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).
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.
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).
Like a child’s ‘why’ the dance of flipped coins. A yes or no that triggers more, then more of a self-interrogative prose: ‘mining my own heart’ to understand the world. ‘Life involves making a decision so the spirits can rush in’ (186).
Heavy in weight with 800 works and heavy with 350 years plus of history and heavy with generations of wrong. Yet beautiful food, loved gardens and strong blood memory reaching back to healing. Black story power repelling the cesspool of white privilege.
Read in one sitting, exquisite observation, careful thought, the emplaced body thinking through place and time with an eye on knowing the self through motherways, lit up by ‘instances’ of intensity: ‘the world opening up as if through a great funnel’ (63).
