Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, Corrections and Confessions

I made several declarative promises at the outset of this enterprise to write a page (ish) of creative interpretive commentary for every one of Matt Kish’s iconic page-by-page illustrations of Moby-Dick. That main promise I intend to keep, though I might have to take periodic breaks. I never promised I would do a page a day. I just wanted to try to simulate something of the experience Kish himself must have undergone when he created the illustrations. It’s been a humbling educational experience to say the least, but I am now compelled to make some “corrections” (as Kish sometimes had to make when originally publishing the artwork on his blog) or in my case confessions.

Firstly, I said at the outset that I would only let my references to the text of Moby-Dick be based on recollection (this I said in a sincere effort to keep my focus on Kish’s art), but I had to quickly abandon that bravado when faced with the great difficulty I had developing commentaries on several of the canvases. I’ve repeatedly consulted the text for further contextual detail to support potential commentaries on the illustrations, and in doing so I’ve leaned on it as a crutch. Then, as the text was helping me elucidate perspectives on the illustrations, other canvases were revolutionizing my perspective on several details of the book that I never closely considered. The ideas and associations forged between these two opposing currents of my writing process – the text informing my perspective on a canvas, the canvas transforming my perspective on the text – have been the main fount of inspiration and motivation to continue and to complete this labor, so from here on out I’m looking, looking closely, at the text as well as the illustrations.

Secondly, sometime around Queequeg’s poncho, my bookmark landed in my printed copy of Moby-Dick in Pictures and I started relying on the archive of Kish’s original blog to source images of the illustrations. As a result, divergences between the canvases that were ultimately printed in that book and the ones that originally appeared on the blog have now occurred that are not accounted for in my commentaries. The differences between the illustrations that Kish originally made and the ones he recreated are fascinating to consider, but the rhythmic fluctuations in Kish’s process that led to these recreations or resulted from them have become my own. His “corrections” have made me reconsider how to move forward with my writing: should I rewrite previous commentaries? That prospect seems painful to me: especially in the case of the “MD Aphorism” illustration series (which were for me among the most difficult commentaries to compose), all of which were redrawn by Kish before being published as a book. If I move forward not having rewritten previous commentaries do I just refer to the re-drawings to come as a matter of course, with no acknowledgment that there are others unidentified behind?

Going forward, I will definitely use both the printed version of the illustrations and the originally blogged versions (as well as any other republished recreations of the illustrations Kish put out there) as sources, but there are some decisions I need to make about my own process before I can resume (near) daily publications.

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 37

10/5/21, 9:33pm

37

In MD, after Father Mapple ascends the side ladder to his pulpit, as if to make an “impregnable” island of himself upon it, he draws the ladder back up with him. This, at first, unaccountable action – since Mapple’s reputation for “sincerity and sanctity” prevents Ishmael imputing his behavior to any “tricks of the stage” – accomplishes, Ishmael resolves, a physical isolation to signify his “spiritual withdrawal,” the temporary suspension or removal of Mapple’s “worldly ties and connexion” to perform the sermon. 

10/6/21, 7:05am

MK’s disembodiment of Father Mapple makes his “spiritual withdrawal” from the worldly world more readily apparent as part abstraction. Still just a face, or the mere mask or skin of one shows facing forward from a greater distance. A boulder-shaped grey mass hovers just above the midway point of the found page: a long, thick black line is inked across its broad top in place of eyes; a short line just below its middle with a thin perpendicular forms a nose; and just below that a medium-sized line traverses its lower tapering end for a mouth. The thicker lines have smaller striated lines drawn into them from above and below in such a way that the pattern of linework which appears readily as a contoured face in the previous canvas looks like a stretched and displayed hide in this one. Surrounding the face is a colorless nimbus, irregular radiations of black ink defining its perimeter, as if the light source eclipsed shines black, the eclipsing body an emptiness around Father Mapple’s face.

In drastic contrast of texture and style, a detailed black-and-white photograph of a foremost part of a ship’s deck is featured prominently in the lower half of the found page. It’s not a whaler but a warship. Opened cannon turrets are visible along its sides. The effect of this illustration to signal Father Mapple’s physical ascension to his pulpit in the Whaleman’s Chapel while almost entirely dispossessing him of a body is accomplished in no small part by the presence of this photographed prow upon the found page. A loose vertical braid of three twisting bands of color – red, blue, and yellow* – extends from the foremost part of the ship’s deck into the upper margin of the canvas, passing behind the defacing face suspended in the ringed eclipse of a nimbus.

10/7/21, 4:42pm

The column of braided but untouching, unmixed bands of primary color forms an additional abstract masthead on the foremost part of the realistic ship. It’s planted on the deck just where, according to the suggestion of the caption on the found page, a ship’s chaplain might have lamented access to private toilets. It’s a monument to a phallic apparatus without direct physical counterpoint in the structural reality of the ship, where the chaplain wishes for room of his own in which to poop, some designated rung on the whaleship’s hierarchy. No earthly mast or spire extends to eternity as this ladder of Creation. Father Mapple stands spiritual masthead ashore in the Whaleman’s Chapel, done up in all its “sea taste,” where he used to spy for whales in his seagoing days. The standing of his avocation drives him to his knees sooner than would have done the standing watches of his vocation, not for age but for the immeasurable weight he bears as his spiritual role as “pilot of the living God.”

Either way, in MD, for all his removal from “worldly ties and connexions” Father Mapple’s body tires while he’s away. In MK’s illustration, however, there are no legs upon which he stands, nor knees upon which he can kneel, just a face stretched out like a pelt against ringed flare of black light, ready to beat like a drum against the tri-chord of primary color growing like a beanstalk to the heavens.

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*Perhaps this is precisely the color palette to which the instars of Ishmael captured in MK’s MD Aphorisms tends.  

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 037
Title: Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions?
(7.75 inches by 11 inches; acrylic paint and ink on found paper; September 12, 2009)

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 36

10/4/21, 5:26pm

36

Father Mapple is MK’s subject for this page of MD, a closeup, two-thirds view illustration of the face of the veteran-whaleman-turned-chaplain occupies the majority of the 9×11 inch found page, containing only a column of printed text almost entirely obscured by the ink and paint (you can still read: “today, / keel / the / stru / b / i […] p / Go”). Surrounding the face are charcoal-colored cloud formations, graphically shaped and opaquely painted. More nearly, their silhouettes shift from obtruding, eclipsing parts of the face in the lower and middle portions of the canvas to a solid band of color that the texture and color of Mapple’s face is showing through at the top: showing through the clouds, that is, but parting through them in their own proper shape. It’s a difficult visual effect to capture in language; the upshot is the visual identification, interplay, and hybridization between the spiritual figurehead of Father Mapple and the airy elements of which he partakes in the elemental visual spectrum of MK’s illustrations of MD. Mapple hasn’t just brought these clouds into the chapel with him from out of doors; they travel with him as atmospheric phenomena gathered on his brow.

Individual features of Mapple’s face are defined mostly by concentrations of striations and root-like strokes branching off a thick black line for a mouth, and banded cavity for eyes. Between, a triangular declivity juts over a pursed stiff upper lip. Where it is not outlined in black, the face is filled with a wash of grey that just allows the printed text on the found page to show through. Of course, MK’s linework evokes “the fissures of his wrinkles” that feature prominently in Mapple’s physical description in MD, but they also mimic the veiny linework of the whale’s body in 35. There, thin, root-like formations grow denser and more compacted where the tail tapers to the fluke, where the pectoral fin projects, and where the open wound gapes. Mapple’s face is abstracted by a mouth and eyes withheld from view: a self-effacing face, made of similar tried and true stuff as the shelter for hemorrhaging hope and ravenous faith projected onto and into the body of the whale in the previous canvas. Mapple’s body is an extension of the very atmosphere of the chapel. The proven face of weathered wood he wears to show there, as and for the whaleman or his widow. We see nothing more of his body, and his face is a mask on the air.

This is a stark contrast to the text of MD where Mapple is all body – an old guy in a “second flowering youth,” pretty spry. His “reverential dexterity” is most memorably remarked when he ascends the side ladder leading to his pulpit, but also everytime details about his appearance, bodily comportment, and facial expressions register, which is often, making him one of the most fully embodied characters in the book so far (second only to Queequeg). MK’s illustration of Father Mapple divests this spiritual figurehead of his physicality in order to emphasize his spiritual stature and the spiritual transformation to which it attests: the lower arch of his nimbus hung like gravity itself upon the unbending dried seawall of his brow, and blending his face, for all its hard weathering, with the clouds.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 036
Title: Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favorite.
(8 inches by 11 inches; acrylic paint and ink on found paper; September 8, 2009)

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 35

10/3/21, 7:56pm

35

Ishmael empathizes at some length with the mournful tablet gazers he encounters upon entering the Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford. He knows no one in the place (save for Queequeg), but he deduces that among these tablet gazers are family – widows namely – of those people whose names are engraved upon the marble plaques. Two pieces of evidence lead him to this conclusion: 1) the look, if not the wardrobe, of “some unceasing grief” upon the tablet gazers; 2) Ishmael’s familiarity with the many “unrecorded accidents in the fishery.” As if on this very point the perspective of the Ishmael speaking silently shifts to that of the Ishmael on the other side of the catastrophe of the Pequod, not just glimpsing the interior of the Whaleman’s Chapel for the first time as the would-be whaleman. “Oh! Ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass…” This Ishmael knows firsthand the “desolation” of those who have lost loved ones in ways that admit of no visitation, no resurrection. The “frigid inscriptions” on the marble tablets are a testament to the “void” of not just the loss but the loss of the customary equipment to grieve. The repeatedly failed testing of reality for the lost one that carries on in the wake of absence – what they call learning to live with it – is often intimately tied to defined notions of place. Stabbing, healing daydreams and hallucinations – the torments of mourning – are called up by memories activated by familiar objects, sounds, vistas. How strange and unresolveable the grief, then, Ishmael opines, for lost whalemen. Perhaps a personalized tool, logbook, or other object makes the voyage home to tokenize the absence, but the person is hard lost that never returns as a body to bear witness to its own departed life. 

This lost body of the life lost is the literal center of MK’s illustration of this page of MD: a mere silhouetted stick of a figure with a little rounded head, laid to its side on the plane of the horizontal orientation of the found page itself, an electrical schema. Surrounding the black stick figure is a blood-red oblong hole; surrounding that the be-lined form of a great whale. The thick outline is recognizably that of a sperm whale – from the shape of its fluke to the far right of the page to characteristic brow line nearly nosing the far left, and the pectoral fin placement and shape on the lower side of the form – but apart from the blood red oblong hole in its side where the black stick figure lay the whale is featureless; there’s no eye or mouth. It’s outline gives it a dormant, frozen appearance, while it’s surface features an intricate linework in black ink, branching out from the whale’s thick perimeter line and meandering their various inverted V- and Y-shaped ways toward its middle – as if traces of every former movement.

10/4/21, 7:10am

Ishmael characterizes the uniquely impossible mourning for lost whalemen as grief for the “placelessly perished.” MK couldn’t have chosen to illustrate this line in any way that would not have given this placelessness some place, if even just the margins of the found page itself. Rather than ink some abstraction to render the woeful thought of a bodiless grief, MK draws the missing body – simple like a petroglyph, featureless except for its anthropomorphic limbs – and places it within another recognizable body. The intricate linework of the whale’s body isn’t a labyrinth confining the stick figure; both bodies together are the picture of stillness: the one still body still in the other still body. The only feature of the canvas that animates this illustration of the radically departed is the blood-red oblong cavity in the whale’s side where the black stick figure is deposited as in a crypt. The wrinkling linework of the wheel’s body draws in and puckers around its edges like a wound. MK creates a monument to the unceasing grief for the body that never returns in the form of the unreturning body that the unreturned set out to make.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 035
Title: What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.
(11 inches by 7.75 inches; ink on found paper; September 7, 2009)

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 34

10/2/21, 7:56am

34

Ishmael spends a fair amount of time contemplating the mourners in the Whaleman’s Chapel, their gazes fixed to the marble tablets inscribed with the names of whalemen lost to the chase. He rhapsodizes at length about why the living suffer the dead, especially the faithful, believing the departed in some otherworldly Paradise, “dwelling in unspeakable bliss,” “but the rumor of a knockinging in a tomb will terrify a whole city”? In the midst of this reflection – which could have inspired many dark and ponderous illustrations from MK, if he’d chosen another line* – Ishmael observes Queequeg sitting near him in the chapel, “a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance.” Queequeg’s awed expression seems addressed to environs of the chapel itself rather than its congregation, because he recognizes Ishmael among them: “This savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance…” Noting Queequeg’s presence in the chapel – notably, the only person recognizing Ishmael – Ishmael’s language immediately registers Queequeg as out of place there – he’s “savage” here, not pagan – and he further isolates Queequeg on the basis of his supposed linguistic prowess by offering that it’s only because only Queequeg among those in the chapel cannot read (he assumes) and is therefore not reading the “frigid inscriptions” on the wall that he recognizes Ishmael. Ishmael recognizes Queequeg recognizes Ishmael while they both fail (according to Ishmael) to recognize the writing on the wall.

MK’s choice to illustrate this single instance of Queequeg being mentioned as a presence in “The Chapel” – or in the subsequent two chapters where “The Pulpit” is described at length and “The Sermon” of Father Mapple is recorded (After, it’ll be mentioned that he left sometime before the benediction.) – underscores the questionable necessity of Queequeg being inserted into this chapter at all, like a fish out of water. The “curiosity” of Queequeg’s gaze (as it’s given a noun by Ishmael) is consistent with an ethnographic posture toward Christendom that Ishmael will later impute to him.** MK’s interplay of illustration and found page highlights the wonder and incredulity of Queequeg’s countenance upon occupying the space of the chapel. 

On the upper half of the found page there is a black-and-white reproduction of what looks like a medieval-era engraving showing scenes in five panels. The interior space is defined in the engraving by a series of vaulted arches, most of them angled sharply toward their zenith, except for what appears to be the center arch (despite the cropping of the photo on the found page), which is more rounded and ornate and is raised just a little bit higher than the rest. Beneath this arched sits a tall, slouched figure in a tri-tipped crown, long robe and cape, sitting atop a sculpted and draped dais between parted curtains tied to the tall columns framing him. To his right and left smaller, dark clad figures are kneeled in positions of supplication and servitude: the one shown to the right looks up into the face of the master of the house with a long scroll in his hand; to the master’s left a stooped, robed youth with an abbot’s cut holds a page of notes. In the far right panel of the engraving four tall robed figures consult around a page, one of them declaiming to the rest. This image is left almost entirely unobscured by MK’s illustration. 

Below it, superimposed over the column of text printed on the found page, Queequeg’s face is drawn in its characteristic texture of concentrically lined scallop-shaped scales of aquamarine, his white almond-shaped eye sockets housing his hazy red, pointiliated eyes, which are turned up, as if gazing into the paneled scenes printed above from below. The red eyes are oriented not toward the master, however, but toward the margin. Most obvious when first regarding this canvas is the fact that Queequeg’s face is not rendered anatomically rounded or spherical, but rectangular and flat, like a blanket or a sheet. Or more likely a kite, since around the perimeter of this wavy edged rectangular shape, eleven silhouetted bird shapes lift off with eleven individual aquamarine strings that wind their ways in to the concentrically scalloped scales of Queequeg’s face.

The illustration isolates Queequeg in a “fish out of water” moment in “The Chapel,” but not in the stigmatizing fashion of Ishmael, who immediately resorts to cultural bias to account for Queequeg’s recognition of him in that space. While Queequeg has placed himself in the chapel by his own volition, MK’s illustration shows him captivated by the space, surrendered to its airy atmosphere: not in the passive way of a wet sheet on the line but in a willful, harmonious way, and in a way perhaps that carries him beyond it. Symbiotically, Queequeg’s bird friends fan him out to flap in the open sky of which so many vaulted ceilings are dim reminders. If they kept flying on their separate ways then the damp winding sheet of Queequeg’s tenure in the chapel would unravel him like a shawl. Good thing he leaves before the benediction. 

The red Q stamp and infinity band signature appears in the upper left corner of the canvas, superimposed over a portion of the engraving preserved on the found page where the exterior facade of the structure frames the reveal of its interior scenes.  

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* e.g., “Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope

** “[I]n Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two.”

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 034
Title: …and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance.
(7 inches by 9.5 inches; ink and marker on found paper; September 7, 2009)

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 33

9/30/21, 9:01pm

33

After a walk to take in the streets of New Bedford, Ishmael sallies out a second time for a special visit to the city’s famed “Whaleman’s Chapel.” Upon entering the place, he notes as many “sailor’s wives and widows” as sailors among the small, scattered congregation. Each of the congregants appears isolated in an experience of grief. Ishmael notes their sense of loss as a matter of fact, as palpable to his eyes as as their “muffled silence” to his ears.

To illustrate this grieving archipelago MK arranges three of his white peglike figures along the lower margin of the canvas with only their heads exposed. Like the water gazers in 2 each of them faces a different direction, one left, one right, one forward. Unlike the water gazers, however, whose lidless, hazy eyes stare in every direction but landward, the grievers’ eyes are all drawn passively closed like the dreamer in 15. The two peglike figures turned profile have large individual teardrops dangling like jewels from the drape-lines of their eyes. Previously, I extemporized that the water gazers were magnetically drawn to the water in proportion to how sealed off they are from it, like buoys. The extremity of grief lodged in the Whaleman’s Chapel – that specially unresolveable grief specially reserved for the “placelessly perished” – draws water from the driest of dowels.

The isolated griefs are minimized by the features of the canvas dedicated to MK’s rendering of the space of Whaleman’s Chapel itself. The 8×9 inch found page is occupied almost entirely by a closeup black-and-white photo of a section of brick wall, marred and uneven in its finish and adjoining what appears to be an industrial weather-sealed concrete surfacing, dark in color. On the fifth brick down from the topmost brick in the frame, the words “I need” are chalked in an informal cursive. The seven bricks below this one are void of writing as the ones above it, but the words scrawled on the fifth brick leave you projecting on the bricks below, above, and all around – like a spreadsheet – various scrolling lists of nouns and verbs and prepositional phrases that would answer to “I need…” In front of the original street art in the photograph, before the chalk washed away, you’d have the whole wall.  

That is, if you look past the painting that forms the canvas’s foreground. On level with where the grieving pegheads enter the frame so too does a towering cross extending halfway up the height of canvas, formed of broad, partially transparent canary yellow brush strokes, dotted over with 9 daubs of opaque white paint, up and across, crossing at the third and fifth dot respectively. Over the upper third of the found page, irrespective of the cropped photograph of the brick wall, are capital letters formed not by lines but individual semi-opaque daubs of yellow spelling the name JESUS.

In MD the scattered silent islands of people assembled in the Whaleman’s Chapel all gaze upon marble tablets engraved with the names of the placelessly perished, drawing their eyes toward the walls of the space that contains their respective insular and incommunicable griefs as a congregation. The heads of MK’s peg people are all turned away from the wall. In fact, they’re painted on a plane and a scale that defies the margin of the wall’s appearance, as the name above them is spelled across that margin: a constellation of isolated dots, taken from a cross and put up on high. Sometimes there’s no faith but for that of a space. Never is there space but for that of a faith.

Matt Kisk
MOBY-DICK, Page 033
Title: Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.
(8 inches by 9 inches; acrylic paint and ink on found paper; September 7, 2009)

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 32

9/27/21, 8:14pm

32

A minimalist collage is the first of many examples of MK’s deliberate effort to illustrate the relatively sparse references to women and femininity in MD. There are very few females assigned as characters in the book – only one with a speaking role – a few more women appear as minor shapers of the plot in their absence (wives back home, Ahab’s “‘crazy widowed mother,’” etc.), but the text’s figurative language abounds in passing references to women and female bodies. MK consistently highlights these features of the text in his choice of line to illustrate and often in the form of realistic collage elements. The aggregate effect of this stratagem is to amplify a dimension of femininity and womanism of the book that might easily go overlooked, as it is seemingly not a deliberate priority of Melville’s (or Ishmael’s).

The current page of MD offers a longer-than-average mention of women, and its placement at the very end of the chapter – given the flourish with which chapters generally expire in MD – should imply that it’s not so much a digression or diversion as a destination. After a passage where we are brought out of the perspective of the Ishmael who’s a newcomer to New Bedford, seeing its wild peopled streets for the first time, into that of an Ishmael who’s visited New Bedford in every season, tasted its sweet summer and smelled is budding fall, the blossoms terracing the exposed ancient rocks upon which the shoreline city is built provoke this parting thought from Ishmael:

And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.

Melville, Moby-Dick

The final paragraph of a chapter dedicated to “the street” of New Bedford is not just a nod to the women of the renowned whaling port and their better than “perennial” beauty but also a diminishing comparison between them and the women of Salem. Evidence that the latter “match” the former’s “bloom” is bandied about by Ishmael as sailors’ gossip: “they tell me.” Perhaps during his few tours in the merchant service Ishmael caught scent of “the odorous Moluccas” firsthand, but in all likelihood it’s Ishmael the veteran whaleman more than the greenhand making a knowing reference to the licentiousness of proto-colonial probes into the archipelagos of Southeast Asia.

MK’s illustration of the first line of this concluding paragraph of “The Street” consists of three main collage elements: a black-and-white photograph of a whaleship at full sail in the lower right corner, prow pointed center canvas, is cutoff at its mast-heads to expose an overlain black-and-white photograph (older method, daguerrotype maybe) of a body in long sleeved, white collared black dress, holding an open book, and sat sideways on a wooden slat back chair, oriented the same direction as the ship. This photograph occupies the majority of the canvas. A graphic rose is painted over the head of the seated figure: a circle outlined in black, with cross sections of thin black painted lines concentrically spiralizing toward the circle’s center, the resultant petals are blood red. Organic elements and textures are incorporated into the canvas but confined. A small segment of photographed shock green elegance coral is visible in the lower left corner of the canvas, cutoff at the top by the photograph of the seated reading person with a painted graphic rose for a head and then overlain by the modern-age photograph of a whaleship speeding asail, which is torn at the far left edge as if revealing the magnified coral beneath.

The figurative language of MD binds the beauty of the women of New Bedford to the natural world; their “bloom” – the “fine carnation of their cheeks” – is “perennial,” unlike the red roses they tend in summer. It endures like “sunlight in the seventh heaven.” That sounds nice. On the other hand, Ishmael implies that the commerce of the whaling port – control of which was hoarded by men – has nurtured blossoms in a place that would otherwise be an outcropping of “barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation’s final day.” In MK’s collaged illustration the modern photograph of the speeding, tilted bowsprit of a whaleship overlays the more stationary photo of what I assume to be a woman reading, but the photograph made from a more archaic, time-consuming process dominates the canvas both in its size and owing especially to the painted feature that obscures the face of the reading person. Eclipsing the photographed woman’s head with a graphic, painted token of the transient beauty of a New Bedford summer rose, MK renders transient the supposed better-than-perennial beauty captured in the photo-realistic medium with a painted token of that beauty, made by women, which is said annually to fade. The zoomed-in, digital era photograph of green elegant coral confined to a small, uneven portion of the canvas’s far left corner is a minimized but striking reminder about how distant from nature these competing vantages of the canvas are.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 032\
Title: And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses.
(9 inches by 11 inches; acrylic paint and collage on found paper; September 7, 2009)

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)

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 30

9/25/21, 7:35am

30

Ishmael’s surprised to find the company of whalemen lodging at the Spouter Inn such quiet and evidently shy company over breakfast. He, a great spouter himself, was expecting stories. MK illustrates the line wherein Ishmael contrasts the “sheepish,” “bashful,” and “timid” manners of the whalemen at the “social breakfast table” with their unabashed bravery upon the high seas, where they have “duelled [great whales] dead without winking.” The canvas inspired by this line becomes the first of MK’s many illustrations of whales for his enterprise (excluding that “portentous, black mass” that occupies the dingy canvas in the entryway to the Inn), but this is only a partial view. Just the top of a leviathanic head breaches the bottom margin of the canvas and extends halfway up its length before tilting outward to the right; the curvature of its brow is just within frame near the middle of the right margin. The body of the whale is composed mostly of overlapping, variously sized lateral shapes like razor clam shells, outlined in black and shaded black-grey along their upper edges. The body of the whale is colorless, apart from this shading, so the printed text of the found page is visible behind it: fragments of histories of artillery fire and maneuvers asail read through. Just above curvature of the whale’s brow a black-and-white engraving of galleon warship is printed on the upper third of the found page, partially obscured by graphic clouds of grey and white over pink that originate spoutwise from the foremost point of the whale’s head where emanates a sloped column of grey and white bands with one pink band shot through it. 

Standing astride the whale’s back, braced against its rise, is the broad figure of Bulkington, his green monkey-jacket buttoned up tight and a bulky silhouetted lance tilted to his side. Just below the tip of the lancehead is an overlarge lidless anthropomorphic eye drawn to one side of the great whale, its striated blue iris and watery black pupil rolled upward in its socket toward Bulkington. Upon the ponderous body of the whale the enlarged human eye looks oddly, its passive, dewy form juxtaposing the graphic spout emanating sharply from the whale’s head, that band of pink shot through the grey and white expelling the whale’s lifespot. But the eye isn’t so much the whale’s as it’s Ishmael’s, turned up into his own head and imagining the “war stories” he expected to be regaled with over breakfast. The wave formations atop the wedge of seascape painted behind Bulkington in the background of the illustration evoke the horizon-line of Ishmael’s own water-bag head. It’s funny that Ishmael, a greenhand to whaling at this point in his own story, jokes that you would have thought these “timid warrior whalemen” a fold of sheep upon the Green Mountains, sheepish as they were. Veteran soldiers, however, are often less embarrassed about remembering their past battles than about remembering how to be sociable animals once more.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 030
Title: Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking…
(8 inches by 11 inches; acrylic paint, colored pencil and ink on found paper; September 5, 2009)

Every Page of Every Page of Moby-Dick, 29

9/24/21, 7:32pm

29

In the light of day, and with a fair prospect of breakfast before him, Ishmael gets a better look at his fellow lodgers at the Spouter Inn, some of whom he saw arriving the night previous. In the text of MD Ishmael registers several precise physical characteristics of these specimen “whalemen” in his description – “a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.” These attributes are ellided out of MK’s isolated line from “Breakfast” which serves the title of his illustration, whose matter instead is a list of the whalemen’s ranks on the hierarchy of the whaleship or what form of labor they bring to the fishery: “They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers.”

Notably absent from MK’s illustration of this company of whalemen upon the landscape-oriented canvas is the cylindrical peglike figure of the landlubber. Workers in whaling are differently drawn, imbued with either the elemental mediums native to their labor (primarily water, fire, and air) or the tools of their various trades. One of figures on this canvas is recognizable, the broadest of the 5 standing to the far right of the frame. It’s Bulkington (from 14); notable among the minor differences in his reappearance on this canvas: his brickwork cofferdam of a chest beneath his unbuttoned pea-green monkey jacket is painted over in pale blue and yellow stripes, his fluid-blue visor-eye has been replaced with a green-grey balene-band. The figure standing on the far left of the canvas is clearly the “chief mate” (aka first mate), as there’s a large black 1 painted on his red/blue silough-shaped body; even its head is drawn in the shape of a large blocked number one, colored white: three hashmarks about a mouth, a slouch of red for a cap, with a furl of ink black eddying from the top of it. Whereas the coffer-dam chest of Bulkington walls up water within (as previously shown in the depths of the visor-eye featured in his individual portrait), the silough-bodied chief mate keeps the air in or rather keeps it out, the excess of what it can’t contain – whether absence or presence of a certain air – excreting in the form of black cloud that briefly forms the shape of a whale before breaking apart and rejoining the sky. 

The tallest figure, standing center canvas and occupying its full height is one of the other mates, second or third: I’m inclined to think third. Standing next to this figure, which is colored mostly brown, is a black silhouetted lance, its line spiraling around its shaft and disappearing behind the figure’s back. The figure’s proximity to the lance might represent a recent promotion since the implement whose use was reserved for those aboard the whaleboats deserving the honor and glory of the kill (if not the dart that secured it) – the lance – is not the shape of the tool emblazoned in blue on its body and protruding like a finial out of the top of its tubular head – that’s a harpoon. I read a story in the beady eyes of this tall illustrated whaleman where a long-darter of whales finally ships out a mate. Like the newly minted mate the squat blacksmith to its one side is imbued with the icons of its trade: a squared off slag red body is cut across by a yellow lightning bolt, flecked black. Upon the flat terracotta head featuring a double row of white block teeth and a black visor-eye is a chalice-shaped vessel with a row of white bubbles rising from its middle, like a quench. The figure standing to the other side of the third mate stands taller than the blacksmith but shorter than the rest; it’s draped in a powder blue coat with golden, fringed epaulets, pinned large about its middle is an emblem: a circle of golden cordage frames a black anchor against a field of seafoam green. The rounded head of this figure is colored white but a pattern of lines and circles gives it the appearance of riveted metal plates cut across by a red visor-eye; atop its head is a golden fin or frond resembling the horn of a gramophone or an ear trumpet. This would be the ship-keeper, who bore the responsibility for the ship’s movements and communications between the crew when the captain was away. The anchor emblem on the figure’s chest is nearly identical to the one spouted before the face of that right whale of a captain who Ishmael foresees ordering him “GET!” when he ships (in 4); it signals the singularity in the hierarchy of the whaleship’s power structure whereby it must distribute itself incrementally down the ladder of command, with the captain on top, whose “complete dominion” can transfer and indeed does frequently transfer to another, even one upon its lowest rung.

Presumably, Ishmael would’ve discovered after a certain brief period of casual conversation and repeated meetings the respective positions and occupations of the various whaleman about the Spouter Inn and is not claiming to be able to distinguish at sight their positions in the whaleship’s hierarchy and its division of labor when he sees them before his first breakfast in New Bedford. MK is in the opposite position of having to make the duties and specialized labors of the whaleman visible. Of course, there is no real urgency of his doing so here; he might have illustrated any number of charming lines for this page. I would suggest he chose this moment as a sort of practice run along the rungs of the whaleship’s hierarchy for his portraits to come of the main cast of “knights and squires,” tradesmen, servants, and men-before-the-mast comprising the crew of the Pequod. Before we even know that ship to be hiring crew, MK is working out how to conjure them.

Matt Kish
MOBY-DICK, Page 029
Title: They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers…
(11 inches by 8 inches; acrylic paint and ink on found paper; September 4, 2009)