakers,
no more mountains overhung with a crush of stars;
no rose window, no pietà, no Yoruba head;
no more meeting your eyes filling up with light.
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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