Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 9

9

In Greek mythology, the god Aeolus kept powerful winds holed up in a cavern of his island’s interior and once gave Odysseus some in a to-go bag to help get him home sooner, which of course didn’t work out. Ishmael appropriates the Greek name eurokludōn [εὐροκλύδων] – literally: north-east wind – to characterize the icy, howling gale ripping through the city streets by night when he arrives to New Bedford, but the literary investiture of this mighty wind in MD is clearly derived more from the New Testament, where it shipwrecks Paul. 

MK’s vision of Euroclydon is much less dramatic and drastic than Ishmael’s. The wind itself is depicted in the lower-right quadrant of the canvas as a fluid, billowing cloud – colored flat, without outline, and serenely blue – pouring out of a spout-like flange in the upper-left quadrant of the canvas, drawn in blue ink against the exposed, predominantly white found page. The flange head features a hardline unibrow and a circular mane of waving, blue-tipped tufts and appears to protrude from a striped tube snaking its way out of frame atop the canvas. It puts me in mind of one of the cybernetic arms of Doctor Octopus, emitting a spooge of Euroclydon as from the fake flower on a clown’s lapel.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 009

Title: …where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft.
(8.5 inches by 11 inches; acrylic paint and ballpoint pen on found paper; August 13, 2009)

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