That was a pretty roundabout answer to what
I would have to say
was one of the more straightforward of my questions.
But to come back to this thing
you call your near-death experience.
In the accounts I’ve read, whose credibility,
or lack thereof,
we’ve already talked about—
that is, their lack thereof—
you say you saw the universe from the outside in, as,
you say, a dense web
of capillaries through which pulsed
corpuscles of 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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