The wall is massive, of solid stone, hard, finished;
yet it oozes The wall is smooth, new and old, durable,
and yet it is crannied, and through the mute fault drips
a drop, a beast, a moss The wall performs its role,
it borders, blocks, separates, it hides, it obstructs,
and yet it has to do this, it protects, sustains the insect
100%, it laments, supports decision, is accounted for to
the bare bone, it pierces water, it has just allowed this
hand which inscribed to go through, it brings mortality
to mind: Here fell
Here lived
Here passed
Here died
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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