Lost Wax by Jericho Parms
a book review & consideration of ekphrasis
First, a confession. Before reading Lost Wax by Jericho Parms, I had no idea what ekphrasis meant.
So, a definition in case you find yourself in the same boat:
Ekphrasis is an attempt to explore/describe with words something that is originally visual or sensory.
Let’s say I write a poem about a painting or a sculpture. The poem would be considered an ekphrastic poem—and my attempt to describe or explore the work of art with words would be ekphrasis.
The title, Lost Wax, is derived from a casting method in which a mold is built around a wax model. Then, once the mold is set, the wax is melted out, making a cavity into which can flow the glass or metal or whatever is being formed.
The wax that first built the mold is “lost” in the process … or at least, it is no longer what it once was.
Throughout her book, Jericho Parms creates and develops the idea of the collection of essays as an ekphrastic work. This does not apply only to her descriptions of works of art that she has seen; it applies also to her personal memories and experiences.
It is as though Parms is drawing attention to and commenting on a scene from her mind – one of memory or experience or hope – and then describing it in a variety of ways and from various angles. In other words, not only are her essays ekphrastic because of her narration of works of art and objects she has gazed upon, but by necessity, she pulls a shard of memory and makes it into an image.
She glances at it from one angle and then another, and jots down what comes to her mind. In fact, Parms doesn't jot; she pares and plots to find the right words, clearly and keenly understanding the form and power of words in their connotation, denotation, history, and bearing.
Jericho Parms makes her attempts and efforts clear at various places in her essays, such as when she admits this:
"What I want more than anything is to find words to do justice . . . "
Jericho Parms
Isn’t that what we all face — in writing? In speaking? In communicating? Trying to find words to do justice to how we feel or what we have seen or what we believe.
In this particular case, she was looking for words sufficient to describe “sweetness,” yet we understand this is the challenge and the joy she faces as a writer overall: seeking, desiring to find words to do justice to her vast range of emotions and experiences.
Parms seeks the perfect words for sights and forms yet also desires to reach beyond them. She seeks the inexplicable and the liminal, which she describes in images such as a doe that “seemed always to be there” as if watching over her, or ghostlike cattle in the morning mist that her boyfriend assumes was only her imagination, or her experience in summiting a mountain of pilgrimage and “touching the exquisite.”
In the titular essay “Lost Wax,” Parms sets up three different scenes ekphrastically, and then expounds on them to form a new ideal. Beginning with the statement that she wants to be disassembled, the essay slowly meanders toward a particular purpose.
She expresses that the ideals of those that go before us – parents, in this case – are a thing we uphold, like caryatids bearing the weight of ideals or hopes or the weight of all the world. It is a world that Parms loves, a world she wants to be intimate with in so many ways, but she is stuck in one place as a caryatid is — perhaps missing arms or a kneecap, carrying ideals she had never originally claimed as her own.
With deep themes such as these, Parms places herself into the scenes she explores, becoming at once both the observer and the observed. She is both the character standing and peering at all angles of the statue and she is the statue – an emblem of perfection idealized that has become an image of the brokenness of the world.
Parms reveals that just as no statue or form – however perfectly imagined at first – retains its originally-intended purity, in the same way, no matter how hard she tries or how deeply she wishes she can find the perfect word to describe the exquisite sweetness of nectar or the texture and granules of things, all she can offer is what she offers: her particular form, her choice of words, carefully crafted, molded by her experiences and memories and histories and bloodlines and fears.
She implicates herself as the seeker of the lost wax of the shapes she sees, desiring to look beyond what is now to discern what might have been the original shapes, connections, and purposes of images.
In her craft, she seeks the purposes of words.
By ending the collection with a discussion of essays that reveal forms and substance and the effort behind the stories and pieces, Jericho Parms seems to be saying all she can offer is herself — that still form, in some ways disassembled and reassembled in so many ways and never quite in the original way, statuesque under the weight and storms and fallen birds and broken family and once-lovers, standing for the world to see, for the reader to peer at her articulate and painstakingly devised work from all angles … to remember this rendering forever or pass it by “as if it never even happened at all.”
The dense form of Parm’s writing invites a reader to return to her essays as an art lover would return to a museum, to continue to consider the renderings from a new angle each time and receive and discover something new at every return.
