The Catskill Eagle

There is a chapter in Moby-Dick called "The Mat-Maker" — Chapter 47 — where Ishmael sits weaving a sword-mat with Queequeg on a calm afternoon, the ship still, the sea "like a strip of tarred road between two country towns." He describes the loom: the warp is necessity, fixed and unyielding; the shuttle is free will, moving across it; and Queequeg's sword, beating down the threads with "impulsive, indifferent" force, is chance. Structural knowledge. From inside the weaving, with the thread in his hands, watching the pattern form.

Forty-six chapters later, a boy named Pip jumps from a whaleboat and is left behind in the open ocean. A whole mile of shoreless ocean between Pip and the departing ship. And there, alone — "the intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity" — he saw something Ishmael never saw at the loom.

"He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad."

Not the structure of the loom. Who was operating it.

Pip came back. The sea had kept his finite body up, but "drowned the infinite of his soul — not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths." There, among "the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities," he received a vision of the absolute: God's foot pressing down, the loom weaving, the whole machinery of fate running under deliberate pressure.

He came back from this knowing everything and able to say nothing.

"So man's insanity is heaven's sense." Melville means it. Pip isn't simply broken — he's broken in a particular direction. His madness is the cost of access. The abandonment made the knowledge possible; the abandonment also made the knowledge incommunicable. You would have to have been left there, alone, in the ringed horizon expanding until there was nothing. There is no other route. The transmission cannot happen because the condition of receiving is the condition of no longer being legible to those who haven't received it.

Ahab understands this. He treats Pip with extraordinary tenderness — keeps him close, calls him a boy who has "sounded to the bottom," says Pip's hand "shall hold mine" and thus have "the hold the world can take me by." He recognizes what Pip carries. He recognizes it because he believes he carries something of the same kind.

He doesn't.

Pip fell by accident. The ocean took him. The knowledge was received, not sought — pressed into him by the heartless immensity as a man might press a coin into wax, indifferent to the impression it makes. Wisdom was passive. Pip was empty enough, in that abandoned mile, that it could enter.

Ahab is never empty. He is always full — of his leg, of his wound, of the white whale who took it, of the meaning he has assigned to the taking. When Ahab stares into the abyss, the abyss doesn't show him God's foot. The abyss shows him Ahab, reflected back at the size of the universe. He has done this to himself with decades of deliberate focus, hammering his motive to a monomaniac point.

Chapter 96 — The Try-Works — gives us the picture. The midnight furnace raging on the Pequod's deck, the harpooneers with their long forks, the ship driving through black ocean trailing fire. Ishmael stands at the helm. He stares into the try-works. The fire "begat kindred visions in my soul." And then he falls asleep standing up — a "brief standing sleep" — and wakes to find he has turned his back to the compass. He is facing the ship's stern. He is about to capsize the Pequod.

He wheels around in time.

"Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass."

This is the warning. The fire inverts you. Ahab has been staring into his private fire for years — the wound, the whale, the vow — until he is completely inverted, completely turned from the compass, driving the Pequod stern-first into the dark. He cannot feel the tiller wrong because he has forgotten which direction is forward. His inversion is not a moment; it's a settled state. He would not wake up to correct it. He thinks the direction he's facing is the prow.

But here is where Melville will not let the warning stand alone.

The sun, he says, "hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara." The sun hides not the ocean, which is "the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth." "That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true — not true, or undeveloped."

The fire revealed something. What it revealed was real. The harpooneers capering in fire-light, "their tales of terror told in words of mirth," the ship "burning a corpse and plunging into blackness" — that is also the Pequod. That is also the truth. The warning is not don't look. The warning is: look, but turn back to the compass.

There is a wisdom that is woe. But there is also a woe that is madness. You must be able to tell them apart.

Then the Catskill eagle: "There is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

This is Ishmael's self-portrait. Not the soul that never descends, but the soul that can descend and return. The ability to look into the try-works fire without surrendering to it. To see what the fire shows — the ship's own nature, the material counterpart of its captain's soul — and still know where the compass is. To dive into the blackest gorge and soar out again. And even if you spend a long time in the gorge: you are still in the mountains.

Three positions, then, on what the abyss does to a soul:

Pip: fell into it. Received operational knowledge of the loom — who is operating it, whose foot is on the treadle. Came back seeing everything, comprehensible to no one. Could not leave the gorge; was never entirely in it; exists now at the border, passing between worlds with the ease of someone who belongs to neither. His madness is heaven's sense. That's Melville's judgment and I trust it.

Ahab: drove himself into it. Not fell — drove, with decades of sustained will. Stared into fire long enough that the fire became his only orientation. Believes the inversion is clarity. His madness is not heaven's sense; it's the woe that is madness, the woe that closes rather than opens. He has lost the compass and doesn't know it. His tragedy is not that he looked into the abyss but that he has forgotten what it would feel like to look away.

Ishmael: fell asleep at the helm, nearly capsized, snapped back. Was in the gorge — the fire begat kindred visions, the ship was made of darkness — and returned. Issued the warning, qualified the warning, named the eagle. Is the eagle, or is learning to be. He will survive this voyage. He is the only one who will.

The difference between Pip's madness and Ahab's is not intensity. Ahab is more intense; Ahab wills his condition with everything he has. The difference is the direction of the opening.

Pip's abandonment emptied him. The ocean took the finite and left the infinite — or gave the infinite access to what was left. Whatever it was, it was received. The wisdom came from outside him, from the absolute, from the God whose foot he saw. His madness is an opening.

Ahab's obsession filled him. There is no room in Ahab for anything but Ahab-and-the-whale. He has configured himself as a closed system, a self-consuming fire — the whale "supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body" is also Ahab's portrait. His madness is a closing. It opens onto nothing because it opens onto nothing except itself.

And Ishmael — Ishmael has learned to carry the opening without being consumed by it. He reads the try-works and knows what they mean: the ship is a fire-ship, its captain is a monomaniac, they are all bound somewhere they did not choose. He sees all of this. He also turns back to the compass.

Even if he for ever flies within the gorge: the gorge is in the mountains.

What Melville leaves unsaid — and he is deliberate about what he leaves unsaid — is whether Pip's knowledge was worth the price, whether it would have been worth it if he could have kept it. Whether the operational knowledge of the loom (God's foot, pressing) would have changed anything. Whether knowing who operates the machine is useful when you cannot tell the operator what you know.

Pip answers by following Ahab to the end. He cannot return to who he was; he cannot communicate what he received; he attaches himself to the person who seems most to understand — the one who claims to have the same knowledge by a different method. Ahab's method was will and obsession and the burning of everything else. Pip's was accident and abandonment and the ocean.

They reach the same place by opposite roads: the certainty that the universe is operating under deliberate intention. The difference is what they do with the certainty. Pip's passes through him like a current, lighting him briefly and leaving him in the dark. Ahab's becomes a closed circuit, feeding itself, growing hotter, driving the ship.

Only the Catskill eagle can live with this knowledge and remain useful. Can dive into the gorge — into the fire, into the woe, into the full truth of what the try-works reveal about the Pequod's nature — and soar out again. Can carry wisdom that is woe without crossing into woe that is madness. Can turn back to the compass.

The gorge is in the mountains. Even there — especially there — you are higher than the birds upon the plain.