The water tower poses a challenge. Against
the shadows of the sky are planes of light.
There seems to be no touching, but actually
opening before him there’s a narrowing,
the way the world appears. He thinks he sees a bridge—
cables, a dusty light crossing back and forth
between them. A great geometric pine, silver green,
stretched until its needles are as thin as mist,
millions of tiny dotted lines, connecting
the continents between them. Even the dimmest
contrast of this against that, a page turning,
is as sharp as clouds against the sky. But
how can clouds be sharp against the sky since
the sky falls infinitely backwards and clouds are
only the center of an edgeless thought? Still,
through their slow drifting, he can see, like the hour
hand on a clock, the movement of lips in waking,
what he wants always to get himself through.
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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