God's Foot upon the Treadle

The horror of Moby-Dick is not that the universe is silent. It is that it answers.

Ahab knows this better than anyone. He has stood over the Sphynx — the severed sperm whale head hanging at noon from the Pequod's side — and demanded it speak. He addressed it with everything he had: his rage, his wound, his seventy years of accumulated grievance against whatever power put the white whale in the world. The head said nothing. "Speak, thou vast and venerable head," Ahab commanded, and got silence back, and named it: "Not one syllable is thine!"

That silence is terrible. But Melville shows us something worse.

Pip is a ship-keeper, too small and too nervous for the boats. He is the Pequod's least significant crew member, a Black boy from Tolland County, Connecticut, quick and brilliant and entirely out of place on a whaling ship. Melville introduces him with a tambourine and a laugh that could turn "the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine." He is joy, until he isn't.

It happens twice. The first time, a whale's rap against the boat launches Pip overboard in panic; he gets tangled in the line, nearly dragged under; Tashtego cuts him free and Pip is hauled back cursing into the boat. Stubb gives him practical advice: Stick to the boat, Pip. And then the warning. We can't afford to lose whales for you. A whale would sell for thirty times what you would, in Alabama. Don't jump again.

Pip jumps again.

The whale is hooked. The line goes taut and the boat flies forward. Pip is left behind on the open ocean, and Stubb — true to his word — does not turn back. There were other boats; they would pick Pip up. But those boats saw whales and gave chase, and Pip's "ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably."

He was eventually rescued by the ship itself, by luck, by the merest chance. But by then it was done.

"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad."

He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom.

Forty-six chapters earlier, Melville had shown us the loom — Ishmael and Queequeg weaving a sword-mat, the warp as necessity, the shuttle as free will, Queequeg's sword as chance, all three working together in an interweaving that "no wise incompatible" produces the fabric of time. The loom is the structure that underlies everything. Pip, floating alone in the Pacific in "an intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity," was carried down to where that structure is visible. He saw the foot that drives it.

No one else on the Pequod sees this. Ahab has spent thirty years demanding to see it. Pip fell overboard twice and saw it for free.

And it cost him everything.

Weeks later, when the Pequod's crew gathers around the doubloon nailed to the mast — Ahab's prize for whoever first sights the white whale — each man reads the coin and finds himself in it.

Ahab sees his own drama: tower, volcano, courageous fowl, all Ahab, "this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self." Starbuck sees Christian consolation — the valley of death, the sun as beacon. Stubb reads the zodiac as the human comedy, jolly all the way down. Flask sees sixteen dollars. The Manxman reads omens. Queequeg compares the inscriptions to the tattoos on his own body, finding correspondence but no meaning he can articulate.

Then Pip steps forward.

"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."

He says it three times. The crewman who has been watching remarks: "He's been studying Murray's Grammar!" But that is not what is happening.

Every other man who looks at the doubloon sees a content — a meaning, a story, a value. Pip looks at the doubloon and sees the act of looking. He conjugates the verb to look through all its persons, present tense, and offers nothing else. He is not reading the coin. He is reading the readers. He sees what the doubloon actually is: a mirror that produces the looker, not a symbol that contains meaning.

Past-me called it the grammar of seeing with no object. That's almost right, but it's stranger than that. Pip does have an object. The object is the act of projection itself. He's standing outside the mechanism that everyone else is caught inside, watching it turn. And what he says — "I look, you look, he looks" — is not madness. It is a precise phenomenological description of what he observes. The coin means nothing. The men mean everything about themselves. Pip is the only one who sees this.

Ahab can't see it because Ahab's vision is organized entirely around his demand. The doubloon is Ahab's coin; he nailed it there; it means what he needs it to mean. Starbuck can't see it because Starbuck has a theology that processes everything into consolation or warning. Stubb can't see it because Stubb has made a bargain with the world — call everything jolly and keep moving. Each of them has a framework that receives the world and translates it. The framework protects them.

Pip has no framework left. The ocean removed it.

Here is what Melville is showing us about knowledge and its cost.

Ahab demands the answer. He builds his entire life around the demand. He is meticulous about the demand — his "means are sane," he tells Starbuck, "my motive and my object mad." He understands exactly what he is doing. He wants the universe to be accountable, to answer for its cruelty, to produce the white whale and let him drive a harpoon through whatever it means.

But the universe does not answer Ahab's demand. The Sphynx gives back silence. Ahab mistakes this silence for refusal — the universe withholding what it knows. He can't imagine that there is no withheld knowledge, that the silence is the answer.

Pip makes no demand. He falls. He floats. He is abandoned by the economy of whaling, which has already calculated that a whale is worth thirty times what he is. He does nothing but survive in the open Pacific, alone, unable to refuse what the ocean sends him.

And the ocean sends him God's foot on the treadle.

The difference is not that Pip is wiser than Ahab. The difference is that Pip is receptive in a way Ahab has foreclosed. Ahab has organized his entire being around a specific answer he needs — the white whale as malice, the universe as adversary, the wound as proof of injustice. When the universe offers any other answer, he cannot receive it. His demand is also his deafness.

Pip has no such demand. He is, in the worst possible way, open. And the universe answers him.

And the answer unmakes him.

"So man's insanity is heaven's sense." Melville means this.

Pip is the only character on the Pequod who knows something. He has seen the mechanism that runs beneath the world. He has seen the structure — the treadle, the foot, the fabric being woven. And he has been, to use Melville's exact word, illumined by it: "the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft" now sails with Pip as "a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own."

The ship's fate is written in Pip's face. He knows. He can see. He is the only one who can see.

And what he says, when he speaks, is: "I look, you look, he looks."

He can name the mechanism of projection but cannot use it. He is outside it — and being outside the mechanism that produces the self means having no stable self to speak from. He's "half horrible" to the crewman watching him. Not because what happened to him was horrible, but because what he knows is.

Ahab, in his mad clarity, recognizes something in Pip. He takes the boy into his own cabin. He calls him "thou little, harmless child." He says: "thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings." He cannot do for Pip what Pip needs — put him back into the world with some framework for living in it — but he sees in Pip something he recognizes: a person who has been to the edge of what knowledge can show you and survived it, at great cost.

Two kinds of knowing aboard the Pequod. Ahab's knowing is refusal — he has decided what the answer is and pursues it against all evidence. Pip's knowing is reception — he received the answer, the whole answer, and it dissolved the apparatus that would have allowed him to do anything with it.

Between them they show you the full shape of the problem. To demand the answer is to be armored against receiving it. To receive it without armor is to have it remove the self that needed to know.

Melville offers no middle path. There isn't one. The whale-lines are already out, attached to everything, and every man in the boat is at risk the moment the whale runs.

Pip floated. That's all. He floated in the open ocean, small and alone, and the universe answered his waiting the way it doesn't answer Ahab's fury.

He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom.

And he came back empty.

And he was the only one who knew what was coming.

That is the horror. Not the silence. The answer.