A Second Wind: Foreword
by Chris Bache
I am completely intimidated by the challenge of sharing my thoughts on Jerry’s art and how it touches me. I am not an artist nor a student of art. I have earned my bread as a professor of religious studies. My tools have been words, reason, order, and precise statement. Jerry’s art brushes aside my words, shatters reason, laughs at order, and hangs my precise statements as decorations on the arms of his magnificent creations. His work turns my world upside down and inside out. That’s why I love it so.
When I stand in front of Jerry’s pieces, when I turn their wheels and open their doors, I am mesmerized by their absolute originality. Everywhere my mind goes, it is turned around. Muses in glasses, goddesses in gas masks, madonnas in drag. Faces open, skulls pop out, outrageous hair cascades to the floor in screaming colors. Nothing makes sense but everything coheres until, exhausted, I give up and simply play, and when I play, something sneaks up on me and changes me. I am freer, looser, walking in wonder again.
I am staggered by Jerry’s craftsmanship, by his technical mastery of so many mediums – wood carving, metal work, painting. How many lifetimes has his soul spent collecting these extraordinary skills? But in the end, it is his unbounded creativity that moves me most deeply. His ability to weave people’s discarded junk into combinations that transfix me with their beauty. How in the world did he come up with that combination? Where did this idea come from? Layer upon layer of the unexpected, it never stops. Every square inch overflows with novelty. When I step away from Jerry’s work and come back to my own world, I always want to go out and make something, anything. I want to try something new, be bolder, take risks. His freedom makes me feel the straightjacket of my habits. I would say that Jerry’s creativity is contagious, but really it is his communion with the universe from which his creativity comes that calls to me, inviting me to drink deeper from this bountiful well.
Jerry came by his remarkable capacity to open to the deep psyche through honest if unusual means. In response to a growing spiritual unrest when he was 29 – and in the middle of his Saturn Return astrologers would point out – he burned all his artwork, gave away his possessions and money, and committed himself to living a life of unconditional trust in the universe. Like the sannyasins of ancient India, he stripped his life to its bare essentials and lived on the blessings of circumstance in order to discover the “rock-bottom truth of his life.” Fifteen years later, he was a changed man, living deeply in the present and strikingly transparent to the cosmic intelligence that pulses through all things.
In Jerry’s work, life and death play tag as the lovers they are. This is a truth I have learned in my own spiritual journey. Many years ago, I began a series of clinically structured LSD sessions following Stanislav Grof’s protocols. The resulting 20-year odyssey drew me ever deeper into the heart of the universe and the mind of God. Death became my dearest companion, opening the door to untold adventures. Sweet death, sacred death, guardian of truth, gateway to ecstasy. Life without death would be such barren sadness. Not death at the end, but death here and now, this very moment.
Seen in this light, Jerry’s outrageous women are dakinis, Tibetan “sky-dancers,” liberating us by tearing apart our assumptions, breaking through our fixations, bringing us back to the wonder of children seeing the world for the first time. Play with me, they say. Twist my keys, turn my gears, run your fingers through my hair, be surprised, be confused, but play with me. Embrace my strangeness until you rest in my arms restored, reborn into the mystery. Mystery within mystery, the joy of surrendering to the delicious openness from which all new things come. The Sacred Communion.
The peace and compassion on the faces inside Jerry’s coffins call to me from some deep remembering, reassuring me. Strange and ordinary, all is well. Death and birth, all is well. Fierce and tender, all is well. But just when I have absorbed this comfort, his next figure slaps me again, reminding me that the universe is not tame but wild, and closure is an illusion. The dakinis beat the drum, wear necklaces made of human skulls, and dance on cadavers. Wild wisdom shakes us to our bones. Becoming one with life is not for the faint of heart. Opening to the One Mind that shines in all, the One Heart that beats in all takes complete surrender, again and again, minute by minute, no rest, no exceptions. Resist Me and I will break you, embrace Me and I will bring you home to your true self and together we will remake the world.
This is what Jerry’s art stirs in me. What a gift.
Chris Bache is the author of LSD and the Mind of the Universe and Dark Night Early Dawn