Memorial Service Transcripts

Gustav Peebles: I would like to begin by thanking the Waletzky family for including us all in this ceremony. I also wanted to extend my gratitude to everyone who came, the mutual support network has been essential for us all and I’m especially extending that to what over the years has been called Team DC, all of whom grew up with Jake or watched him grow up. And I feel like I’m speaking for all of us. And that group of people in particular will know that after I finish we'll sing the song ‘tis the gift to be simple, I’m supposed to let you know comes from the Quaker school that we were brought up in.

Okay. We’re not supposed to be here today, Jake should still be around supporting and enlivening us all. I wanted you to know that I struggled immensely with this, not just because of the strong emotions involved but also because I deeply knew Jake’s love of language, his passion for communication, the meaningful communication that as Jake might say separates us from the beasts and makes us human.

This passion was manifested as he often told me by a privileging of form over content in both his writing and reading. So to craft something in Jake’s memory is both a high honor and an intimidating task indeed. But after much thought, it seems highly appropriate that my following remarks should revolve around language, the language he was so attuned to, and which in many ways consumed him.

Once, only once, I thought for sure that I had learned a word that Jake wouldn’t know. This, I assure you, was a singular event and I remember it lucidly. Jake, as his copious notes attest to and as the citation in the program does evokes as well, was an autodidactic extraordinaire, so there was almost never any hope that you could be a step ahead of him in such matters. I recall speaking with him after we took the GRE’s on the same day. He complained vociferously of the location, hidden deep in an unfamiliar part of Brooklyn; he had cursed the airplanes that screamed closely overhead every two or so minutes. He insisted that it had gone disastrously. Of course months later, we found that for Jake an off day meant that he disappointingly fell 10 points shy of a perfect score. 800, 790, 800. Somehow, I can’t recall my own. This was also the man who, over a beer in a bar in Sweden, could casually illuminate the distinction between phenomenology and ontology for me. So, as you can see, my relationship with Jake over the years revolved much around academic discussion, in both senses of that term.

But it was also about so much more and I could regale you with innumerable tales of Jake’s exploits, hilarity, compassion, and accomplishments. In fact, since we heard the news, this has been our way of coping. There have been scattered Jake gatherings to celebrate Jake and his Jake-isms, Jake-ish expressions, and Jake-ian deeds, all dealing with that incomparable combination, or shall we say oscillation, between profundity and buffoonery that I was privileged to witness and partake in for over 20 years. But here there is not time to recount such stories and anyway anyone who was touched by Jake has their own personal story with which to reflect. Instead, I wanted to briefly mention the spirit that came across in our gathering last night aside from some central themes emerging, such as his infamous logic, always impervious to any assault, or his insatiable desire, and often fluid capacity, to excel in all he chose to do.

What came across was how powerful a being Jake was. A roomful of people was alternately moved to tears and laughter all night long. We couldn’t help but feel his presence in that present moment, but more importantly, we couldn’t help but feel how much his presence had impacted all of our lives and changed its course in so many ways. He had a magnetism that pulled us in, but like that same magnet’s opposite force, he pushed us further upon whatever path we were on. I know that for me personally, he was my paramount guide and sounding board for all decisions and movements that happened in my life. Nothing happened to me that he didn’t know about and I don’t have the slightest clue how I’m gonna get along without him. And for that I’m both terrified and deeply saddened. What I find amazing is how many others feel precisely the same way. And that brings me back to that word that I was hoping to trump Jake with. In grad school, studying Marxism, I picked up the term metempsychosis. To my misfortune, Jake had already taught himself Hegel. He lobbed the definition effortlessly back at me: The movement of a soul from one object to another.

Now, as an important side note, one of my favorite tribes to study in my own work live in the mountains of Papua New Guinea. This tribe insists that there is no such thing as an individual self, delimited within the confines of one body. Instead, the self resides in the social relations surrounding them, a hearty dose of one’s parents, a piece of that uncle, a dash of one’s sister, a handful of one’s friends. Insofar as we can say that a soul and a self are the same object, I know that just as surely as a piece of our souls has departed with Jake’s, his soul remains also behind here with us, for we would not be the selves we are today and will continue to become in the future without him.

Lucy Waletzky • Gustav Peebles • Jeremy Fields • Dana Goodyear
Jeremy Waletzky • Naomi Waletzky