May their memory bring us identity
Representatively instantiate mathematical necessities
John Gierach and Ron Jeffries died about three weeks ago. Of course I extend my deepest sympathies to their families and to those that knew them best. For me, personally, the timing was synergistically poignant - a macabre coincidence of fish and beer. They were both significant influences on who I am. I’m always a little confused by the urge to make memorials and tributes, particularly for someone like me to remember people like this - I never met Gierach and while I did spend a couple hours with Jeffries twenty years ago, I’m very sure he forgot about it quickly. All memorials are ultimately memento mori, reminders that you must die, with which I am squarely obsessed - our awareness of death is the defining characteristic of the human condition, the wellspring of all meaning - so despite being confused about the impulse to do so, I think it’s important.
I read John Gierach’s Trout Bum in 2004 or 2005 when I was discovering fly fishing as something “to be about.” When I was a kid it was just another type of fishing, but when it was time to grope around for an identity as a twenty-something, the kind of fly fishing life that Gierach espoused was pretty appealing. I was shocked when “The Trout Bum Diaries” video came out soon after - how uncanny that this movie should be exactly what I was looking for and should be called the same thing as the book I just read. Of course it wasn’t uncanny, it was somehow in the zeitgeist, this search for something that was more than a hobby, that is equal parts self-reflective physical “art” and self-sufficient outdoor life, an identity that highly values camp coffee (and whiskey from the same tin cup), that values driving slowly and aimlessly on remote dirt roads, and that tries to not take it all too seriously.
John Gierach laid out the program twenty years earlier and gave the whole thing a very catchy name. The wise old sage doing it before it was cool and writing it all down in a holy tome that could be “discovered” was also important for the meaning-making. When Orvis filed for a trademark on the term “trout bum” in 2007 and subsequently through legal action stopped other uses of it in the fishing industry, including AEG’s video series (now verging on an ancient holy tome itself), I wondered: “What does John Gierach think about all this?”
It would have been cool if he sued Orvis.
Ron Jeffries was the founder of Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales in Dexter Michigan. I always thought it was a weird brand name and the names of the beers were weird, too - lots of Spanish, pirate vibes - but it was authentic to who Jeffries was and somehow he pulled it off. The thing that made Jeffries and Jolly Pumpkin special in craft brewing was that everything was aged on wood. He was one of the first people to start doing funky wood aged beer in the United States in 2004. Jolly Pumpkin, along with New Belgium, Lost Abbey, Allagash, and Russian River, set the tone. It was a really exciting time in craft beer and these sour and wild ales were considered, and still are, to some extent in our “post-interesting” culture, the most interesting and complex beers you can make.
I was able to visit the brewery and chat with Jeffries as part of a wholesaler junket relatively soon after he opened. His were the first foeders I had ever seen and we got to try beer straight from these vessels and his barrels and Jeffries was passionate and generous and it was a great experience for a young aspiring beer nerd and brewer. Several years later when I was living in Northern Michigan Jolly Pumpkin had opened a location on Old Mission Peninsula and one of my favorite days, in my whole life, was when I took my old, very good friends from Pennsylvania fishing at Mission Point and we caught a bunch of smallmouth and went to Jolly Pumpkin for beers and dinner afterwards.
Fishing and beer are still two really important parts of who I am, though of course the more I learn about fishing and beer the more I realize I don’t know about them, and more importantly, the more I learn about identities the more I realize I don’t know about them, either. I can hope theirs was painless, quick, and reasonably unexpected in the moment, that everything winked out suddenly to blackness, to nothingness, and that any suffering and fear were gone forever. We are plagued by narrative, the curse to explain, plagued by the ability to think beyond and about our circumstances, to posit reasons and consequences for things we can’t see or will never see, to think about what happens after we die and how life will go on afterwards.
My thoughts can squeeze into places infinitesimally small and yet encompass those that are geologically slow. How can they camp in an Eastern old growth forest for ten thousand years to see how it changes, to see old-growth die and watch the mosaic of succession build a structured canopy again? My thoughts can go back in time to ride the leading edge of the Juan de Fuca plate. I want to ride the edge of the Pacific Plate for thirty million years and behold the Laramide Orogeny and yet escape obliteration.
How can thoughts tunnel with an electron through (?) spacetime, surf a wave function beyond oblivion, how can they representatively instantiate mathematical necessities (regardless of exotic metaphysical commitments), conjuring mechanical thought models about these symbolic relationships, narrating their tinker toy behavior - this happens and then this happens and then this other thing happens? My thoughts can easily transit a Planck length, my thoughts are so powerful that they can transit any and all spaces - behold the instantaneity of my thoughts! But how can I hold a clear concept of infinity? Lo, what cognitive dissonance to so easily think of a space smaller than a Planck length! To easily think of traveling faster than the speed of light!
I can’t, however, seem to conceive of nothing, even mathematically it doesn’t make sense - what is the symbol “zero” supposed to refer to? What was before the big bang? It smells like a category mistake to even ask.
I can’t seem to conceive of anything prior to my creation or after my obliteration without me there. I find it’s impossible to conceive of my own actual death. Death is not me becoming a body-less casual observer floating over a stage that I have exited, it is not sleep, nor is it the patient, dreary waiting of a quiet, dark room. It is final and true, defined only by the pure impossibility of my own awareness.
Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle - Arnold Böcklin
