Reading this, you are waiting for the curtain
To go up on a glade, vistaed valley
Or colonnade of lath. Yet you are not here
To view a painting—the painted thing
Like the written word, is there for the hearing—
To which end the tympanist stretches his ear
To interrogate a drumskin, hangs over
Undistracted by bell note or forest murmur
In horn and harp. Cellist pursues
An intent colloquy with his instrument,
Urging nerve and string up to that perfection
He may falter at. For, the aria done,
It is he alone who must comment on
The meaning of it, and bars he is testing now
Climb then on a faultless bow
Out of the darkened pit as the hero pauses
To resume in song. He, too, unseen
Sweating into his paint, runs through
(In mind, that is) the perils of a part
That from start to finish (and this is true
Of every bubble and iota of these tuning notes)
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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