Tag Archives: blackness

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

September 27, 2021

Posted under

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick

Comments

Leave a comment

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 31

9/26/21, 9:30pm

31

As previously, when Ishmael was observing the lodgers at the Spouter Inn (before meeting Queeuqeg), MK’s found page comes from the sewing manual for public scenes. For this canvas, set as the book is now in the bustling streets of New Bedford, he had many more intriguing subjects to choose from to make his illustration, but the emphasis is once again on the clothes as much as it is on the subject wearing them. The one is in the other.

On this found page a pictorial guideline for “forming a seam” runs down the ride hand side of the inverted page and one for “keeping seams straight” on the left. Painted over this page is a dandy of a figure, done up mostly in blue, whose body takes almost precisely the form of the wide inverted U-shape that is repeatedly printed to the left side of the page with minor variations to show proper seam straightening technique. MK’s bodies take the shapes of pattern pieces. The dandy’s seams are several and all of them very neat. Forming the most prominent one is a thin band of red piping running parallel to a dashed line stitch; it runs at a diagonal forming the broad royal blue lapel flapped over most of the dandy’s chest. The figure’s sky-blue shirted shoulder is revealed behind the lapel, sporting an inverted Y-shaped black stitch pattern formed of a widely spaced dotted line and a narrow dashed line running parallel to the downward slope of the figure’s body. The lower portion of the figure bells out below the belt; the navy blue tailcoat (the text of MD refers to it as a “swallow-tailed coat”) has a pocket to its left and a vent seam in its front running perpendicular to the middle of the bottom margin of the found page.

The dandyism of the figure would be much less evident without three distinct accessories: 1) the basket-weave textured belt made of blocks of blues, black, red, and white – a blue ringed white badge for a buckle featuring a thin black anchor; 2) a bi-triangular blood red sword, at belt’s end to the figure’s left, with a thin gold hilt and woven textured handle butted in black circles; 3) the “beaver hat” atop the figure’s head, a blend of brown-black dabs from a rounded brush, painted low, just above its blue-green baleen band.

The figure’s only feature besides its clothes, sword, baleen band, and two rows of whiteblock gritted teeth is its blackness. Several pages of Every Page of Moby-Dick ago now, when I encountered MK’s black Angel of Doom, I proposed that the peglike figures that stand in for people in MK’s illustrations are racialized, since the first one painted black occurred on that page in MD when Ishmael stumbles rudely into a “negro church.” Since that page, three other figures have been painted black: the “young fellow” spotted gulping down dumplings in the Spouter Inn, Bulkington (in all three canvas where he and his peagreen monkey-jacket appear), and this dandy, who Ishmael loudly points out to the reader among the throng on the streets of New Bedford by day: “Look there! that chap strutting round the corner.” I’ll never be able to read or see that black Angel Doom other than as a Black Angel of Doom, and there are compelling arguments that Bulkington is Black; being painted black, the hungry “young fellow” and this well dressed chap share a connection with these canvases. If the blackness of all these figures is interpreted as Blackness, one effect of that connection is a diversification (on MK’s part) of the people of the crowd singled out in the early chapters of MD that one wouldn’t expect of most cinematic versions of the book.

There’s another interpretation: another feature that most of the peglike figures colored white have in common is that they’re naked compared to the lovingly adorned black chaps; the water-gazers only have simply-patterned wraps about their peglike bodies and then beaky noses and protuberant eyes to show which way they’re pointing. The peglike bodies painted black sport vibrantly painted jackets based on realistic pattern shapes and stitch patterns; they wear dramatic accessories. The Black Angel of Doom has no jacket or collar but two fantastic wings. Black bodies in MK are adorned to reveal beauty and white bodies are stripped down to reveal emotion.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 031
Title: Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife.
(8.5 inches by 10 inches; acrylic paint and ink on found paper; September 6, 2009)

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

September 21, 2021

Posted under

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick

Comments

Leave a comment

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 26

9/20/21, 6:10am

26

The experience of waking under Queequeg’s arm provokes a memory from Ishmael, one of the only straightforwardly autobiographical stories about his past before going a-whaling in the whole of MD, and it’s a “mystery”: he confesses himself unsure whether it’s the memory of a dream or of a reality. MK’s choice of found page to create this canvas is motivated to help capture an overwhelming, half-wakeful event, now doubly so, since the memory of an experience Ishmael had as a child between a state of sleeping and wakefulness is reactivated by a similar state he’s in when roused from the best sleep of his life at the Spouter Inn with “Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round [him].” The whole of the found page is occupied by an oddly-cropped, closeup black-and-white photograph of six narrow tree trunks, whose sparse leafless limbs are just beginning crookedly to fan out near the upper margin. It’s the type of shot you’d see in a film to show the perspective of someone lost in the woods – no forest, just trees – but there is no movement to this illustration. Here the vantage of the lost one is perfect stillness.

In Ishmael’s report of his memory, he briefly describes a circumstance which occasioned him being sent to bed by his “stepmother… [his] mother” on the longest day of the year: he thinks he’d been trying to climb up the chimney like he saw a ‘sweep do, or some other “caper.” After taking as much time as possible to undress, he spends hours tossing around in bed dreading the long passage of time before his liberation from this latest torment of a (step-)mother who’s recalled as “all the time whipping [him], or sending [him] to bed supperless.” Eventually he wakes from a fitful sleep, “half steeped in dreams,” and his room is shrouded in the dark of night. At this point, his report of the memory becomes unaccountably weird. Firstly, he describes a sensation…

8:00pm

a “shock” – it “runs through all [his] frame.” Like sleep paralysis, a sensation having no sensation – “nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard…” – but perhaps touch? “…but, a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bedside.” Ishmael’s lost command of his hand, and not just grammatically; he describes laying there as a child for what seemed like “ages piled on ages… frozen with the most awful fears,” not being able to move his hand but convinced all the while that doing so would break “the horrid spell.” 

The most reductive and dismissive interpretation of Ishmael’s report of this experience – like that of a fedup (step-)mother with far more important matters to see to – is that he awoke with the circulation cut off to his hand, draped as it was over the cover, and it went numb, and he merely imagined the “silent form or phantom” at his beside, as a projection from his dream state, while the wait to regaining sensation and control of his extremity passed longer than he understandably would have wished in his understandably frightened state. By the way, the intensity of his dreaming, to have returned to wakefulness with him in that way, just goes to show how deeply asleep he must have been and how much, after all, he needed a good, long rest after all that capering, in spite of the difficulty he had settling himself down.

Of course, there are other interpretations. MK sets himself the challenge of illustrating the silent, formless phantom that visited Ishmael during his childhood confinement, the thing felt without sight, sound, or notion. He accomplishes this with a stunningly simple method. I think it went something like this: 1) he spray painted an arching ombre of silvery grey about the middle of the found page showing the six trees; 2) he placed stencils over the canvas: two rounds for eyes, placed just below the centerpoint of the canvas so to align with two of the narrow trunks, and below them a cutout of a rudimentary right hand; 3) he then spray painted a shade of white into the cutout holes for eyes and of the hand shape below; 4) then, I believe, he covered the eye-hole and hand shapes he just spray painted white with the pieces he cut out to form the stencils and then spray painted black over them, concentrating the color where it abuts the silver grey ombre and lightening toward the bottom of the canvas so you can still make out the narrow tree trunks behind. That is the best effort I can make, like a bad (step-)mother, to explain away the greatest mystery of the piece to my eyes: that string of errant black paint in the bottom of the figure’s right eye that you can’t see the tree trunk through. 

That is to avoid speaking to the haunting illustration of the formless body in the dark, its silhouetted white hand so placed – as only its own hand could be, when it’s my hand it’s dispossessed and disarmed – to keep some secret. No amount of probing the canvas should fail to recognize that the illustration is designed to honor what remains non-disclosed about Ishmael’s recorded memory of his past experience as much as it is to animate any details disclosed by it. Ishmael admits that upon waking up and “seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round [him]” he felt as strange as he did waking as child in the night and clasping the “supernatural hand” of a “nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom,” but without the awful fear. (Indeed, accordingly, as if fear’s been purged, from here on out, Ishmael only refers to Queequeg or anyone else as a “cannibal” when animating the thoughts of others to himself.) Not disclosed is why the sight of Queequeg’s armed draped over the counterpane reactivates a memory of his own arm draped over the counterpane, or to which counterpane the chapter’s title refers.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 026
Title: …and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bedside.
(9 inches by 11 inches; spray paint on found paper; August 31, 2009)

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

September 16, 2021

Posted under

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick

Comments

Leave a comment

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 22

22

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.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 022
Title: …he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the color of a three days’ old Congo baby.
(7.75 inches by 11 inches; acrylic paint on found paper; August 27, 2009)
Standard

Posted by

Posted on

September 15, 2021

Posted under

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick

Comments

Leave a comment

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 21

9/15/21, 5:28am

21

Ishmael’s introduction to Queequeg, and the introduction of the latter into MD, consists in some 1,200 words worth of observations concerning the appearance and actions of a person who’s just walked into his own rented room at the Spouter Inn, where, unbeknownst to him, courtesy of landlord Coffin, another man is in his bed, observing him undress and prepare for sleep. 

The light by which Queequeg is observed is held in one of his hands, the rumored embalmed head in the other; he sets his candle down in the corner and begins untying the cords closing his bag of personal possessions. This is the extent of action described before Ishmael spends 200 words reporting on the appearance of the skin on the Queequeg’s face, which the former “was all eagerness” to see while the latter was turned from him, working at the bag. Apart from the initial confusion pertaining to the “large blackish looking squares” – Queequeg’s tattoos, which Ishmael initially mistakes for surgical “sticking-plasters” – the tone of the skin around these “stains” particularly disturbs him: it’s an “unearthly complexion,” he reports, “of a dark purplish, yellow color.” Ishmael’s overfull head at least contains some vague precedent for regarding tattoos as something under the sun, but for Queequeg’s skin tone he has no preconception: “I never heard of a hot sun’s tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one.” Of course, the presumption he’s made – Ishmael’s prejudice – is that Queequeg is “a white man,” that Coffin wouldn’t have paired him with a non-white man for a bedfellow (despite the landlord having specified that he’s a “dark complexioned chap”). 

The only figurative language registered in the whole of this lengthy literal report on Queequeg’s appearance and behavior upon entering his room is one simile meant to convey the speed with which all these considerations and wonderments passed through Ishmael’s mind: “like lightning.” The next time a simile is registered occurs after Queequeg has extracted his “sort of tomahawk” out of his bag, stowed his unsold head in it, removed his hat, and turned again so Ishmael can see the “scalp-knot” upon his forehead, all he has for hair: “His bald purplish head looked now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.”

The event of language that MK chooses to illustrate from this page of MD is a disturbing one whereby Ishmael figuratively flays the offending skin off the face he’s just spent an intricate paragraph trying to account for. The death’s head collaged onto the body of the black yarn of the nightmarish harpooneer in 18 is here hand drawn in indigo ink with osteological exactness. The skull is sketched large, occupying the majority of the found page (now, again, a schematic from a radio manual: this one for an RCA Victor amp chassis); if face it had, it would be facing the left margin of the page. Daubs of greyish black ink are concentrated along the back of the skull and spread outward from its outline into the upper and lower left corners of the canvas. Only two features of the canvas render the skull identifiable as Queequeg. MK includes a thick, neatly bound “scalp-knot” of hair atop the skull – an uncanny sign of vitality and health on this otherwise lifeless thing – and, in the lower left corner, the Queequeg signature: a boldly inked capital Q above an infinity band, in red.

Previously, after my attempt to account for the nightmarish vision of the black yarn of a harpooneer in 19, which Ishmael carries with him to bed courtesy of landlord Coffin, when publishing that writing on my blog, I decided not to tag the post with the name “Queequeg.” I didn’t want the archival function of the tag to index that monstrous vision beneath that name. With this illustration, I have a similar reluctance, but the presence of the Queequeg signature upon this canvas seems to decide for me that this illustration and my writing about it will be so tagged. I don’t want it to be. This, too, I believe, is a conspiratorial vision of Queequeg: not an illustration of him so much as how he is seen to be literally skinned alive by the naive, prejudiced, dangerous gaze of the seemingly harmless person hiding terrified in the bed where the pair will spend the next few days cozying up and becoming best friends.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 021
Title: His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.
(7.75 inches by 11 inches; acrylic paint and ballpoint pen on found paper; August 26, 2009)
Standard

Posted by

Posted on

September 12, 2021

Posted under

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick

Comments

Leave a comment

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 18

18

Even after Coffin clarifies matters for Ishmael about the late nighttime activities of his promised bedmate, Ishmael is determined to imagine the worst: “‘Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.’” This time he justifies his prejudice on religious grounds, in such a way that (really, as such a proudly learned person) he should’ve figured out by now what sort of person the harpooneer is: what sort of person, he wonders to himself (as if in real time), spends the earliest hours of a Sabbath day involved in such a heathanish business as selling embalmed heads?

9/10/21, 9:05pm

MK’s illustration of Ishmael’s nightmarish vision of the harpooneer features prominently another death head – not drawn but collaged into the middle of the upper third of the canvas. Surrounding the black-and-white cutout of a  mandibled skull, is a broad, vague nimbus of white paint (barely discernible over the found page) with intervaled starburst blocks of grey. The feature is subtle but draws the eye to the death’s head almost as readily as the macabre array of red ink dropped, splattered, spilled and daubed about the canvas, most conspicuously on the margins. Owing to these most striking features of the illustration the eye can easily pass over as mimetic the tangle of black brush strokes twisted and spiralized into the approximate silhouette of the torso and limbs of a person, broad coiled ropes of black paint for feet. Clasped in a small, hooked loop at the end of a tendril-like braid for a right arm, a long black harpoon is painted, standing taller than the figure itself, red ink dripped and running from behind its spade-shaped head. Uplifted in the other twisted vine of an arm is a small black oblong shape (the offending “‘balmed head”) with white Xs for eyes and a horizontal white spine for a mouth. The figure is the horrible embodiment of the yarn Coffin has been spinning Ishmael about the harpooner. 

The question is: why does Ishmael persist in this nightmarish fantasy of the harpooneer even after Coffin more plainly explains the reason he’s out so late; what danger does he still pose? MK’s illustration, like the one of the barman Jonah’s poison tumbler, suggests death is at the bottom of it; only here, as with “the black Angel of Doom,” a shaded nimbus serves for the crown. The color chosen to paint the tangled yarn body – besides complimenting the black-and-white scheme that makes the drops, drips, splatters, and spills of red ink on the canvas scream bloody murder – serves as a fair reminder of the only information Ishmael has actually been given about the harpooneer besides the head peddling business: he’s “‘dark complexioned.’” This illustration is one of a monstrous black Other, truly more of a danger to any person the fantasy would be projected on than to the one doing the bad dreaming. As far as Coffin is concerned, as he rejoins before setting off to tuck Ishmael in, the man is civilized enough by the standards of the Spouter Inn: “‘He pays reg’lar.’” More than Ishmael could promise.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 018
Title: “Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.”
(8.5 inches by 10.5 inches; acrylic paint, collage and ink on found paper; August 23, 2009)
Standard

Posted by

Posted on

September 8, 2021

Posted under

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick

Comments

Leave a comment

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 14

9/5/21, 7:19am

14

Bulkington – Ishmael’s soon-to-be shipmate whose “apotheosis” punctuates the poetic rhapsody marking the Pequod’s passage from harbor to open ocean in The Lee Shore – is first spotted by our narrator in the Spouter Inn. In this canvas MK spots him first spotting this specimen whaleman.

In MD, Bulkington is described as dark complexioned – “face… deeply brown and burnt” – phrasing which has lent support to interpretations of him as dark-skinned by birth and sunbaked by his career asea. Melville’s text does not identify this brief character as Black so unambiguously as those inhabitants of the “negro church” Ishmael trips into and degrades in The Carpet-bag, but if Bulkington is Black, then he’s only the second individual Black person described in their individuality in MD, after the “black Angel of Doom.” In MK’s illustrations, Bulkington’s is the third black face, after the Angel of Doom and the “young fellow” illustrated just prior in 13. 

Bulkington’s head – painted small in the upper-left corner of the canvas, facing right, with an undersized, tufted pea green sailor’s cap perched aloft – is not given the elongated peglike appearance of a landsman but appears rather like that shape hammered down to a stump, a brow-like formation overhanging in the silhouette of his face at the base of which another tunnel-like mouth is filled-in with two even rows of shock-white blocks for teeth. The prominence of these teeth is a detail from Ishmael’s description of Bulkington that, notably, does not derive from the titular quote for this canvas; another such detail is reflected in MK’s representation of Bulkington’s eyes as a single elongated band of deep blue, like a helmet’s vizor rendered fluid. In MD, Bulkington’s eyes are described as shadowed, and “floating” in them Ishmael espies “reminiscences that did not seem to bring him [Bulkington] much joy” before he quietly retreats from the raucous society of his fellow, recently-landed shipmates, and they go out into the dark streets hollering after him. In MK’s illustration, Bulkington’s brawn and bulk are given a more enduring presence.

2:17pm

Bulkington’s “coffer-dam” of a chest is the most prominent feature of his physical characterization in this canvas, occupying more than the whole left half of the found page upon which it’s painted: the first sheet of a “Glossary of hand stitches,” rotated 90 degrees right. His pea green monkey jacket – markedly out of proportion to his small, black head – is geometrically shaped with a long sloping corner forming the shoulder, which mimics the contour and placement of the yellow-gold illustration of a featherstitch still visible on the found page just to the right. The billowing visual effect of Bulkington’s jacket is buttressed by two more details of the canvas: 1) the topmost part of the green jacket is painted so as to just overlap the lower row of white teeth, making the figure appear neckless or as if viewed from below, and 2) a waist-belt comprised of a grey-black band sandwiched between two thin lines of blue paint, below which the jacket appears to angle out sharply. Bulkington is swole, but in a fashion rather heavy and static than airy. Indeed, MK adds a feature to the canvas to concretize this bulk: where the found page has been painted over white to accommodate the subject, from below the waving tapered front hem of the monkey jacket, a brick wall extends composed of neatly patterned black lines.

The way MK illustrates him, it would be a wonder for Bulkington to slip from a crowded room unseen, much less to fall into water only to evaporate into thin air. A coffer-dam is a structure designed to enclose and contain great water pressure while submerged. What force, then, could break this body and release the native element therein – brimming just below its surface, as seen by that narrow channel of a vizor-eye – so as to transmogrify it to air? Spoiler: Moby Dick.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 014
Title: He stood a full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man.
(8.5 inches by 10.5 inches; acrylic paint and ink on found paper; August 19, 2009)

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

September 7, 2021

Posted under

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick

Comments

Leave a comment

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 13

13

When Ishmael sits down to a late supper in the frigid Spouter Inn, he and a number of sailors are obliged to button up their coats and hold teacups to their lips to supplement the unwarming glow of two cheap candles upon the table. The inhospitable temperature of the Inn is juxtaposed to the bounty they’re served for the meal: not only meat and potatoes but “dumplings… good heavens! dumplings,” Ishmael reports in that voice designed to replicate the pleasant surprise. A “young fellow” among the huddle at the table sets to eating these dumplings ravenously, prompting landlord Coffin to caution him about disturbing his dreams.

MK illustrates these rapidly consumed dumplings as four roughly formed pea-green balls – evenly spaced apart, each trailed by multiple thin black hash marks depicting motion – arching their way from the lower left corner of the canvas to its middle-right, where some have hurtled into a tunnel shaped into a flat black wall dominating the right side of the canvas. Apart from the context provided by the titular quotation from MD, only two minimal, colored features aid the impression that this is the young fellow’s face the green balls are disappearing into. Overlaying the black form, aligned in the lower-right corner of the canvas, a forest-green triangle is bisected by two parallel white lines (one solid and one dashed, like striping on a two-lane highway) and a white-outlined circle to the right of these lines: the seam and a button of the young fellow’s “box coat.” Near the top of the canvas, a narrow multi-colored balene band extends from one edge of the black wall-like form to the edge of the canvas in alternating blocks of green and blue, save for one block of red so placed as to give the figure a greedy aperture.

This is a relatively simple canvas depicting a simple moment of paternalistic humor in MD, but there are several significant movements happening here in MK’s enterprise (besides the arch of the dumplings): 

  1. The silhouette chosen to represent the face of the young fellow suggests MK interprets this character as a landlubber, since it recalls the peglike form of the water gazers in 2 and the “black Angel of Doom” in 8; this interpretation is supported by the textual detail that the young fellow is dressed in a “box coat” rather than a “monkey jacket” like the sailors at the table wear (and apparently Ishmael, too), which is shorter in length so as not to catch in the wind.
  2. MK’s attentiveness to what the characters are wearing in MD is being advertised by the shift in this canvas of one source of found pages to another. Up to this point every illustration has been created upon a page from a radio systems manual. This illustration is painted on a page from a sewing instruction book, turned on its side. A black-and-white diagram comparing four different types of stitch is left exposed in the upper-left quadrant of the canvas, and about the middle a series of beige illustrations shows the correct way to sew a suture. In fact, MK embraces this series of diagrammed folded seams – from left to right: too loose, too tight, just right – to aid in the effect of the dumplings’ trajectory into the young fellow’s hatch.

10:30pm

  1. We will see a handful more of these peglike figures before the Pequod sets sail, but this is the only remaining form of this type that is imbued with natural elements and textures in a fashion similar to the more prominent seafaring characters MK knows to be shortly arriving to the book. These Elementals will be discussed in their time, but the “young fellow” addressing himself to dumplings in the Spouter Inn is in transitional state, a hybrid figure. He wears the trappings of a landlubber: the box coat and buoy-peg silhouette, but his head is oped to or by the hues of the sea. The natural texture of the balene band that makes a power-stache on the archetypal captain commanding “GET!” (in 4) and a frown upon the geometric face of “the invisible police officer of the fates” that bullied Ishmael into whaling (in 5) serves the young fellow for eyes. A fresh experience asea is to come or perhaps just past, an experience before or behind that of Ishmael, who for his part doesn’t give the young fellow a second passing glance.
  2. The solitary red rectangle interrupting the blue-green pattern of the young fellow’s balene band, placed so as to suggest an eye, provides a clue to interpreting the red eyes of a figure that’s been haunting me – the black Angel of Doom – and one very prominent and important seafaring character MK knows to be shortly arriving to the Spouter Inn (and into MD), who is nearly always illustrated with red, pointilated pupils for eyes like those staring out of the canvas in 8 – Queequeg. In MK’s illustrations red eyes betoken a character in extremity: for the young fellow, his extremity is simple, albeit voracious hunger (“Whatcha doing?” “Eating!”). The extremity of the “black Angel of Doom” is harder to articulate, being that of a whole individual life in extreme which also shoulders the extremeness of a whole people in extremity, striving to acknowledge each of those individual extremities, and delivering them all faith. The single red hungry eye of this young fellow calls me to look back with a more sensitive and sympathetic eye on MK’s “black Angel of Doom” and quickens my anticipation of eyes I know to be awaiting me ahead.

This canvas made out of a page about how to sew sutures is itself a suture. In lightheartedly illustrating the direful manner in which this young fellow addressed himself to dumplings, MK had his own lee shore.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 013
Title: One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.
(8.5 inches by 10.5 inches; acrylic paint and ink on found paper; August 18, 2009)
Standard

Posted by

Posted on

September 2, 2021

Posted under

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick

Comments

Leave a comment

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 8

8

The peglike buoy figure of the water gazers in 2 returns in MK’s rendering of the “black Angel of Doom” Ishmael witnesses “beating a book” before a congregation in the “negro church” whose service he rudely interrupts then cruelly mocks before eventually finding his proper place at the Spouter Inn in New Bedford. The water gazers in 2 appear sexless and featureless apart from their beaky noses, hazy grey eyes, and multi-colored, -patterned wrappings. This canvas suggests that the figures are racialized, as this one is painted jet flat black from its smooth rounded head to the point where its tubular body vanishes behind a small brown pulpit uplifting a small book. The hazy, pointilated eyes are red, and a pair of large wings extend lifted from its sides, composed mostly of neatly layered small scallop shapes colored in various shades of maroon, grey, pink, black, and white (The wings have another texture where they meet the figure’s body: long slender U-shaped forms are colored in various shades of grey and black). A light, metallic grey spray-painted cross appears afront the black figure and a likewise painted nimbus crowns its head, framed between the uplifted wings.

The peglike figures seem to be MK’s answer to rendering the nameless landlubbers who populate the early pages of MD. This one is given prominence as the sole occupant of the canvas and by its great wings, but its most distinguishing and important feature is the one that differentiates it from the water gazers in 2: its blackness. Ishmael’s attitude (mock-revolted, dismissive) toward the congregation and pastor at the Black church is far from generous – indeed it’s dehumanizing – and MK chooses his moment on this cringeworthy page of MD to wrest some compromise between what Ishmael reports seeing and what he sees Ishmael seeing. Such compromises are fraught under the weight of US history. I’m anxious to witness how and where he chooses to grapple with illustrating Ishmael’s (and Melville’s) often racist characterizations of Black persons especially as the book goes on, having only begun myself with this “Angel of Doom” to sense the burden of (ir)responsibility that follows hard upon returning them into words. What is “doing justice” to a book like this, when it’s an injustice to some?

On the very edges of broad horizontal arms of the cross, where they extend past the tubular black body, you can make out traces of the scalloped lines composing the Angel’s wings beneath: a clue to the order in which the elements were created to compose this canvas – a detail I love.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 008
Title: …and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit.
(7.75 inches by 11 inches; ballpoint pen, colored pencil, ink and spray paint on found paper; August 13, 2009)