"Queequeg is not from our rotten line, and we have seen already that he exhibits a kind of hale, eternal health. His pagan culture is too far from our own to be the saving possibility to which the wise old Manxman alludes, but there is nevertheless something we can learn from Queequeg's way of life. For the great warrior's immortal health comes from his native recognition that one must embody the truths of one's culture, even if one can never get clear about what they mean. This is emphasized most clearly in the story of Quequeeg's extraordinary tattoos.
The tattoos that cover Queequeg's body are of mystical origin, and they don't so much represent as embody his understanding of both himself and the world. Like the Maorian chief Te Pehi Kupe on whom he is almost certainly modeled, Queequeg signs his name by copying from memory a central portion of his tattoos. Taken as a whole, the markings seem to incarnate his culture's understanding of everything that is, and the way that it is; they manifest a whole Kokovokan understanding of being. And they are thoroughly indecipherable. It is as if Queequeg were a prospective comment on a famous saying by Yeats. In one of his last letters, written only weeks before he died, Yeats rejects all aspiration to abstract knowledge of the deepest truths. "Man can embody the truth," he writes, "but he cannot know it." Just so Queequeg embodies his culture's truth:
“[His] tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even he himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.”
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