NAPOWRIMO #6

Picture by The Child. "Cheryl Plays the Organ While The Choir Sings."

Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Prompt #6 - Converse with Images

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DIALECTICAL QUEEQUEGS

"Who-e debel you? Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!"

Debel you?

Not me.

[1]

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Enter the tents of Mr. Melville’s “Tales of the Exotic: the Polynesian Peepshow”! Experience the tropics! View cannibal man in all of his savage glory! Come so close that you can almost touch his tribal markings, the mysterious and painful-looking tattoos! Watch as he wields various weapons! The spear! The harpoon! The lethal lance! Keep your children near at hand, that they don’t end up the next shrunken head of his ghoulish collection!

[2]

Miguel Covarrubias restores nobility to this heir of the throne, this son of the king, this prince who is divine. There is no Icarian fall here. There is no stooping from his station to serve aboard a Nantucket whaler. There is no selling of one’s birthright for a pot of porridge, a bowl of cod chowder. There is only majesty made manifest. There is disconcerting bravery, masked and regal, yet rightly bestowed by the gods upon this royal man. This is the strutting and befeathered cock. This is the light that emanates from the heavens and her inhabitants. This is the indigenous island native in his natural habitat.

[3]

Here then, is 1935 Heritage Press Editions Typee Queequeg, an embryonic version of the half-man, half-spectre of unearthly complexion and dark purplish, yellow color. This is 1941 lithograph Mexican Street Scene transposed from Mexico to the Marquesas, turned ninety-degrees from profile to full-frontal portraiture, seated to standing, transgendered, clothes and caution now thrown to the non-existent wind (because these scenes are both situated in the breath of the God of Elijah—no earthquake, no fire, only stillness and silence) Queequeg. This is breach of time-and-space, non-linear, semi-non-Melvillean Queequeg. Yet: the spear, the harpoon, the lance! Step right up!

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The images I played with:

[1]

Queequeg from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Italicized quotes are from Chapter 3, "The Spouter-Inn."

[2]

Young fierce Marquesan warrior from Typee by Herman Melville, as illustrated by Miguel Covarrubias for the 1935 Heritage Press Edition.

[3]

Mexican Street Scene (lithograph, 1941) by Miguel Covarrubias. (I recently viewed this lithograph at University of Puget Sound's Kittredge Gallery.) Also, a reimagined Queequeg, combining elements of all three images, although revisited primarily through image #2.

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I conversed with the images. The images conversed with one another. Covarrubias conversed with Melville's ghost. Queequeg conversed with his alternate selves. The conversations recorded themselves onto the page.