Ben was an utterly unique individual. He lived in a world rich with music, magic, mathematics, and metaphysics, and he was deeply rooted in, and a great advocate for, our shared home here in Madison, Wisconsin.
He was a talented improvisational pianist and composer. In his twenties, he self-published a book of philosophy and word games, and he later collaborated on three semiautobiographical interactive fiction games. He was a self-taught computer programmer, contributing code to the experimental distributed operating system Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and creating his own distribution of the Plan9 OS, ANTS (Advanced Namespace ToolS for Plan9). He was a friend and supporter of the Madison housing cooperative system, especially Lothlorien Co-Op, where he spent the happiest days of his life.
Ben played improvisational piano and keyboard with a loose collection of musical (and not-so-musical) friends in high school, where he usually hosted jam sessions (because his piano wasn't portable!) He went on to play concerts with the free improvisational group We're Freaks, and to play and write music for the instrumental ska group The Anklebiters and a jam band called The Big Dive Community Orchestra.
Ben created several personal websites over the years. I've captured mirrors of these sites from archive.org and will be hosting them here when time permits.
My intent here is to honor Ben's memory and preserve some facets of his unfairly limited creative life. In keeping with his last autobiographical writing, it would also be unfair to those who knew him not to mention his lifelong relationship with mental illness.
He was one of my best friends in our teens and early twenties. I helped him navigate some of his mental health crises, and vice versa, and we spent many hundreds of hours walking and biking around Madison late at night, talking about everything from love to Riemannian manifolds. I missed him every day after we became distant, and I will always wish I'd made a better effort to reconnect.
Day is ended, dim my eyes,
but journey long before me lies.
Farewell, friends! I hear the call.
The ship's beside the stony wall.
Foam is white and waves are grey;
beyond the sunset leads my way.
Foam is salt, the wind is free;
I hear the rising of the Sea.
Farewell, friends! The sails are set,
the wind is east, the moorings fret.
Shadows long before me lie,
beneath the ever-bending sky,
but islands lie behind the Sun
that I shall raise ere all is done;
lands there are to west of West,
where night is quiet and sleep is rest.
Guided by the Lonely Star,
beyond the utmost harbour-bar
I'll find the havens fair and free,
and beaches of the Starlit Sea.
Ship, my ship! I seek the West,
and fields and mountains ever blest.
Farewell to Middle-Earth at last.
I see the Star above your mast!
Bilbo's Last Song
(At the Grey Havens)
J.R.R. Tolkien
