This writer. The writer’s writer. Who better to write of the ‘amoral’ soul of an artist, laid bare to hear ‘the call of truth when it comes’ (109)? But it’s Cusk. Art is a ‘serpent’, a cold lonely yen for belonging (107).
No wonder it’s a classic, this pilgrimage of learning to see differently, deeply. A wonder it took the ‘flesh-flake’ (145) of me so long to be spun into this web of spy-like stalking with its dream of a ‘prayer tunnel’ cell (261).
The heartbreak, power and music in these carefully shaped essays of class oppression layered with the barbs of racism and spiked with a fraught mother-daughter relationship. Tender humour and sometimes just perfect oneliners. Yes, beer is the ‘missionary position of beverages’ (68).
Snake Church is a home-grown kookaburra-led cultural experiment. My scattered field notes, moments-in-time reports, begin with the first movements of spring, when the lush grass of unmown areas swallows my feet, then my knees. Snake Church finishes, for this paper at least …
This writing style has the severity and graphic exactitude of a police report, a litany of crimes that weigh into a crushing racist violence where generations of white indifference and cultural theft form aching chasms bridged by families held together by story.
Spring, well over a decade ago. I head up the rise before the fruit trees as a tiger snake moves across the path made by my regular round of the tree paddock, a cherished place transformed more than ten years before this …
A ‘pure experience,’ reading this theoretically insightful book of practice (64). Puns as insights, as gentle and sharp as an acupuncturist’s needle that makes knowledge ‘on the spot’ (71). I meet this book ‘in the middle’, a playful ‘co-mingle’ of joy (86).
Just when you think it’s gone too far, this story turns and bites into you again, with that sweet all-in of kid-love, the stink, the joy, the earthiness, the isolation, the no-hands eating and the packs that help with the getting through.
Languish, language, l’anguish in this anger-quivering response to the hard stomping world, this hard-muscled rattlesnake of a book brewed tight with intoxicating ‘venom’ shots (77). Melt in the dare of this take, fall prostrate to the truths in its ‘black ooze’ (74).
So, you are ready to co-exist with a snake. At last! No more niggling discomfort with those images of a snake under the foot of a woman under the hand of a man-god. Instead, you are helping make the oppression of others …
