Bone

(with a nod to Jasper Johns’s Ventriloquist)

Ahab stands at the mast, ranting invective against the wind;his left-leg a whale-bone prosthesis pivoting in its notch on-deck.The creaking of bone on oak soothing and haunting the shiplike the sullen rattle of an unseen snake in overgrown grass.At his desk, Ahab daydreams, wriggles his left toes, scratches his left knee,but as he swats a mosquito from his left calf, he’sjolted from his dream as his hand strikes unfeeling bone.

Ahab hobbles out onto the dark deck, alone with the sea.No breeze but the ship glides along,lured by the phantom whale.While leaning against the bulwarks,searching the surface, whale-bone between flesh and oak,Ahab’s a bearded conduit for Tragicall Nature;shards of current shoot out from the gold doubloon on the mast.Omens, presentiments charge through human sinew,shoot through wood/world/oceanic membraneas the past flits up for an ungraspable secondilluminating invisible whiteness impervious to surface.

Within the frame:painted copies of paper American flagsattached to a painting of a painted doorenhanced by trompe l’oeil technique: shadow on a white vase.A black and white painting in the painting.Representations of representationsriding the white whale.Foreboding jaw wide open: tungsten steel teeth.Massive might twisted, wound tight, ready to strike,speaking through mists of mind and epistemic murkthat can only hope to glimpse yet never contain the vertical whale.

An image is unhinged by yet another image.Ungraspable terror at the heart of the paint.

C© 2006 The AuthorsJournal compilation C© 2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc

L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 85

Jasper Johns, Ventriloquist, 1983. Encaustic on canvas (196.5 × 133cm). c©Jasper Johns/Licensedby VAGA, New York, NY. By permission of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum purchasewith funds by the Agnes Cullen Arnold Endowment Fund.

B O N E

The whale, copied from Moser’s woodcut,copied from lithographs, words, the book Moby-Dick;copied from Melville’s life, whaling tales, encyclopedias, the Bible.Everything a copy of a copy.

Voices thrown hither and thither by sources unknown.Unwilled speech of free will that cannot be found or MEAN.Till the whale comes towards us, open-mouthed,raising the waves on all sides andbeating the sea before him into a foam.

Rick MitchellCalifornia State University, Northridge

A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 87