Or The Whale @savvyfairy777 - Tumblr Blog

Whaling museum

#engl302 #whales #whaling museum #Nantucket

So good.

#Moby dick #words #Melville #ahab is white #iron soul

So I was makin this all semester. Planned on it being an art project but I never made it in time. But this is my Moby Dick teapot!

#mobydick #teapot #pottery #wheel throwing #Herman Melville #the whale

Poetry. Women's Studies. Environmental Studies. Winner of the 2016 Washington Prize, this poetry collection retells the story of Moby-Dick, but from the points of view of the women left at home, the whales, the sea itself. Patriarchy is inverted by lyric and astonishing voices that insist we transform from killing to consciousness. "What if, dear Reader, pursuit's fierce law—to hunt what flees, to kill what is killable, to silence forever what cannot exactly speak for itself—could cast its dark line around itself and halt the maddened chase. What peace would then arise? Who would speak then in the ocean's haunted reciprocities? One voice might say: 'What you've done / to me you've done to you.' So speaks a hunted whale in Jessica Cuello's deep dive into Melville's waters. And in those depths she continues Ishmael's own dearest work, to give voice to all those otherwise denied one. But unlike the narrator in Moby-Dick, Cuello's choral generosity reaches beneath the surface of the waves, reaches past the horizon's boundary, letting the pursued whales speak themselves back into being, letting the women left home claim the lives that are their own. The ethic speaks so clearly it need not speak loud. It says, so simply, so justly, so necessarily: 'I have lives // and they are numerous.'"—Dan Beachy-Quick "What Cuello knows could save us from ourselves. Fear is instructive, yes, but we've learned poorly, devastatingly, from its churnings. It doesn't have to lead to the destruction of that which we fear; instead, we must allow it to draw us to each other, we must feel its deep call and heed its warnings. We need each other, fear says. Cuello transcribes this fear into a lyric sweep of nimble power and stunning insight. Hunt is a lasting and crucial collection."—Katie Ford "Jessica Cuello's HUNT is a tragedy. But it isn't the sort that ends with the death of a hero—instead, it is a tragedy that begins in the middle of the common death. It begins with, and emanates from, the recognition that it is impossible, in a world shaped by market forces, for humans to live with other beings in healthy and mutually beneficial ways—'What you've done / to me you've done to you,' Cuello writes. HUNT, then, isn't only a tragedy—it is a warning, and it is a guide, and thereby it is redemptive."—Shane McCrae

youvegotishmael

Raymond Weaver’s 1921 biography of Melville, responsible for the surge of American interest in Moby-Dick.

False light

you fuel your own fire, burning lungs, minds and blubber,

now stands a false sun, casting shadows against the seas.

you, the beast, alone face the empty ocean and survive whole,

not so the boy left in the dead currents as boats rush past.

the barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, lusting for inhuman mirth,

tales told laughing at your misery and mutilation,

“died by my hand, that fish, first kill of the month.”

he laughs, throws back a celebratory swig of distilled mirth.

last night they stared into furious flames, your dying wrath,

smoke flew into their lungs and all became devils, unholy terrors.

I watched them viciously spit on all side, drink smoke and heat,

and howl with the blackness of false sun, you didn’t survive whole.

the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.

a stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me.

that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him,

that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped.

I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong.

inspired by the try-works chapter, and some of the following chapters.

youvegotishmael

Introduction

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

-From Emerson’s “Nature” (1836)

youvegotishmael

“Selectively painting over much of a forgotten nineteenth-century book, Ruefle’s ninth publication brings new meaning to an old story. What remains visible is delicate poetry: artfully rendered, haunted by its former self, yet completely new. A high-quality replica of the original aged, delicate book in which Ruefle erased the text, this book will appeal to fans of poetry as well as visual art.”