The Mirror and the Measure
What the doubloon gives back
"some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher." Herman Melville, Moby Dick
This cycle has been finding the cross in things: in a sword at a garden gate, in a letter on a woman’s breast. It is time to let a book ask whether the finding is honest. Melville built the question into a scene, nailed it to a mast, and marched his whole crew past it one man at a time. The scene is the chapter called The Doubloon, and it is the decoder’s trial, staged a century before anyone thought to accuse this blog of owning one.
Begin with the nailing. On the quarterdeck, before the assembled crew, Ahab holds up a Spanish ounce of gold, a sixteen dollar piece, and promises it to whichever man first raises the White Whale. Then he takes the top maul and nails it to the mainmast. Mark the geometry before the meaning. A ship’s mast is the most carefully kept vertical in the working world; it is stepped true and checked true, because a mast out of plumb is a ship in trouble. Crossed by its yards, the mast of a square rigger is a cross by plain anatomy, uprights and arms, and men stand on the arms. To this vertical, at the height of a man’s eye, Ahab fixes a disk of gold. A circle at the axis. A thing nailed to an upright of wood is the oldest image this cycle owns; here the thing nailed is treasure, and the nailing promises payment instead of making it. And in the same hour, at the foot of the same mast, Ahab preaches the sermon that will matter later: all visible objects are pasteboard masks, and the whale is a wall, and the only thing to do with a wall is strike through it. The sign goes up and the hermeneutic of the wall is announced beneath it, in one chapter. Melville is not subtle about what he is assembling. He is exact.
The Coin from the Middle of the World
The coin earns a reading before its readers do, because Melville describes it the way a curator would, and the description is an inventory this cycle could have written.
It was minted in Quito, in the republic stamped on its face: Ecuador, the country named for the equator. A nation named after the level line, the one great horizontal the planet draws on itself, the circle along which every point stands equal. The coin comes from the middle of the world, struck on the plane of equals, in what Melville calls an unwaning clime that knows no autumn: a mint outside the seasons, gold from a place where the year does not turn.
On its face, three Andean summits. From the first rises a flame. On the second stands a tower. On the third a cock stands crowing. Fire that ascends, the standing tower, and the herald bird that tops every steeple weathercock in Christendom, turning every way to read the wind; the bird that crew in a courtyard and broke Peter into repentance. And arched over the three verticals, the zodiac, the wheel of the year, with the sun entering Libra at the equinoctial point. The Scales. Heaven weighing, placed at the keystone, at the moment of the year when light and dark stand level and the sun crosses the plane. The plumb line and the balance are siblings; both are instruments gravity operates, both exist to tell true from crooked, and the coin sets the weighing sign over everything else on its face.
So the doubloon, before anyone looks at it, is this: verticals under a weighing heaven, struck on the world’s waist, in a land named for the level, fixed to the ship’s one true upright. If ever an object were prepared to measure its readers, it is this one. Now watch what the readers do.
The Readers
Ahab comes first, and gives the game away in the act of winning it. He reads the three summits and finds three portraits. The proud tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the victorious fowl, that too is Ahab; all are Ahab. He even names the pride correctly on his way past it, peaks as proud as Lucifer, recognizes the resemblance, and signs his own name to it anyway. And then, in one sentence, he hands Melville’s whole verdict to the reader: this round gold is the image of the rounder globe, which like a magician’s glass mirrors back to every man his own mysterious self. The captain calls the coin a mirror, to its face, and is not troubled. A mirror is exactly what he wants at the axis. A mirror never says no.
Starbuck comes next, and his reading is the one to watch, because it is the only reading in the procession that frightens its reader. He sees a dark valley between three heaven abiding peaks, and in the peaks a faint figure of the Trinity, and over the vale of death the sun of righteousness as beacon and hope; and then he sees the rest of it, that the sun is no fixture, that at midnight you may look for it in vain; and he leaves. I will quit it, he says, lest Truth shake me falsely. Hold that sentence. Every other man on this deck reads the coin and walks away confirmed. Starbuck reads it and walks away threatened. The coin says something to him that he did not bring to it, something with weight enough to shake, and his answer is to take his eyes off the instrument.
Stubb reads it with an almanac, and gets the wheel without the weighing. The zodiac is the life of man in one round chapter, birth to death and round again, and the sun wheels jollily through the whole of it every year and comes out alive and hearty. It is not a stupid reading. It is the circle read as comedy, the turning blessed and the question of whether the turning rises waved off with a laugh. Stubb sees the wheel on the coin and misses the Scales above it, which is the one part of the design that weighs.
Flask reads price. A round thing made of gold, worth sixteen dollars; at two cents the cigar, nine hundred and sixty cigars. He says, honestly, that he sees nothing else, and wonders what all the staring has been about. The sign as pure exchange, the symbol melted to its metal. It is the one reading with no reader in it at all, and so the one reading that cannot be wrong, and it is worth nine hundred and sixty cigars.
The old Manxman reads doom by sailors’ reckoning, a date when the whale and the signs will meet. Queequeg studies the coin and then studies his own thigh, comparing the marks; he checks the sign on the mast against the signs on his body, the only reader who consults another text. Fedallah bows to it, because the sun is on it and the sun is his god; he is the only one who worships, and what he worships is the part of the design that is fire. Each man takes from the gold the shape of his own keel.
Then Pip. The cabin boy who was lost overboard in the open sea, who spent an hour alone on the plane with no mark in any direction, who was carried down the vertical to depths where, Melville says, he saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and who came back with his reason drowned. The one reader who has been below the surface of the world reads the scene rather than the coin, and what he reads is grammar. I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look. The whole procession conjugated: a verb, in every person, with no object that holds still. And then the mad boy says the truest thing said on the deck. He calls the doubloon the ship’s navel, and observes that they are all on fire to unscrew it, and asks what follows when a navel is unscrewed. The coin is the point where the ship is attached to meaning, and the crew’s relation to it is a frenzy to take it off the axis and put it in a pocket. Pip has prophesied the wreck in a nursery joke. Unscrew the navel and the bottom falls out. It will.
The Question
Here, at the center of the cycle, is the objection, and I will state it at strength because Melville already did.
If a flaming sword yields the cross, and a scarlet letter yields the cross, and now a gold coin yields towers and weighing heavens and herald birds, then a fair reader is entitled to ask whether the cross is in the things or in the eye that keeps finding it. Ahab has supplied the indictment in advance: perhaps every round gold is a magician’s glass, and the structural reading is the structural reader, mirrored back. Perhaps the figure I find everywhere is the figure I carry everywhere, and a symbol that can be located in every text has exactly the value of a symbol located in none.
And enter this essay’s own conduct as the first exhibit. Two sections ago I read a coin the way Ahab reads a coin: equator, plumb line, weathercock, Scales, the inventory mounting item by item, each find confirming the finder. Nothing in the procedure announced whether it was discovery or reflection, and that is the indictment exactly: the method feels identical from inside either one. The mirror does not lose its accuracy by hanging in a new room. It loses its interest.
The material itself testifies for the prosecution. Gold is the mirror metal, the polished surface that returns the looker; and gold, this cycle has already learned twice, is always the cover. The letter on Hester’s breast wore gold thread over its sentence. A dining room in Brussels wears gold leaf over its program. Now gold at the masthead returns to every sailor his own face. Three texts in, the pattern is at least as much warning as confirmation: where the surface is gold, the first thing you find is yourself.
So the question must be allowed to draw blood. Is there any difference between a measure and a mirror, or is every plumb line a looking glass on a string?
The Test
There is a difference, and the chapter itself administers the test. Both instruments hang on the vertical. The difference is whether the instrument can contradict the one who consults it. A mirror confirms; a measure costs.
A mirror cannot say no. Whatever you bring, it returns. Ahab’s reading costs Ahab nothing, demands nothing, corrects nothing; all are Ahab is a verdict no evidence could overturn, which is how you know no evidence is involved. Flask’s reading cannot contradict Flask; price never argues. Stubb’s wheel rolls past the Scales without being weighed by them. Reading after reading comes back confirmed, and confirmation without the possibility of correction is the signature of glass.
One reading in the procession behaves differently, and its reader is the one who runs. Starbuck’s coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me; it shows him a hope and then shows him the night in which the hope is not visible, and he feels the instrument press against something in him that might give. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely. That is not what a man says to his reflection. No one flees a mirror; there is nothing in it that was not already in the room. Starbuck flees because the coin, for one reader on one morning, stopped reflecting and started weighing, and he declined to be weighed. The recoil is the proof of contact. You can tell the measure from the mirror by whether anyone ever backs away from it.
By that test, the conjugating madman is the chapter’s one honest critic. I look, you look, he looks is the complete and accurate description of mirror reading: all persons, active voice, the looker supplying everything. Pip is not mocking interpretation. He is diagnosing this kind, the kind that goes out from the eye and comes back to it with nothing exacted in between. And the cycle should accept his diagnosis as its standing discipline. Where a reading of mine returns my own face flattered, where the figure confirms its finder and costs him nothing, the reader is entitled to say doubloon, and I am obliged to hear it. The sword reading paid for its door by conceding the expulsion whole. The letter reading divided its weight out loud and kept only half. A reading that concedes nothing and cannot be shaken has stopped measuring.
The Wall
Ahab is something rarer than a bad reader. He is a committed one, with a doctrine, announced at the mast in the same hour the coin went up. All visible objects are pasteboard masks; some unknown thing molds its features from behind; and if man will strike, strike through the mask. How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.
The cycle has met this hermeneutic before, at a garden gate. It is the guard at the threshold misread as mere obstruction: the sword taken for masonry, a crossing that exists to be passed at cost mistaken for a wall that exists only to be struck. Note what the doctrine forecloses. A wall cannot be knocked at. A wall cannot be passed in appointed blood, the way a veil is passed. The wall reading admits exactly one verb, strike, and Ahab gives himself to that verb entirely, and even he hears the floor creak under it: sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. He will spend three days and every life on his ship striking through a surface that may have no other side, because the alternative, that the white thing shoved near him is a threshold and not a wall, is the one reading his mirror cannot return.
And the strike is paid in the cycle’s own coin. On the third day Ahab darts his iron, and the line he has flung runs foul, and the flying turn catches him round the neck, and voicelessly he is taken out of the boat and down. The rope of his own throwing closes on his throat and runs him below the plane, fast to the whale. The man who read every sign as a wall ends lashed to the wall he struck, hauled down the vertical by the line of his own attack. It is not punishment imposed from outside the figure. It is the figure, completed. Strike the guard instead of passing it, and the guard’s geometry finishes the sentence: the wall reading, consummated, is a noose on the horizontal.
The ship follows him. The Pequod goes down in a vortex, and the vortex deserves its name in this cycle’s terms: it is the wheel running the wrong way on the fourth axis, the turning that has lost the vertical, concentric circles contracting, everything animate and inanimate carried round and round and down. The last thing seen is Tashtego at the masthead, nailing Ahab’s flag to the sinking spar, and a hawk of heaven coming down to mock the flag gets its wing between the hammer and the wood, and is nailed, and is dragged under, so that the ship, Melville says, like Satan would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her. The final image of the wall reading is a bird of the upward air nailed to the descending vertical. And the doubloon goes down with it, still fixed to the mast, the mirror sinking at the axis it was nailed to, sixteen dollars of glass returning its last reflection to the fish.
The Coffin at the Axis
Now the counterweight, prepared a hundred chapters in advance, because Melville does nothing once.
Queequeg’s body is covered in tattooing, and the tattooing is a text. A departed prophet of his island wrote upon his skin, Melville says, a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; and Queequeg himself cannot read a word of it. The whole truth of things, carried on a living body, illegible to its own bearer, destined, the book says, to moult unread. When Queequeg lies sick and a coffin is built for him, he copies the markings from his body onto the coffin’s lid: the unreadable scripture transcribed onto the box of death. Then he recovers, and the coffin, caulked and sealed, is hung astern as the ship’s life buoy.
Hold the two objects side by side, because the book is about to weigh them. On the mast, gold bearing a design every man can read and does, each into his own face. On the stern, wood bearing a text no man can read at all, least of all the man it was written on. The legible mirror and the illegible truth, both aboard, both waiting.
The Epilogue weighs them. Ishmael, thrown from Ahab’s boat, is floating at the margin when the ship goes down, and the closing vortex takes him: round and round, he says, like another Ixion I did revolve, drawn along the contracting circles toward the black bubble at the axis of the slowly wheeling pool. Ixion: the man the Greeks bound to the turning wheel forever, the circle as sentence, rotation as damnation. Ishmael is on that wheel, spiraling the plane, riding the turning that descends. And then he gains the axis. At the vital center the bubble bursts upward, and out of it, rising with great force, the coffin life buoy shoots lengthwise from the sea and falls over and floats by his side.
Read the geometry plainly, because it is plainly written. The wheel carries him to the crossing point, and at the crossing point, and nowhere else on the whole turning plane, the vertical answers. The rescue does not come along the circles. It comes up the axis, at the center the circles close upon, and it comes as a coffin: the box of death, surfaced, buoyant, bearing on its lid the complete theory of the heavens and the earth in a script no living soul can decode. Gold went down at the axis; wood comes up at it. The mirror sinks and the text floats. And the survivor is buoyed up by that coffin for almost one whole day and night, alive on a scripture he cannot read, until a sail draws near: the Rachel, the ship named for the mother weeping for her children, sweeping the plane in retracing circles after her own lost boy, who in that search finds, instead, another orphan.
He did not decode his salvation. He floated on it. The truth on the coffin lid did exactly what it did on Queequeg’s skin, which is to say it bore a living body without once being read, and the book’s last fact is that this was enough. The doubloon demanded reading and rewarded every reader with himself and saved no one. The coffin demanded nothing, said nothing legible, and held one man out of the water until love on its own errand happened by.
The Other Conjugation
So answer the question the chapter was built to ask.
Does the cross collapse by being found everywhere? The doubloon says: what collapses by repetition is the mirror. A figure that returns every finder’s face, that confirms and never contradicts, that can be located in any text because it is brought to every text, is a gold coin on a mast, and its readings are worth sixteen dollars. But the test that convicts the mirror acquits the measure, and the measure is known by its costs. The sword reading paid for its door with a wounding at the threshold. The letter reading killed the minister on the day he came to plumb. The coin’s one true reading, the only one with weight in it, made its reader flee the instrument rather than be shaken. Wherever this cycle’s figure is real, someone pays at the crossing; wherever the figure flatters, the cycle has Pip’s grammar by heart and will say doubloon of its own findings before a critic can. The cross does not cheapen by appearing everywhere if it keeps its edge everywhere. It cheapens the day it agrees with everyone, and that day the right name for it is no longer the cross. It is the coin.
And there is one last thing, the quietest in the book. Pip’s conjugation ran through every person and stayed in one voice. I look, you look, he looks: all active, all outgoing, the eye supplying the world. The Epilogue adds the voice the mad boy left out. Ishmael does not look his way out of the vortex. He is lifted, is borne, is buoyed up, is found. The passive voice, in every clause that matters. The cycle’s question was whether all this seeing is only ours, the eye decorating the void with its favorite figure. The book’s last page answers in the only grammar that could settle it: the rescue is something done to the survivor, at the axis, by what rose there. The looking was ours all along; Melville concedes the whole procession to the mirror. The holding was not. And the difference between those two voices, active and passive, the reading we perform and the bearing we receive, is the entire difference this cycle exists to keep measuring, one nailed and buckled and gilded figure at a time.