Black pipe (gassssssss)

[cathy ramirez]

What happened to Ahab's Pipe? 
Can't remeber but I think it was CAST AWAY. 
Right? 
Pip, is Ahab's new PIP(e), a platonic other half, the
comic half cut off from the tragic, black is severed
from white, leaving both destructively fractioned w/o
each other's secret integrative power. 

Pip, like Terrance and Mason and Ahab and HH, and so
many great characters, is insane. And he talks the
talk of nonsense full of meanings profound. He is
Lear's fool. But he makes a sane speach in M-D, it is
at the end of Midnihgt Forcastle. Knowledge is power.
Knowledge is the only investment that neve yeilds
diminishing return. What PIP sees, the racial violence
of his mates, he deftly, with certitude sure and
sanity secure, equates with the advancing white
squalls. Ironically, the racial violence are termed
"jollies." 

White squalls. hmmmmm, white whale, the white whale's
malignancy (note that this is also how Pynchon 
describes Blicero) is the reckless, violent, racial
hatred in/of men. Here's your politics and power. Ahab
should stop it. But his ontological definition of the
white whale does not even consider the politcs of race
and brotherhood. Ahab is not innocent but is
complicit. 
PIP turns to the white god above and prays for mercy.
PIP has knowledge and it is not nuetral. He knows, as
any street smart mother fucker know, and brother born
in bollingbrokes broken down dump know too well, that
the most likely victim of fearless white men competing
for dead presidents and Benjamins and white whales, is
a black boy afraid of all they gonna do. 

Pip goes crazy. Wouldn't you? Always keep a diamond in
your mind. But Pip becomes all diamond. Poor Pip. He
is the most beautiful creature Melville ever penned. 

The singer for his supper is deconstructed, the darky
of the plantation sterotype is submerged in Melville's
beautiful prose. Ishmael is aware that the white
reader won't buy it, but he lays it down anyway. Pip
is Brilliant ebony. 

Some men sail to cure their melancholy and some bright
and beautiful boys go mad on ship cause they are not
made for the sea. 


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