Moby Dick and Hilma’s Treasures: a weekend when books soared, life and art mingled amid a blizzard of flyers at the Guggenheim, mirroring each other dancing with the shades and shadows

 

Scenes  from  book group, Hilma Klint's treasures,  and the Guerrilla Girls. 

Donna Aceto - Guggenheim_Met Shame on Sackler Demo against Board...

Put on by Artist activists Nan Goldin, LA Kaufman and P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) joined by VOCAL NY & RAR 

artist-drops-massive-opioid-spoon-at-entrance-of-another-sackler-owned-drug-manufacturer 

Its Tuesday and I'm  still thinking about the action we had and the book we read,
the dancing and the poems of our days here,
falling apart,
trying to stand,
holding each other up if we can.

Some days, I just wonder what I’m doing.

I can barely hold on.

Or I stumble. 

Friday, I rode up to 54^th street in Manhattan

where a elder cyclist had been killed.  The precinct was cracking down  on cyclists,

of course.

And got doored on the way back  home,

a double parked car door crashing into my bike before I could swerve away,

cars to my left, rows double parked to my  right,

thud, crack, my neck, ow, my shins bleeding,

the driver screaming at me,

I hobbled away,

could have been worse.

That could have been it.

Benjamin and Huck Finn and Brad Will, together again.

But I was ok.

Before the street imitates the news stories,

another dead cyclist, 

wading out into a sea of cars,

fighting a hegemony of steel,

burping  out exhaust,

enveloped into  the abyss.   

Riding wobbly, feeling worse,
another punch from the sky,
maybe the universe is trying to tell  me somthing?
Look out!

I thought about that all the way

back home.

Still had 90 pages to read in Moby Dick for

the AiR Reading Group.

 LAK wrote to say

an action was planned for Saturday during our

reading group.

You can’t cancel reschedule book group any more,

members told me.

All week we scheduled and debated when

where to meet,

amidst conscientious objections here,

and busy schedules there.

A majority on the email list agree to meet

an hour early so I could get to the action.

Arriving home,

I dozed and read,

in between movies and dinner and boxing highlight reels

and other distractions till 300 am.

Woke up at six am,

read some Moby Dick and got ready for my 9 am

group work class,

wondering about the AiR group,

and the trouble

we were having scheduling our reading group later  in  the day.

There is process and there is content.

I didn’t feel up for attending to process.

Hopefully we could just stick to content.

by 1145 am I was back  home after class.

What are you doing here dad?

asked the little one.

Got reading group, need to finish the last 50 pages

of Moby.

But you’re usually out now.

I had to skip das kapital reading group today

to finish the leviathan.

Two  more hours,

Three more days before Ahab is consumed.

you can’t win against nature,

Starbuck warns the captain.

Turn back.

It’s the folly of man.

Napoleon learned  it in Russia.

Hitler  made the same mistake,

From of a quiet sea and 500 pages

the whale sticks its head out of the water,

Looks at us,

Snaps his tail and its over.

Mesmerized,

Someone was at the door.

The buzzer is ringing,

The Cannibal Girls are rehearsing.

The AiR crew dropping by,

Gladys and Joan e,

and Emily and Catherine.

Dave and Vicki,

Mark and Caroline

and Deb, without conscientious objections.

“Forgive  me  for being caffeinated and passionate,” gushed Catherine.

“I wanna write an essay about trying to schedule the book club,” Mark laughed.

Everyone has their angle when they read a book like this.

Some  see  the history of misogyny here.

Others a critique of heteronormativity, capital, and colonialism. 

You can see anything  if you look hard enough.

I had an hour and 45 minutes to chat before I made my way to the Met,

an hour in the cold riding to meet LAK

and  Monica and friends for the big zap.

The Guerilla Girls were there.

and so were many of my friends.

I greeted the trees on the way, 

recalling snowy days long past

on Central Park East,

kids sledding on colder days

that seem to elude us.

Hurry up and wait for the action,

to meet everyone at the Met.

Looking for the signal at the Guggenheim.

Talking  with the Guerilla Girls

about Hilma Klint,

her paintings on the  walls.

She died and no one cared,

like so many of the greats.

Years before Kandinski or Mondrian.

“Do women have to be naked to get into U.S. museums?”

Frida asked  in 1985.

Well, Hilma got in,

but  she had to be dead first.

Not much has changed.

The  museum is still a site of contestation.

“…every decision, aesthetic decision, has a value behind it,”

Frida told Steven.

 “…if all the decisions are being made by the same people, then the art will never look like the whole of our culture. And right now the art world is kind of run by billionaire art collectors who buy art that appeals to their values. We say art should look like the rest of our culture. The history of art, it’s not really a history of art, it’s a history of power.”

There is  a security guard looking  at us. 

Lets  pretend we’re here to see art.

So we wander over to visit

Hilma’s treasures as we case our spot.

Taking in her,

“radically abstract paintings in 1906,

like little that had been before:

bold, colorful, and untethered from any recognizable references to the physical world. …

her better-known contemporaries published manifestos and exhibited widely,

Klint  rarely exhibited,

 convinced the world was not yet ready to understand her work,

stipulated that it not be shown for twenty years following her death. Ultimately, her work was all but unseen until 1986…"

The New Yorker reports:

“The Guggenheim Museum is crowded after five on a Saturday, when the price of admission is “pay what you wish.” Even in below-freezing weather this weekend, the ticket line snaked around the corner. People came in groups, couples, and alone. As happens in large crowds, at times the noise level rose spontaneously, as though something or someone were demanding attention, but immediately subsided. At any given time, there were people milling around in the lobby, looking at the door as though waiting for someone and up at the galleries as though planning something. Some of them were…”

Nan arrives.

People snap pictures.

A blizzard of white flyers fall from above,

On cue, we drop our banner.

Nan dies in.

We mic check.

March to the Met.

“We want their money,” Goldin screams.

“For safe-consumption sites.”

“For harm reduction.”

“For treatment.”

We march down 5^th!!!

Meeting  on the steps.

Museums are still contested spaces.

Revolting Lesbians are still railing about Mercer,

at the Museum of Natural  History.

Kick off the board god damn it.

And artists are still pushing fossil fuels out of culture

at the Tate Modern.

As we unpeel the histories of our colonial past,

the ruins and wreckage,

dead souls,

and artists pushed back against a commodity fetish

transforming ideas into  money,

our lives reified by the minute.

And made our way downtown.

Stopping at Curry n a Hurry on 28^th and Lex,

 like the old days,

visiting Brennan in the East village,

gossiping with Drew.

He couldn’t decipher himself.

“Too bad. I have typed out some abbreviated remains

where my old life used to be, but I’m still

living in them as if they were a book.”

Babs and I chat about the action  Friday.

What would have happened if I’d watched my body fly

over the door on Friday night?

Feet in the air,

my body landing on Jay Street,

cars rolling,

where we’ve organized thousands of rides

and zaps.

Still everyone double parks on the bike lanes.

The ironies oozing,

15 minutes of fame coming and  going.

My soul passing from this life to the next.

But it wasn’t  to  be.

I’m still here.

Looking around, 

Bodies dancing,

Brennan spinning.

The peddles moving on my way back home.

To hang with Albert F.

RIP

The calming voice who was always there

through my life.

With  Erin Brockovich and his Dresser

and Tom Jones and Daddy Warbucks

and the Big Fish,

where Ian McGregor seemed to channel him.

You had a rough week dad.

but I’m actually glad to be going  to Judson,

declared the little one Sunday morning walking  to the subway.

We ran into TW and Karan

and walked up to 42^nd street,

past Duane Reads and banks and guys selling

this and that.

past Starbucks and shuttered stores.

A blandified landscape.

No one wanted to call the coffee Ahab,

The reasonable first  mate got the name,

the wildness of the city dwindling along with Ahab,

lost in a sea of identical  details.

Up to explore our favorite bookstore and sub  back to Brooklyn.

Where we lite a fire after the wild weekend.

Tom Jones  survives.

Melville is with me all the time.

Call me Ishmael

"God hears or God Harkens”

Keep unpeeling  and unpeeling.

Ishmael and Queequeg,

becoming the best of friends,

transcending place and station.

“What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”

If only we all  could?

Maybe we should?

(A few more notes  about the big fish

later in this blog.)

The little one goofing about on a Sunday and a Rockwell Kent of Moby Dick. 

A few notes on  Moby Dick and friendship, an ocean feeling and an encounter with otherness.

The early chapters concern the burgeoning  friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg becoming “bosom friends.” We all  make  friends who remind us to be bigger and wider, more a part of things  than  we possibly could imagine. These narratives foreshadow a queer sensibility, which would only become more and more  pronounced.  

“I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.

We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us.

If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.

After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.

I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to do the will of God—that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.”

Ishmael and Queequeg become close. Yet, there is a dialectical quality to this friendship.  As Ishmael  confesses in Nightgown: “We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”

            Indeed, nothing exists in itself.

“I was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.

Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it.  He gladly complied.”

The tender moments between the two men were many, engaged in the practice of friendship and storytelling: “He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen.

His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.”

Yet the center could not hold. A whole new queer sensibility was born from this writing.  As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick gushed about Billy Budd’s nemesis “presented as different in his essential nature than the normal men around him.”   Eves been gone ten years now.  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

 Over time, we lose contact with Queequeg. DH Lawrence points out that having known Queequeg, Ishmael gets back to wale hunting.  “Queequeq must be “known” then dropped into oblivion.”  Men conquer and move forward.

Erections come and go in this book, as civilizations crumble in vainglorious folly:

“But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

Full of symbols, whiteness is both a signifier of “power” and “appalling…”

“But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.”

In the face of this greed, the world’s riches must be “guarded from the all grasping western world.”

We consume for resources, devouring all  we can find, powering and illuminating, energy releasing.

The question of sperm extends, providing light throughout the story, no further however than in “A Squeeze of the Hand.”:

“I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!

Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.”

God knows, we all have moments  like this  from time to time, our fingers sticky, cum rags needing washing. Yet, what of our relationship to the other?

“So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.”

Back to basics, with Ulysses and Whitman we sail, in a metaphysical sea of ideas. Is every sperm sacred? 

“There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.

Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!”

Yet, what of the mystery of the sea?  We know practically nothing of it. Freud passed out, contemplating it, overwhelmed  by  his  encounters with the sea of his unconscious thoughts, its waves reminding him of everything he did not really know, rational  thoughts  eluding him.  He called it, an ocean  feeling, encountering this thing much larger than himself, beyond his conscious mind.  He explored these sensations in Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents, writing: “I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion....”

Seventy five years before, Melville explores  these sentiments in in chapter 111.   The crew of  the Pequod sail by the Bashee isles into “the great South Sea.”  The author describes the scene:

“I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies , eand Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumb..”

As if he were  talking about a dream, like civilizations ebbing and flowing unceasingly, the author reminds us, no one can conquer nature.  Its better we dance  with mixed shades and shadows.