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2:23pm

If Queequeg were made into an action figure (the true Queequeg, I mean, not that Star Wars knock-off, which nonetheless made for a legendary toy), besides featuring certain distinguishing bodily traits, he’d be reasonably expected to come packaged with several accessories – an embalmed head or a poncho maybe, his harpoon and tomahawk-pipe almost certainly – but none of the items with which Queequeg is characterized by proxy in MD would be as justifiably sealed up with him forever in a collector’s cellophane sarcophagus as Yojo, the ebony idol he worships.

10:27pm

MK paints “Yojo” before painting the figure of the idol itself; the name occupies nearly the whole of the canvas: Y O appearing in the upper half, J O just below. The letters are outlined in a brushed band of rich, gum pink, with a band of blood red tracing the outer edge of these formations, and another layer of pink beyond that, then another layer of red… the pattern repeating until the bands of color are just peaks and arcs barely showing the contour of the letters they’re shaped by as they ripple out to the margins of the canvas. In the hollow left by all these concentric bands of pink and red, the Y O / J O reveals another labeled circuitry schematic beneath the paint, save for in the middle of each O where are rounds of the gum pink. This is only the second time MK’s canvas identifies a character by a name (excluding Queequeg’s signature), and the first is the first illustration of the whole project, identifying Ishmael. There are many different ways, however, that MK registers the influence of individual words and fragments of speech in the illustrations occasioned by them. In this case, Queequeg’s idol is not named at this point in the text of MD (“Yojo” is not said until 13 chapters later), so the moniker swimming in the background of this canvas is another anachronism designed by MK, whose interest seems drawn in part by the pictorial symmetry of the name, given its arrangement on the canvas.

The figure of Yojo is formed by a rudimentary black outline in the foreground of the canvas. Its back is rounded and its apparent front quite flat, the body terminating in a short stump for a base. The head is shaped like a slightly squashed letter b, featuring two ribbed conical formations with black ovals at the tapered ends, seemingly serving for eyes. A rectangular patch with rounded edges is painted on his chest with sparsely brushed s-shaped vertical lines running along its length, like a rough-hewn wood grain raised from the boundless waters pushing out against the little body invested with the power of their god.

Maybe it’s just me, but if you cock your head to the right when viewing this canvas the two large Os in the name Yojo lose their appearance as letters and look instead like a pair of glaring red eyes, the Y and the J similar but not exactly matching underlying markings.