Pilgrim, 2022

The pilgrim, in a traditional sense, follows an understood plan of pilgrimage. First, they don a set of ritual garments. Communicating to others that they are pilgrims on a sacred journey. My garment is lined with volcanic rock and quartz. It sits tight against my body. 

To complete the distance of 418km, it will take approximately 15 days, 6 hours a day, around 27 kilometres a day to complete. The impressed textures upon my back will, over this time, amalgamate, proving them indistinct from one another. Each day after wearing it, I’ll take it off and remain still until my body absorbs the impression. This may take anywhere from 1 to 3 hours, as the days go on. 

I grew up in Mount Gambier, playing with volcanic igneous rock. One day, I was taken abruptly to the Adelaide Hills and the floor changed from red rock to silver quartz. I was young and couldn’t understand the complexities of my parents divorce, the choices they made about how to escape. However, the silent violence of distance put between them resonated immediately with me. 

Both locations began to be described colloquially as home. 

Two places of particular social economy, landscape familiarity, two lifestyles that clash and resist each other. One a concave volcanic cavity, the other a convex mountain reaching through clouds. I imagine them fitting into one another, making a body.

With a fragmented definition, separated by hundreds of kilometres, an unease in my sense of belonging grew with me as I went back and forth over many years. 

Lately, I have been flying to avoid the road. I took it again just a couple of weeks ago. 

To think and to feel the road. 

To reimagine that first journey, to assess it. 

To question the necessity of this pilgrimage I feel drawn to do. 

I found myself on cruise control, in a temperature moderated cabin, with a constant hum of tyre on asphalt to lull me through the hours, pock marked by the occasional da da da da indicator.

I wanted to know why I needed to walk this. 

Originally, I thought I would drive as I was driven. 

But it is very easy to ignore the real distance - and what that represents - when your feet are not connecting with every part of it. 

When the energy directed to covering the distance comes out of a petrol station and not your own source. 

That to walk is to be tested, uncomfortable and potentially in pain. 

That walking would mirror my experience of uneasy hybridity and serve to guide me through it.

I realised I need to allow myself to be consumed by the road. 

The trees. I need to ask them if they remember the first time I passed, 27 years ago. 

I want to witness their silence.

Distance - the longing, the beauty and the terror. 

The desire to reconcile two locations in one body is not, in this case, an arrangement free of pain. It is the endurance of physical pain that is the salve for dissolving psychological pain. The precedent for a parallel journey. As the body endures and simultaneously heal itself, so too can the mind, riding on the back of the subconscious actions the body makes. At the end of the day, when I have finished walking and I sit, as I am now, as you are witnessing, it is here that I slowly overcome the fragmented, uneasy hybridity and amalgamate those two locations of home into one that is untethered.

Can we transform ourselves, even if it means enduring pain?

In Amelia Jones’s Performing the wounded body: Pain, affect and the radical relationality of meaning, she argues how representational wounds in art permit the viewer to ‘read’ their own pain through the artists body.    

Jones speaks for the power of aesthetic pain to be a mediator for our own and that the bond with the artist enduring it, causes “us to call for something to change in order to end the agony”. If our attention is turned to what distance has meant to us individually, and we are not only called to, but willed to change, we may begin to dream of what collective reconciling of distances can mean to society. Dare I speak of borderless nations, and the radical agency of your person. 

The pilgrimage is a religious trope that I use here to exploit its inherent and familiar meaning of sacred and transformative journey. I can assume symbolic knowledge and align myself with its interior framework of ritual garment wearing, souvenir collection and bodily sanctification. It’s a strategy I use for turning your attention to distance. 

To doing those things with reverence, but also asking you to question your existing definition of them. Asking you to read the pain on my body to see if an unease exists within your own. 

What distances exist within you?

Do they need to be reconciled?

During the pilgrimage, I’ll refrain from clock time and instead turn to subjective untethered rhythms. Henri Bergson’s idea of durational time - that is - experiencing what was, what is and what will be simultaneously - feeds this conceptual desire for amalgamation. 

I’ll be responding to and revising the definition of home through my current known definitions, the process of challenging that definition and arriving at the amalgamated definition, all at once. 

Durational time is a place outside of economic time, a place where it is no longer measured, but  is  felt. Without the economics of time, chromo-normative expectations like doctors appointments, bed times, when to eat and the daily 9-5, we become untethered from the controls that demand our attention. We can release ourselves to the profound experience of, as Andre Lepicki puts it, ‘a quasi-unmediated exchange between conscious subject and plane of matter”.

I want you to consider your own bodily home, its rooms, the souvenirs you collect to populate it. The pilgrim collects souvenirs along the way. 

I’ll collect them with my eyes, with my ears, my mouth. 

You have built rooms and gardens of immensity within yourself. Rooms that are locked. 

Gardens where others are permitted to plant seeds. Gallery rooms that hold every work of art that has ever moved you. Music rooms that sometimes only play one song on repeat for a week. There are rooms that are painful to open. 

I have a double door marked ‘home’. 

I will open it up and remove the hinges and discard the lock.

I will touch every nook and cranny of this room as I walk with its sharp texture pressed upon my back. I’ll make it the vestibule, the welcome area.

The pilgrim then reaches their destination and becomes sanctified. 

It is said that after making the pilgrimage, you journey back to where you live, forever changed. This is why attempting significant feats is so palpable in the body.

I finish with an excerpt of the poem Go to the limits of your longer by Rainer Maria Rilke, for it was my invitation to take this road, to become a pilgrim of sorts.

Go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. 

Flare up like a flame

And make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going.

No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me. 

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.