Melville on the Tattoo
"carlatattoo4 butterfly tattoo" by Beautiful wwworld's
I have recently been reading "Moby Dick," and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is not simply a book as an almanac to the mystical moments surrounding every second of our lives.
One of my favorite characters in the book is Queequeg, the heavily tattooed harpooner and close friend of the narrator, Ishmael.
Being a rather tattooed person myself, I was struck by this one passage about Queequeg and his tattoos. To me, it encapsulates what is so wonderful about this timeless artform...
"...this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wonderous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even he himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unresolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg - "Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!"
Labels: quotables
posted by Cynthia Silvestri at
5/07/2008 08:54:00 AM
4 Comments:
that makes me want to get more done. now please.
oy vey! i was looking at day of the dead images today. i need to get one before the summer has ended!!
Almost a year to the date after you posted this I run into your blog entry regarding Queequeg. I just read Melville's 'Queequeg in his coffin' chapter last night and it really hit me in my spout. The quote you posted is a work of art in itself. I asked myself whether Queequeg was somehow aware of the knowledge inscribed on him at an unconscious-metaphysical level. Let's not forget that he pretty much raises from the dead at the end of that chapter...like a Lazarus or even a Christ. While in his coffin... I believe that he was getting ready to ask his shipmates to throw him into the sea while he was still alive... he stops the process of his death because he remembers that he has some unfinished business on land. That struck me because I've seen that firsthand with my father-in-law...a dark-skinned man with many burn marks on his skin as well as a scar from a bullet wound, and only one leg (kind of an Ahab-Queequeg person in real life). Maybe the theory scribbled on Queequeg's skin had to do with the need to fulfill your destiny...and the power that it gives you to know thy destiny scribbled upon you. And that once you become aware of it, destiny can only be severed by something outside of yourself...not by sickness but by the force of a gale or by being beaten by a whale. And that proof of a real woman/man is that she/he still faces that gale or that whale which is the only obstacle prior to one's destiny.
Melville was an enlightened man with a genius ability to write... a bit of a racist but we cant expect perfection from anyone, can we?
Thank you so much for this post - so good to see someone else who is really moved by Melville...
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