In “To Capture the Castle,” an essay in her collection Lost Wax, Jericho Parms recounts an arduous climb to the summit of Croagh Patrick. The essay weaves its way upward, over the landscape of Ireland, tracing the outlines of other individuals on the pilgrimage, and winds its way through memory.
“I can understand pilgrimage as an act that asks the body to journey for the soul,” Parms writes. “To summit a mountain, to complete a trail, to reach an ancient monument offers a tangible sense of arrival. The worn and weary legs of a pilgrim are but a physical expression.”
Reading Lost Wax, I’m transported to pilgrimages I made in and around Lhasa, in 2010; a climber, like Parms, but one who did not make it to the summit. Seven years later, I still circle around Tibetan monasteries—not in person but in writing. Around and around I go, tying recollections together like prayer flags, and stacking anecdotes like cairns.
The essays of Lost Wax are a journey in their own right, though not a physical one. Instead of putting one foot in front of the other on an incline, Parms puts down a memory, then a metaphor, then a realization—all of it circling toward the summit, all the while acutely aware of the richness of colors and feeling.
In “Honey,” Parms recalls the untimely death of a goldfish, and the wet orange scales practically drip off the page. “A Chapter on Red,” much like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, utilizes color as a way into writings on life, a way to make sense of seemingly unrelated disciplines or events. In it, Parms asks, “But what about the stories and myths we tell ourselves, the meaning we make, in order to endure?”
Like pilgrims scurrying up a mountain, writers climb in faith. Unable to see over the next hill or page break, we trek onward and upward in search of solace or reconciliation or shared meaning or greater understanding—even of something we may never fully comprehend.
“I can understand pilgrimage as an act that asks the body to journey for the soul.” I can understand how writing, like walking, is a kind of pilgrimage—how the movement of an arm over the page, albeit small, primes the body and brings about a new mental space. We may not possess answers to all of life’s questions at the end of an essay collection, but we may field solace, having climbed the seemingly insurmountable subject of memory and family, and made it out alive.
__
e.v. de cleyre is a semi-nomadic writer currently residing in the Midwest. She holds a BA and MFA in creative writing with a focus on nonfiction, and her essays and reviews appear in Brevity, Ploughshares online, The Review Review, and ayris.