CAN ART STOP WAR?

by Gerry Fialka Part One

Having been recently in the news about hosting FINNEGANS WAKE Reading Clubs, I was advised by a wise friend, Bruce, to use this recognition wisely.

Can the WAKE be read as a peace manifesto to help us realize conflict resolution can be attained by means other than military?

ReJoyce and see the light. Find the commonality in everyone. The humanity of the WAKE’s protagonist, “Here Comes Everybody” is described by Louis Gillet: “the mystery of the titanic figure H.C.E., the unique, many-faceted hero of innumerable incarnations … the language he had adopted in order to give his vocabulary the elasticity of sleep, to multiply the meanings of words, to permit the play of light and color, and make of each sentence a rainbow to which each tiny drop is itself a many-hued prism.”

The rainbow is never ending. The newspapers and radio media swirl emphasize that our WAKE reading “ended” on the last page 628. Not true. The book is cyclical, the last sentence ends mid-sentence and picks up right at the beginning. It is never ending. All times are happening NOW!!! This all-at-onceness evokes what is happening on the planet earth right now. Why not satirize the multi-verse’s sensory overload, and emulate James Joyce?

How can we sustain the simultaneity? Easy, smeasy. Bottom line, we’d appreciate it if the press, and everyone, made a bigger deal out of Joyce’s promotion of peace. Flip T. S. Eliot’s “In my beginning is my end,” into “in my end is my beginning.” You know kinda like Joyce did on page 278, “land me arears.” Chris Hedges begins his book War Is A Force that Gives Us Meaning with the Plato maxim “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” So stand on the shoulders of these giants, and muster metacommentary into . . .

Right off the bat . . . Marshall McLuhan flipped the cliche, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” by Oscar Wilde into “imitation is the sincerest form of battery.” So, by flipping a cliche into an archetype, we’ll start this genuine fake essay. Shall we imitate Joyce’s no-content novel FINNEGANS WAKE into gibberish that’ll keep you busy for 3 minutes, 3 months, 3 years? Mimicking Joyce’s desired goal of 300 years? or is that “yearns?”

Lois Beckett asked in The Guardian November 12, 2023 “Was I writing about Finnegans Wake, or was I suddenly inside it?”

McLuhan emphasized that media and technologies create new environments (in his book War and Peace in the Global Village). In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy (page 268), he notes that Joyce devised “individual pass-keys to the collective unconsciousness, as he declared on the last page of the WAKE.” Sam Horgan wrote in Scientific American August 10, 2012: “But to my mind, Joyce exemplifies Noam Chomsky’s dictum that we will always learn more about ourselves from literature than from science. In the 90 years since Ulysses was published, scientists have not progressed much toward a theory of consciousness. Hence the persistence of creaky old paradigms like psychoanalysis and even behaviorism, which assumes, absurdly, that mind doesn’t matter. Although Joyce didn’t offer a theory of consciousness, he gave us a better sense of what consciousness is, and for that we should be grateful.”

And we are grateful McLuhan asked questions that were new, like, “How about technologies as the collective unconscious and art as the collective unconsciousness?” Think about it.
Experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton suggested that if one is going to lecture on film, one should be in a room with the lights out. He also said that narrative is born among the “animal necessities of the spirit” because we are “waiting to die.” Joyce forgot to die! We ain’t going away alone . . . “A way, a lone a last a loved a long the . . .” (page 628) ” . . .riverrun . . .” (page 3).

Wow, the Marshall McLuhan-FINNEGANS WAKE Reading Club receives world-wide press and radio coverage since we spent 28 years reading the book aloud with a group of people in Venice California. Then rebirth, and we began reading it again in November, 2023. It is a cyclical circus. This Mobius strip of mosaic writing, FINNEGANS WAKE, is the “the greatest guide to the media ever devised on this planet, and is a tremendous study of the action of all media upon the human psyche and sensorium.” – McLuhan. Wake up all you Finnegans.

You can laugh that we took 28 years to read one novel, but please note that James Joyce took 28 languages to affirm one word to the world: “Peace.”

On the eve of war in 1939, Joyce called for peace and repeated the word peace in 14 pairs in 28 languages. Síocháin is Irish for peace, just like salaam and shalom is peace in Arabic and Hebrew. And Joyce wrote in both Ukrainian and Russian, too, calling on each for “mir” and “myr.” Joyce knew then what we know now, the world needs peace.

See page 271 of FINNEGANS WAKE, or take my word as one of his unhurried readers: Joyce wrote a powerful call for peace. Sure, he gave the call his twist, his Joyce touch, rendering it “Mirra! Myrha! Solyma! Salemita!” But he caps this 28-word play on the words of peace with a prayer of reverent clarity: “O Peace!”

Joyce mashed up two words “please” and “peace” on page 278 to form “Plece.” Professor James A. W. Heffernan wrote: “Against the threat of war and annihilation, Joyce proclaims – in his own inimitable way – the power to re-create language, to ridicule dictatorship, and to rise again – like Finnegan.” He evokes the phoenixology of the immortal bird that cyclically regenerates and is born again.

Author of the book The Ethics of Love, Dr. Benjamin Boysen wrote “From all accounts, Joyce is said to have claimed that World War II need never have happened if Europeans had read his last book, FINNEGANS WAKE.”

McLuhan warned that “World War III will be a guerrilla information war, with no divisions between military and civilian participation.” Are you reading? Taking action?

James Joyce said, “Now they’re bombing Spain. Isn’t it better to make a joke instead, as I have done?” That reminds me of Frank Zappa saying, “I’m very serious about being not serious.” Frank listed Joyce as an influence on his first album, Freak Out, in 1966. Through his music and song lyrics, Frank teaches us how to embrace contradictions.

Another key WAKE word is “Laughtears.” We laugh and we cry, the human condition. We fall, then we get backup. There’s dark and light. It is both simple and complex, as in the book title: The Media Simplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos by Donald F. Theall. Dream awake in satirizing information overload with another WAKE word mash-up: “chaosmos,” that combines “chaos” and “cosmos,” evoking the cyclic dance of creation. The constant universal and complementary movement between chaos and cosmos, between disorder and order, between harmony and dissonance. The “in-betweenness” is ringing for me and my pals. For everyone! Hear Comes Everybody!

Scholar/researcher supreme Corey Anderson Dansereau, points out the WAKE lines: “alls war that ends war”! (page 279) and the “war has meed peace” (page 518) is a war! It’s what Michael Aquino called the “MetaForce Branch” of the military, a green beret that wages MindWar. This is what’s happening in the Willingdone Museyroom – the cosmotechnicians (Kant and Gunn and Crowley) toppling the old-school militarist nationalists (Napoleon) using dirty tricks and erotic magick! A prophecy of the future of mankind, metaphysical Waterloos forever! Compare HG Wells on information warfare, war in the medium of knowledge as “Ultimate Warfare, the crowning transformation of war”

Marija Gimbutas showed us, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “an actual age of harmony and peace in accord with the creative energies of nature which for a spell of some four thousand prehistoric years anteceded the five thousand of what James Joyce has termed the ‘nightmare’ (of contending tribal and national interests) from which it is now certainly time for this planet to wake.” – from the foreword to her 1989 book, The Language of the Goddess. Gimbutas, as an archeologist of prehistoric Europe, documented findings showing that these goddess- and woman-centered cultures were peaceful, without weapons and warfare. She inspired systems scientist Riane Eisler’s 1987 book The Chalice and the Blade, which promotes “partnership.” These themes resound on every page of the WAKE.

Since the WAKE is the history of everything that ever happened, and will happen, the study of Gimbutas reverberates with the knowledge that we humans are not naturally violent. There were 4,000 years of no warfare. The Greeks start introducing weaponry, horses and chariots around 1700 BC. We are not wired for war. We are wired for cooperation. Why do we accept that war is inevitable? McLuhan learned from Joyce “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

Contemplate “matristic,” which means “being or relating to a prehistoric female-led society based around Mother Goddess worship.” Matristic is based in the word “matrix,” which is etymologically rooted in “the womb, source, origin, mother.” One of my favorite T-shirt slogans is “The Matrix is a Documentary.” This is for real, people. We can find commonality and humanity in cooperation. Motherly love. Seek peace. Nurture partnerSHIP. Ahoy.

Addendum: Part Two due in the Next Issue. Gerry is presenting “Can Art Stop War?” at the Farmington Film Festival Michigan on March 24, 2024.

LAUGHTEARS.com Events in VENICE Tune in, Turn on, and Drop by – Gerry Fialka pfsuzy@aol.com 310-306-7330 .https://laughtears.com/

PAST: ***SUN April 14 Venice Beats III at Venice West 1717 Lincoln Blvd – Suzy Williams & Gerry Fialka celebrate Venice West Cafe & Sponto Gallery history with music, poets, songs by Jack Kerouac, Linda Albertano, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Slim Galliard and all the local cats. Jack Kerouac, author of ON THE ROAD, introduced the phrase “Beat Generation” in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement. Venice West Cafe at 7 Dudley Ave in Venice, California was one of the birthplaces of this free-spirited literature and art movement. The Beats shared themes of spirituality, environmental awareness and political activism. Coolsville Daddy-O. Songs by Clifford Brown and Frank Zappa will be performed by Musical director Kahlil Sabbabh and his wife Ginger Smith and their teenage son, Kylan, on guitar. Band members include the inimitable Brad Kay, Ollie Steinberg, Carol Chaikin, and Mike Tempo, with special guests joining in. Co-sponsored by the VENICE HERITAGE MUSEUM.

*** 4th Sundays 4pm Gerry Fialka hosts Venice Culture Salons (VCS) at Venice Heritage Museum, the first one is “Venice Boardwalk Performers” – fun, fiery, interactive discussions) Free admission. Bring your stories and tales..

https://www.veniceheritagemuseum.org/