Prologue to Jacob's Writing

"No one is a genuine metaphysician who has not penetrated into the form-world of numbers, who has not lived them into himself as a symbolism" – Oswald Spengler, Vol. 1, p. 366.

This seemingly cryptic quote from a German philosopher of the turn of the century unveils, I believe, a great deal of the goings-on in Jake's mind and grants insight into why Jake turned to writing fiction as a means to make his mark upon the world.  What needs to be understood is how Jake found himself writing, after many years of obvious potential and facility with mathematics and the physical sciences.  He had a capacity for solving the most convoluted of equations.  He not only conquered the Calculus at an early age, but he knew how to employ such knowledge in the everyday world.  For a few years, he used to pore over the stock and business pages, not (as most do) for a love of money, but because of a fascination with the interlocking meaning of vast arrays of pure digits.  He often found a beautiful and confirming order in these monstrous (and I would hazard, profoundly boring) tables, and many times I recall jubilant revelations and future projections based on some astute calculation of the position of a certain set of stocks or the movement of a variety of "only superficially unrelated" national currency prices.  Occasionally such analyses would hatch brazen business schemes that were devised more to test his theorems than to produce actual profit—any derived profit would merely stand as the material residue and proof of a true and proper theory. This facility with numbers paid off in a real sense: Once I recall that, after a series of tests, he was offered a job involving complex financial operations for a firm in Princeton, NJ., but he turned it down. 

While most topics of study weren't strenuous for Jake, it was math and science that he truly found somehow transparently simple, as if it all made sense to him in an intuitive way, an intuitive way that never made itself available to me.  As my own interest in the economy grew, I used to always turn to Jake for down-to-earth descriptions of the mercurial interest rate or the barriers to arbitrage.  One notes an obvious thread connecting all of this fascination with numbers to the calculations presented by the character "Nestor" in the beginning of his short story "Combustion."  Here we are presented with the musings of a man consumed with the need to explain the surface-to-volume ratio, and its deep, but unnoticed, relationship with the idiosyncrasies of human sweat.  For Jake, numbers were everywhere. (Weren't, by the way, the thick curvy lines painted on the wall behind his couch intended as a series of stacked sine waves?).

In the intervening years between college and his fiction-writing, Jake took up the study of philosophy.  At 23 he recommended books to me that I wouldn't find pertinent until I entered grad school, at which point I realized how much he had been delving into these matters, on his own.  But once in a Ph.D. program, Jake found the discipline dissatisfying. In a diner in Hyde Park, he told me that he came to Chicago with a specific philosophical project in mind, but that "it was contingent."  Once that contingency collapsed for him, there was no longer any reason to pursue the discipline.  Spengler (he of the above quote) makes claims that "Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities," because it had abandoned its commitment to mathematics.  He also avers that Nietzsche was not a true philosopher, though he was a great critic and writer.  I remember numerous, virtually identical, statements from Jake (though to my knowledge Spengler is one of the few German philosophers Jake never tackled).  I have no doubt that—in the most private depths of his soul—Jake had a completely coherent philosophical system, emanating from his understanding of numbers (Jake respected modern philosophers such as Carnap, who remained committed to logic and mathematical systems).  But he had an epiphany once on a subway ride in New York City (elaborately connected to the "contingency" mentioned above): philosophy could no longer provide, in this day and age, an adequate forum for conveying his views.  At this point, he launched into fiction. 

All this biography is, for me at least, a way of explaining Jake's love of language per se., which obviously contributed to his individual style of writing.  He told me that he was less concerned with plot (with its devices, developments, and denouements) than with the language upon which all fiction itself was built. Jake praised authors such as Joyce and Gaddis, both famed innovators of the form of writing, and equally notorious for their sometimes impenetrable books which rarely keep the reader hooked via some tension regarding the fate of the protagonist.  I might add that Wittgenstein, the premier philosopher of linguistic form, stands as another one of Jake's favorites (Wittgenstein, strangely enough, began his career studying the foundations of mathematics).  Though I do not want to overemphasize this distinction (Jake's notecards reveal that he also labored heavily over techniques of plot development), I believe that his general privileging of form over content is eminently consistent with his love of numbers.  What I am suggesting is this: Jake wished to achieve, in the literary mode, the same "elegance" that mathematicians refer to when they witness the completion of some previously vexing equation.  Once this occurs, clarity emerges succinctly and absolutely for them; a previous jumble achieves brilliant order.  Such, I believe, was Jake's fixation with any apparently mundane written sentence.  The notecards that he devoted to each book he read attest to this strong tendency; in these he copied down sentences he thought were examples of excellent or instructive prose, and commented upon such things as their composition and whether they were successful or not. [2]

Anyone who knew Jake sensed strongly that he was a man of conviction, a man who believed he grasped the complexities of how the world worked, how it was all glued together and how it progressed through time—on some of these matters he could broach no argument.  This understanding, achieved during his years of studying numbers, was surely what he sought to convey once he turned to writing.  Yet what are numbers if not pure form, no content?  They are hard facts, the classically non-fictive creation of humanity—purely and perfectly representing the world and its hidden workings; language's ability to represent the world is much messier, and therefore more human and less callously scientific.  Perhaps Jake turned to fiction-writing in order to put a more colorful, personal, empathic, and no doubt more humorous stamp upon his own representations of the world.  In this manner he could elegantly clarify and succinctly convey his beliefs to a much broader group of people than could ever be reached via an arcane mathematics or an "exhausted" philosophy. 

This world is much poorer without such a rare translator between the realm of numbers and language—as any good translator, he knew both tongues fluently, as only a native can.  We can gain a sense of the task he laid out for himself by reading the postings on this web site, which contain: 1) samples of his prose, 2) a compilation of work and criticisms assembled by his fellow students at Columbia's Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing 3) some selected correspondence between friends and family which exhibit some of Jake's passion, wit, and care.  

We can cherish these writings, and reading them, we can easily imagine where his skills may have taken him had his life not been tragically cut short.  Jake was famous among his friends for toying with danger, for plucking knowledge from the extremes of experience and then returning to the happy medium to tell us what he had learned.  It was always quite a ride.  Had he completed his writings, what a ride he would have taken us on indeed.