“Craig Acorn #3, Magnolia Wood, South Carolina” © Stu Jenks 2021, 54 inches tall.
Price: $225, shipping included in the price. Simply contact me via my email address at stujenks@gmail.com or Facebook message me, if you would like to purchase one of my pieces. Payments can be made with Paypal, Venmo or credit card with Square. All pieces are signed with its title, and can be hung from the wall. Love y'all, Stu.
This piece is no longer for sale.
This is Craig's third stick. The first one is a show piece to be hung from a gallery, museum or household wall, too heavy to be a practical walking stick. The second piece had an accident of sorts. Long story. This third piece was made specifically for Craig as a walking stick, to be used on the trails.
Craig is one of my closest and dearest friends, we having trudged the Road of Happy Destiny, as they say, for 30 plus years. He is also Megan's husband who was featured in yesterday's post. I love Craig very much.
Include here today is a free PDF download of my book The Transpersonal Papers.
Free stuff!!! Yeah!!! Just click the link to own the book.
I put it here because Craig wrote a very nice introduction to that book. Below is that intro from 2010. It's a long read but fun and sweet. And heck, I like it because it's about me.
Thanks, Craig, for being my friend and having my back. I have yours too. You know that.
We are brothers.
A Collection Of Short True Stories (Introduction by Craig Acorn)
Love and death and sex and recovery whirling in sepia-tone flame spirals: sometimes the memories and the conversation and the art, or the memories of conversations about art, are all one piece. Cigarettes and pinholes, a beat-up Pathfinder and an old Brownie viewed through the long lens of the long march or a highland trek or a hike into the Chiricahuas. Or maybe a long walk off a short Rappahannock pier…
Stu Jenks and I have been on a journey of sorts together for more than 20 years. It’s one of friendship, sure…but that doesn’t really get at it. When you travel with Stu you are going to be looking at your family and at his and at the people who you’ve loved and loathed and at the twists of history that brought you to where you two are standing at that particular moment. Who are you wanderers, anyhow? And that patch of dirt…who else has been there and what are they to you? When you journey with Stu, you will want to be present – fully in the moment and in the space – because something magical is going to happen. You’re gonna be alive, friend; you’re gonna engage with your surroundings; your notions will get challenged and your emotions will get some grownup playtime. So hang on.
Stu and I and our friend Michael were sitting in the now-defunct Coffee, Etc. in Tucson in either late 1989 or early 1990. Stu was telling me a story he’d told before, about his notoriety ten or so years earlier in Chapel Hill as the mysterious “Fatal Figures” artist. I didn’t yet know him well, but I was struck by the fact that Stu told the story with less emphasis on HIS place in it, than on THE place in it: how his ‘Southern Gentleman’ legacy played a role in how he took responsibility for not only his art, but for his art’s effect on other people. He drew on his historical pedigree to place his life, work and ideas in a vast but immediately accessible historic context. Then he commented on the waitress’s legs. I realized that a friendship with Stu Jenks meant an elemental shift in content and context, inclusive of the sublime and the familiar, even as my awareness of which was which, would be subject to change.
Years later, I was at a conference and met a distinguished colleague who happened to have been in college in Chapel Hill in the late 1970’s. When I mentioned Fatal Figures to her, she damn near wept and went giddy at the same time. It was a big damn deal to her. She didn’t just remember the fact of it, but she could recall the visceral effect it had on her. Stu’s images and writing continue to grow in their ability to evoke that power.
This is collection of short true stories – or essays, dreams or remembrances of things past; stark black and white images of today or visions of tomorrow. They are brought on by the music of a church organ or of bagpipes. They come from the smell of a sky island forest fire or of the third cigar in a row in a closed car your father drove, or the clean sagey scent of the high desert. They come from the taste of pie no one since your grandma could bake, or that of cocaine dripping down your throat. They are stories of euphoric recall and of past lives shadowing in. Some find us on a civil war battlefield dying yet again not-quite-heroically, but with all the bravery ignorance can set loose. Some find us reclaiming a lost ancestral heritage in a circle of storm-beaten rock, thinking that this might be something – something hard and eternal – against which we might measure our years. Others take us to the anteroom of a family funeral, where we get to say what needed saying to that racist old bastard of an uncle who needs to make every story exclusively, toxically his. Stu brings an antidote in words and images, but the cure is not free. It’s hard to say what needs saying, but impossible to let it go by unremarked. Come along with Stu on that road less traveled.
Sometimes that road has its ruts. Like the best of brothers, Stu and I haven’t always been in step along the way – haven’t always heard the same music. A few years back, he was telling me about being out in the Arizona desert, tracing the path made by walking that many immigrants take. He was talking about the fact that while some folk cache humanitarian aide out there under the mesquite and ironwood, others unofficially patrolled the area with guns, hoping to deny passage. Stu was rightfully wounded – pissed, in fact - when I interrupted his use of “illegals” to point out that it was a problematic term – one favored by…uh…racists. Well, no shit, Sherlock, and I know Stu is anything but that. Rather than just be and stay angry at me – rather than have that become a thing, Stu wrote me a couple of days later to say he had spoken with a good friend that worked with the undocumented community about our conversation. He talked about the context for various usages and said he was settling on the term, “sin papeles” as a poetic and benign way to describe ‘those poor folk who walk at night…’ And so we found reconciliation with generosity, education and love.
As I read these pieces, I can’t help but think of the much sorta-quoted Santayana nugget that warns us that if we fail to know our history, we will repeat the mistakes from which we could have learned. It’s certainly true of us as a culture or society, but maybe even more the case in our personal history. We make myths of our past as a matter of course. What’s true, what isn’t and what does it matter? Well, what does your life and your place on Earth among others mean to you? Not in the vaguely considered, existential angst-y sense of why are we here and what does it all mean, but in the squeezing our fingers and toes in the mud sensation of being here right now inalterably connected to the awareness of who we have been. And the spiral of our consciousness not only drills down into the rock of the Earth, but it opens into the infinite sky. To what height of awareness must we rise to choose our next vessel?
A few years ago, on one of my regular visiting family and friends Tucson trips, Stu schlepped my partner and me a few hours west to a place on the Tohono O’Odham reservation called I’Itoi’s Cave. It’s a sacred place that not many non-native folk even know or care about. Before we left, Stu reminded us that we were going to the place where God lived and so to be prepared with an offering if we wanted to make it out. To many folk, that would be a kind of patronizing, half-hearted joking recognition of what divides us from other people, but certainly not anything that might get our pants dirty. Not Stu - if you’re going to I’Itoi’s Cave with Stu Jenks, you’re going with integrity and respect and a by-god healthy fear of the infinite and unknowable. Trusting his sense of having conveyed the solemnity of the situation…he never asked what it was we offered there. I’m not telling here, either – that sacred offering remains between I’Itoi and me - but in this book you can go there with Stu, too. Bring a gift.
Maybe the best gift to bring to this journey is a sense of wonder and appreciation for the seemingly routine treasures: the note discovered in the old book, the sign glimpsed in the rearview mirror and the story told in the living room when you were supposed to be asleep. I recently needed help moving my stored stuff from the Bay Area to Albuquerque and Stu offered to help me load ‘em up and move ‘em out. We took our time in the Penske rental, tooling along the secondary highways, and as we drove we told stories that were true or at least ought to be. I was struck by what and by how much two people who have used too much dope too long ago could recall with crystalline accuracy. Facts, of course, are another matter when you’re making myths – it’s truth that counts. So Stu talked about moving his mother in a similar truck from Virginia to Tucson and about watching her slowly die. I talked about moving my marriage from New York to California and watching it slowly, then abruptly, die. We told the truth as best we could and believed each other pretty well, too. We appreciated both the pie and the railroad loop in Tehachapi and the ponderosa scent and the gas station punks in Flagstaff (we couldda, shouldda kicked their asses…). There was the history of Michael’s teepee near Winslow thirty years ago and the hundreds of years woven into the rugs in Gallup. We argued about when you need to stop for gas and we laughed - just a little - about the sign in a remote gas station that plead with customers not to abuse the owners over high prices. We are here to help, it said…have mercy…
Yes, indeed, we can all use some mercy in whatever form it may take. Stu serves it up straight, no chaser. The sweet mercy of a longing fulfilled, as well as the occasional justice of not getting what we deserve. Sometimes, though, it is simply the stark recognition of the inevitable – that dying is a point on a spiral of living that is only partially visible as it hovers above the hard desert soil. And it is turning – ever turning – to emerge again elsewhere in you and me and me and you.
Not long ago, I spent the day with Stu at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco. We shared time and space and sound as Stu captured some of that experience in the ones and zeroes of digital imagery. As we listened to a Guy Clark song, I realized that both of us had tears in our eyes – no doubt for different reasons, and no doubt the precipitate of a range of feeling. It can be trite to say that we wear our hearts on our sleeves and it might describe one who can only talk about it. But this is show time, not tell. In The Transpersonal Papers, Stu Jenks does not wear his heart on his sleeve – it’s more like an Order of the Arrow sash across his strong, lean torso – and he earned it by squinting into the low-angle light on the horizon of our awareness.
From all of us who wander, Stu - my brother, my friend - thank you for these breadcrumbs, this map, this blessed gift. Namaste.
Craig Acorn
Albuquerque, New Mexico
November 2010
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