THE BOOK
..........................-
TENDER
BUTTONS
THE SUBBOOK ...................-
FOOD
THE SUBPOEM
...................-
Sugar
WORD COUNT (Total)……...- 333
STANZA(S)............................-
18
—Stanzas
1-8 170
—Stanzas
9-18 163
THE LEADER........................- THE
STEINY ROAD POET
CO-LLABORATORS.............-
MODPO
STUDENTS/THE BUTTONS
About reading Tender Buttons thru Moby Dick: See introto Breakfast thru MD
“Yes, as every one knows,
meditation and water are wedded forever.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 1: Loomings
What did Gertrude Stein do
to prepare herself for a writing career? The short answer is that she spent
several months in London at the British Museum reading every novel written in
English that was in that collection.
A longer answer involves her
scientific background and what she said in her lectures in America. Having
scientific training and experience as an undergraduate researcher at Harvard
and then four years studying medicine afterwards at Johns Hopkins, Stein was
not likely to build a new career without a methodology. In “What Is English
Literature” from Lectures in America by
Gertrude Stein, she said, “It is awfully important to know what is and what
is not in your business” (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1957, p. 13).
In “Poetry and Grammar” from
Lectures in America, Stein spends
considerable effort saying she had not intended for Tender Buttons to be poetry but it is because she is reliant on
nouns to name the thing she loves. She points to Shakespeare as having “in the
forest of Arden…created a forest without mentioning the things that make a
forest.” She says you sense what is there but Shakespeare “does not name its
names” (p. 236). What she hoped to avoid in the language she chose was “imitation…of
sounds or colors or emotions” in favor of “intellectual recreation” (p. 238).
What the Steiny Road Poet is
saying is that Stein based her writing on writing already written but she did
not name names. A long standing reader of Stein will sense the things that make
Stein’s forest and then revel in her intellectual
recreation.
In looking at “Sugar.” through
Moby Dick, Steiny encountered
obstacles that were actually doors to other works of literature—the Prose Edda and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The composite
becomes a commentary on personal freedom relative to slavery in America,
racism, homosexual discrimination, and artistic choice.
SUGAR.
So Steiny asks where is the
sugar in Moby Dick? In Chapter 94: A
Squeeze of the Hand, Melville equates spermaceti oil to a sweetener. Of course,
sugar is a sweetener and since Stein’s “Sugar.” has nothing to do on the
surface with the white crystalline carbohydrate called sugar, a consumer of
this subpoem has to look elsewhere.
No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a
favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! [excerpt from Chapter 94: A Squeeze of the Hand]
A violent luck and a whole sample and even then
quiet.
Steiny will back into stanza
1 based on believing strongly that Stein draws stanza 2 from Chapter 94: A
Squeeze of the Hand. Therefore, she thinks stanza 1 pertains to what happened
to Pip the cabin boy in Chapter 93: The Castaway when second mate Stubb took
Pip out in his whaleboat to replace an injured crewmate. When a whale goes
under Stubb’s boat, Pip, who is terrified, jumps out of the boat and worse gets
tangled in the active harpoon line. Tashtego, the harpoonist is forced then to
cut the line and lose his harpoon, which is attached to a whale. Otherwise Pip
would have been strangled to death. Stubb gives Pip some “wholesome advice”
which relates to Stein’s “whole sample.”
According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, sample is from an Anglo-Norman French variant of Old
French essample or “example” and example goes back to Latin exemplum “sample,
imitation,” from eximere “take out.”
Here’s the passage from Chapter
93: The Castaway:
"Damn him, cut!" roared Stubb; and so the
whale was lost and Pip was saved.
So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little
negro was assailed by yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting
these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still half
humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially gave him
much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat,
Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is.
Now, in general, STICK TO THE BOAT, is your true motto in whaling; but cases
will sometimes happen when LEAP FROM THE BOAT, is still better. Moreover, as if
perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted conscientious advice to
Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb
suddenly dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command,
"Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump;
mind that. We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would
sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and
don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though
man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too
often interferes with his benevolence.
But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again.
One could say that Stubb
made an example of Pip by staying true to his word—if Pip jumped out the boat
again, then Pip would get left behind. The etymology of sample points to example
and take out which fits what happened
with Pip. The other thing about this passage is that Stubb’s threat to Pip
alludes to the slave market of Alabama where Pip’s monetary value would only be
one thirtieth of the value of a whale.
Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on
lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that
there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have
a mouth and eye glasses.
Given the word squeeze, what
comes to mind is Chapter 94: A Squeeze of the Hand. Here Ishmael is squeezing
fatty lumps of sperm whale blubber (lard) to make it liquid. All the stress of
Ahab’s quest to find the white whale vanishes into a crazy bliss that cannot be
sustained by the intellect or imagination in the face of everyday callings. For
now, I will table associations for mouth
and eye glasses.
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged
on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil
sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as 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. [excerpt from Chapter 94: A Squeeze of the Hand]
A question of sudden rises and more time than
awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise.
A couple of things come to
mind relative to stanza 3. A question of sudden rises might point
to whales suddenly surfacing and being under a whale boat as was the case in
Chapter 93: The Castaway when Pip, startled by such action of the whale, jumped
out of the boat twice. In the last chapter: The Chase—The Third Day, the crew
of the Pequod see Fedullah’s body lashed to Moby Dick’s back. Melville often
describes Fedullah as a shady character. Ahab drops his harpoon and cries out,
reflecting on Fedullah’s prophesy about two hearses.
A peck a small piece not privately overseen, not at
all not a slice, not at all crestfallen and open, not at all mounting and
chaining and evenly surpassing, all the bidding comes to tea.
Melville uses birds both
metaphorically and actually. Therefore, peck
brings to mind avian instances such as the comment that passes between Stubb
and Flask about Ahab in Chapter 36: The Quarter-Deck:
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked
deeper, even as
his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark.
And, so full of his
thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he
made, now at the
main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost
see that thought
turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he
paced; so completely
possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the
inward mould of every
outer movement.
"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb;
"the chick that's in him pecks
the shell. 'Twill
soon be out."
In Chapter 134: The
Chase—Second Day, Ahab is overheard muttering to himself about the loss of
Fedullah, whom he refers to as the Parsee, and what Fedullah’s death means.
Ahab says it is a puzzle that like a hawk’s beak pecks at his brain. This
passage also seems to be operative for Stein’s stanza 9.
"And as mechanical," muttered Ahab. Then as
the men went forward, he
muttered on: "The things called omens! And
yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh!
how valiantly I seek to drive out of others' hearts what's clinched so fast in
mine!—The Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and he was to go before:--but still
was to be seen again ere I could perish—How's that?—There's a riddle now might
baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line of judges:—like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain.
I'LL, I'LL solve it, though!"
These two passages seem to
set up the use of the word peck in
Chapter 135: The Chase—Third Day. Melville uses the word peck twice in this chapter. The first reference pertains to a hawk
visiting the Pequod to peck and tear away the red flag flying on the mainmast. Flags
often carried the crest of owners and so we could view this theft as a crest
falling incident.
“…drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he tears the vane"—pointing to the red flag flying at
the main-truck—"Ha! he soars away with it!—Where's the old man now? see'st
thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder, shudder!"
The second use of peck depicts Tashtego nailing up a new
flag to the mast but his effort is hampered by the marauding hawk that ends up
getting nailed to the mast. As Melville describes what happens to the bird, it
seems the bird becomes part of “the flag of Ahab” as if he is a living crest.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured
themselves over the
sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a
few inches of the
erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming
yards of the flag,
which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings,
over the destroying
billows they almost touched;—at that instant, a red
arm and a hammer
hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the
act of nailing
the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar.
A sky-hawk that
tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from
its natural home
among the stars, pecking
at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there;
this bird now chanced to intercept its broad
fluttering wing between the
hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that
etherial thrill,
the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept
his hammer frozen
there; and so
the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his
imperial beak thrust upwards, and his
whole captive form folded in the
flag of Ahab, went down
with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink
to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven
along with her, and
helmeted herself with it.
An interpretation of not at all mounting and chaining and evenly
surpassing, all the bidding comes to tea could point to the activities of
catching a whale which when done well come
to a T, perfection. Or at least the bidding or order/commands of Captain
Ahab from his perspective would be rated that way.
A separation is not tightly in worsted and sauce, it
is so kept well and sectionally.
Stanza 5 could be
referencing Chapter 83: Jonah Historically Regarded. This chapter deals with
the story of Jonah and the whale. The following paragraph from that chapter
uses the word worsted (meaning gotten
the advantage over, to defeat or beat) and discusses a real life possibility
that Jonah’s whale was a ship called The Whale.
One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for
questioning the Hebrew story was this:—He had one of those quaint old-fashioned
Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented
Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head—a peculiarity only true with respect
to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties of that
order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying, "A penny roll
would choke him"; his swallow is so very small. But, to this, Bishop
Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop,
that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as temporarily
lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable enough in the good
Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of
whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might
have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right
Whale is toothless.
Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that
name) urged for his want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something
obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body and the whale's gastric juices.
But this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist
supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a DEAD
whale--even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned their dead
horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has been divined by other
continental commentators, that when Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa
ship, he straightway effected his escape to another vessel near by, some vessel
with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would add, possibly called "The
Whale," as some craft are nowadays christened the "Shark," the
"Gull," the "Eagle." Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that
the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver—an
inflated bag of wind—which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved
from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still another reason for his want of
faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in
the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere within
three days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three
days' journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. How is
that?
Put it in the stew, put it to shame. A little slight
shadow and a solid fine furnace.
The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful.
Stanzas 6 and 7 seem to
point to the first whale killed by the crew of the Pequod. The whaling team was
Tashtego and Stubb. Once the whale is moored with chains to the Pequod, Stubb
orders a midnight dinner of whale steak from the Black cook Fleece, but he
tells the old man the steak is overcooked and that cook has beaten it too much
so the steak is also too tender. Then he teases Fleece, who has been summoned
from sleep, to tell the sharks to quit feasting on the dead whale.
"Cook," said Stubb, rapidly lifting a
rather reddish morsel to his mouth, "don't you think this steak is rather overdone? You've been beating
this steak too much, cook; it's too
tender. Don't I always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks now over the side, don't you
see they prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go
and talk to 'em; tell 'em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in
moderation, but they must keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice.
Away, cook, and deliver my message. Here, take this lantern," snatching
one from his sideboard; "now then, go and preach to 'em!" [Chapter 64: Stubb’s Supper]
The line which sets sprinkling to be a remedy is
beside the best cold.
The rope line which attaches
to a harpoon gets burning hot after the harpoon is thrown. In Chapter 61: Stubb
Kills a Whale, Stubb accidentally drops his hand-cloths and then calls out for
the line to be wet (sprinkled with sea water) in order to cool it down.
"Ka-la! Koo-loo!" howled Queequeg, as if
smacking his lips over a mouthful of Grenadier's steak. And thus with oars and
yells the keels cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van,
still encouraged his men to the onset,
all the while puffing the smoke from his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged
and they strained, till the welcome cry was heard—"Stand up,
Tashtego!—give it to him!" The harpoon was hurled. "Stern all!"
The oarsmen backed water; the same moment something
went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists. It was the magical line. An instant before,
Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns with it round the loggerhead,
whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke now
jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the line passed
round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it
blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb's hands, from which the
hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times, had
accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by
the blade, and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
"Wet the
line! wet the line!" cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the
tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More turns were
taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now flew through the
boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed
places—stem for stern—a staggering business truly in that rocking commotion.
*Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it
may here be stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the
running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is
set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient.
A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a
neglected Tuesday.
Melville uses the word monster frequently to refer to Moby Dick
and Ahab is heard muttering about the puzzle the monster has created relative
to the loss of Ahab’s special mate Fedullah in Chapter 134: The Chase—Second
Day and what Fedullah’s death means. Ahab says it is a puzzle that like a
hawk’s beak that pecks at his brain. This passage also seems to be operative
for Stein’s stanza 9 (the scene is mentioned in the discussion of stanza 4 of
“Sugar.”). However, the word Tuesday,
and a neglected Tuesday at that,
remains a mystery until Steiny investigated the etymology of Tuesday.
From the text of the Prose Edda comes the story of a
Norse God named Tyr (Tiw) who was one-handed because someone needed to put a
magic leash on a huge wolf named Fenris (Fenrir) who was prophesized to kill the
top Norse god Odin. In order to leash the wolf, someone had to put his hand in
the wolf’s mouth. The hand in the mouth was a sign of a pledge to the wolf that
the wolf would at some time in the future be released from the leash. However,
when Tyr put his hand in Fenris’s mouth, the pledge of release was not enacted
and so Fenris bit off Tyr’s hand. Stein may have picked Tuesday to evoke the one-handed Norse god as a comparison to the
one-legged Captain Ahab. Also the monster puzzle might be referring, in this
case, to Fenris as opposed to the white whale Moby Dick.
Later when the prophesy of
Fenris killing Odin is coming true, the following happens. Fenris swallows Odin
but Vidar, the Silent, “sets his foot upon the monster’s lower jaw” and grabs
the upper jaw tearing the monster apart. While Odin is not saved, the story has
comparison with Jonah and the whale in that Odin and Jonah were both commanded
by a higher force to do greater good deeds and they both get swallowed by
monsters. This might be Stein’s reference to heavy choking.
Also Steiny thinks it
appropriate to mention that Melville pays heed to things Norse in Chapter 30:
The Pipe when he compares Captain Ahab’s ivory stool to the “thrones of the
sea-loving Danish kings fabricated, saith [Norse] tradition, of the tusks of
the narwhale.”
Wet crossing and a likeness, any likeness, a likeness
has blisters, it has that and teeth, it has the staggering blindly and a little
green, any little green is ordinary.
The same passage quoted in
stanza 8 from Moby Dick, Chapter 61:
Stubb Kills a Whale has some of the same words used in this stanza (10). Here
are some of the lines:
As the line
passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that
point, it blisteringly passed
through and through both of Stubb's hands, from which the hand-cloths, or
squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally
dropped. It was like holding an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and
that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
"Wet the
line! wet the line!" cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the
tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More turns were
taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now flew through the
boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed
places—stem for stern—a staggering
business truly in that rocking commotion.
As Stubb kills the whale
with his lance, the great animal thrashes around in his death “flurry.”
And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance
into that unspeakable thing called his "flurry," the monster horribly
wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray,
so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that
phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.
Steiny conjectures that
Gertrude Stein found the killing of this whale hard to take because she
identified with this animal who is a mammal like human beings. Therefore, she
repeats likeness three times. Mention
of green is likely to be a reference
to Ishmael, a green hand, who narrates this chapter.
One, two and one, two, nine, second and five and
that.
Mathematics is a recurring
theme throughout Moby Dick. In
Chapter 96: The Try-Works, Steiny was particularly struck that Ishmael finds
the try-pots, the vats where whale blubber is boiled into oil, a place for
“profound mathematical meditation.
The try-works are planted between the foremast and
mainmast, the most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a
peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of
brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the
masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it
on all sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased
with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened
hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels' capacity. When not in
use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone
and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the night-watches
some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil themselves away there
for a nap. While employed in polishing them—one man in each pot, side by side—many confidential communications
are carried on, over the iron lips. It
is a place also for profound mathematical meditation. It was in the left
hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me,
that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all
bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same
time.
While there are a lot of
numbers in Chapter 96 in common with Stein’s stanza 11, including that the pots
were fired up around nine o’clock, Steiny continues to be mystified about what
Stein intends this stanza to do.
It was about nine
o'clock at night that the Pequod's try-works were first started on this
present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.
A blaze, a search in between, a cow, only any wet
place, only this tune.
What comes immediately to
mind for stanza 12 is Chapter 87: The Grand Armada where Melville gives the
reader a view of the sperm whale’s breeding grounds. Ahab’s plan was to pass
through the islands of Southeast Asia without stopping because pirates abound
and the Pequod has all the supplies it needs. The area features a relentless
sun which accounts for Stein’s use of the word blaze but Melville is also comparing Ahab’s passion (or obsession)
as a fiery ring in the way a god
might broadcast a blaze of fire.
When the Pequod nears Java,
the crew spots huge numbers of sperm whales, which excites the crew, but then
Tashtego calls out, “rig whips and buckets to wet the sails;—Malays, sir, and after us!” The Pequod outruns the
pirates and then the men take to their whaleboats, chasing the sea monsters for
several hours until finally the whales break rank and become panicked. Queequeg
attaches to a whale, but it breaks free. Eventually Starbuck’s boat is surrounded
by whales and it during this encirclement that they see cows.
Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they
say lurks at the heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted distance
we beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods
of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied
spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic
circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have gone
round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales,
more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance
of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living
wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us
up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by small
tame cows and calves; the women and
children of this routed host.
The etymology of the word search includes the variant of Old
French cerchier, from Latin circāre, to go around, from Latin circus,
circle. This covers Stein’s phrase a search in between. In searching for
an etymology of tune, one is directed
to tone which has a root from Greek tonos meaning string, a stretching. Two things come to mind, one related to the
harpoon line and the other, Queequeg’s sighting of a whale mother giving birth,
showing the umbilical chord still attached to her calf.
"Look-e here," said Queequeg, pointing
down.
As when the stricken
whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as,
after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line
buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame
Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not
seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with
the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped.
Cut a gas jet uglier and then pierce pierce in
between the next and negligence. Choose the rate to pay and pet pet very much.
A collection of all around, a signal poison, a lack of languor and more hurts
at ease.
With words like jet (what the blow hole of a whale
produces—a jet of water), pierce, rate to pay, hurts, stanza 13 could be pointing to Chapter 72: The Monkey-Rope.
The chapter deals with the cutting of strips of blubber from the dead whale. It’s
a dangerous job. Ishmael describes how he is teamed with Queequeg with a single
rope attached to belts around their waists. Queequeg is on the whale which
revolves like a treadmill. Half the time he is in the water but Ishmael who is
up above him on deck is holding him, as if he were a performing pet monkey on a
rope.
Now what Stanza 13 deals
with is when Queequeg comes back on deck completely spent and is offered a
small cup of tepid water with ginger root in it instead of a high-quality
alcoholic drink. Second mate Stubb accuses the steward (cook) of trying to poison
Queequeg and collect the insurance.
But
courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as with blue
lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs up the chains and
stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over the side; the steward
advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory glance hands him—what? Some hot
Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a cup of tepid ginger and water!
"Ginger?
Do I smell ginger?" suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. "Yes, this
must be ginger," peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then standing as if
incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the astonished steward slowly
saying, "Ginger?
ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies
the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to
kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!—what the devil is ginger?
Sea-coal? firewood?—lucifer matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what the devil is
ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg here."
"There
is some sneaking Temperance
Society movement about this business," he suddenly added,
now approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. "Will you look
at that kannakin,
sir; smell of it, if you please." Then watching the mate's countenance, he
added, "The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and
jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the
steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters
by which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?"
"I
trust not," said Starbuck, "it is poor stuff enough."
"Aye,
aye, steward," cried Stubb, "we'll teach you to drug a harpooneer;
none of your apothecary's medicine here; you
want to poison us, do ye? You have
got out insurances on our lives and want to murder us all, and pocket the
proceeds, do ye?"
"It
was not me," cried Dough-Boy, "it was Aunt Charity that brought the
ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but only
this ginger-jub—so she called it."
While ginger can be a purgative, it is not poisonous like calomel which
is mercury chloride. Also ginger is supposed to settle the stomach but what
Stubb is railing about concerns what “real” men got to revive them and that is
high-quality liquor like cognac.
A white bird, a colored mine, a mixed
orange, a dog.
Stanza 14 reads like a
painted still life and since Melville talks at length about paintings in Moby Dick, Steiny looked for signs of
white birds and dogs but found nothing of interest. Yes, there are white birds
like the albatross in Moby Dick but
not in combination with a mine or dog, let alone a mixed orange which presumably
could be sunset. She searched Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” —nothing there except the albatross. She searched the Prose Edda, thinking there would be something about gold mines worked by the Nibelungen dwarves but also came up short.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” —nothing there except the albatross. She searched the Prose Edda, thinking there would be something about gold mines worked by the Nibelungen dwarves but also came up short.
Taking a final run at this
stanza, Steiny sees this stanza has racial shading with the words white, colored, and mixed. Stein
might be pointing to the growing of sugar cane which used slave labor and which
Stein has pointed to in other subpoems of Tender
Buttons. The most famous book about American slavery is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852. A
search of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel turns up all the words used in Stein’s
stanza 14. The white bird could be a white woman named Mrs. Bird who helps
Eliza get through the free state of Ohio as Eliza makes her way to Canada.
Runaway slaves were usually hunted with dogs. Oranges, the fruit, are mentioned
many times in the book though Steiny is not entirely sure why it would be a
mixed orange without making an extensive study of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Mine
is mentioned in Stowe’s introduction as she acknowledges humanitarian work done
by Lord Shaftesbury in England on behalf of oppressed women and children he
helped liberate from “mines and collieries.”
Cuddling comes in continuing a change.
What comes to mind about
stanza 15, especially in light of the racial implications of stanza 14, is
Chapter 4: The Counterpane where Ishmael awakes to find Queequeg’s arm thrown
over him. Ishmael progressively changes his attitude toward Queequeg along
racial, gender, and religious beliefs such that by Chapter 10: A Bosom Friend,
he says that he and Queequeg are “a cosy, loving pair.”
A piece of separate outstanding rushing is so blind
with open delicacy.
In tandem with stanza 15,
Steiny believes that Chapter 13: Wheelbarrow, which continues the story of
Ishmael becoming fast friends with Queequeg is what Stein is pointing our
attention to. In this chapter, Queequeg is insulted by a white country bumpkin
whom Queequeg manhandles to get his attention. This incident occurs on the
packet schooner that Ishmael and Queequeg board to get to Nantucket where they
will get a job on a whaler. The captain of the packet schooner scolds Queequeg
for trying to kill the bumpkin and then all hell breaks lose on the schooner as
the boom knocks the bumpkin off the boat into the sea. Queequeg saves the man.
"Capting! Capting!" yelled the bumpkin,
running towards that officer;
"Capting, Capting, here's the devil."
"Hallo, _you_ sir," cried the Captain, a
gaunt rib of the sea, stalking
up to Queequeg, "what in thunder do you mean by
that? Don't you know you
might have killed that chap?"
"What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly
turned to me.
"He say," said I, "that you came near
kill-e that man there," pointing
to the still shivering greenhorn.
"Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his
tattooed face into an unearthly
expression of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-e
fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e
so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!"
"Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll
kill-e YOU, you cannibal, if you
try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye."
But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to
mind his own eye. The
prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted
the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now
flying from side to
side, completely sweeping the entire after part of
the deck. The poor
fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was
swept overboard; all
hands were in a panic; and to
attempt snatching at the boom to stay it,
seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back
again, almost
in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed
on the point of
snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and
nothing seemed capable of
being done; those
on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the
boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated
whale. In the
midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly
to his knees, and
crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of
a rope, secured one
end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like
a lasso, caught it
round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the
next jerk, the spar
was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner
was run into the
wind, and while the hands were clearing away the
stern boat, Queequeg,
stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a
long living arc of
a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen
swimming like a dog,
throwing his long arms straight out before him, and
by turns revealing
his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam.
One might say the captain
turned a blind eye to the oafish bumpkin and then got the man got just reward
by being swept into the sea. The delicacy is that the man insulted saves the
insulter.
A canoe is orderly. A period is solemn. A cow is
accepted.
While canoes are mentioned
in various chapters of Moby Dick, Chapter 110: Queequeg in His Coffin is what
Steiny thinks matches the intention of stanza 17. In Chapter 110, Queequeg gets
a fever, loses weight and calls forth a favor of having a coffin made for him.
His orderly departure from living must be in a coffin canoe similar to what his
culture would do for the deceased and much like what the whalemen of Nantucket
did. The period of Queequeg’s illness was taken quite seriously because it seems
to be indicating the end of him as the punctuation mark called period marks the end of a sentence.
While Queequeg lies in his coffin to test it out, Pip, the cabin boy, visits. Pip,
ever since the incident of being left in the sea after he jumped out of the
whaleboat headed by Stubb, is crazy. Pip says he has come with his tambourine
to “beat ye your dying march.” Ishmael narrates:
So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly
vouchers of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?—Hark! he
speaks again: but more wildly now."
"Form two and two! Let's make a General of him!
Ho, where's his harpoon? Lay it across here.—Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for
a game cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!—mind ye
that; Queequeg dies game!—take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I say;
game, game, game! but base little Pip,
he died a coward; died all a'shiver;—out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip,
tell all the Antilles he's a runaway; a
coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from a whale-boat! I'd
never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more
dying here. No, no! shame upon all
cowards—shame upon them! Let 'em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a
whale-boat. Shame! shame!"
During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if
in a dream. Pip was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.
Ishmael calls Pip’s performance
a “strange sweetness of his lunacy,” which lines up with Stein’s Sugar subpoem
and his insistent repetition of the word coward
might be what Stein refers to as cow
in the sentence A cow is accepted. The
etymology of the word coward gives us
from Latin cauda: perhaps suggestive of a frightened animal with its tail
between its legs. And by now the crew of the ship has pretty much accepted Pip’s
condition so that eventually Captain Ahab takes the boy into his cabin to be
under his protection.
A nice old chain is widening, it is absent, it is
laid by.
Chains figure into Moby Dick, the Prose Edda, and Uncle Tom’s
Cabin and in each story, an oppressed one is liberated. In the case of Moby Dick and the Prose Edda, two monsters are liberated from their restraints either
by not being killed in the case of the White Whale or by escaping a magic,
extra-strong chain in the case of Prose
Edda wolf Fenris. In the case of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, escaped slaves are liberated from their chains. The numbers in
stanza 11 might refer to the chemistry of sugar which involves short chain soluble
carbohydrates, something
that was superficially discussed by the Buttons Collective. How to
interpret Stein’s numbers remains a question to Steiny who has little
experience with chemistry. Still, the association to chain remains a strong
possibility.
Steiny stands back and gasps
at what she has seen in Gertrude Stein’s story of “Sugar.” and how surprisingly
well a look at “Sugar.” through Moby Dick
has played out.
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