CAN ART STOP WAR? Part Two by Gerry Fialka

Illustrations by Eric Ahlberg

“We can make it if we try” – Sly Stone. Do we have the will power?

“History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake” is one of James Joyce’s most repeated lines. On page 728 of Richard Ellmann’s Joyce biography (Revised Edition), “Joyce says to Beckett ‘What is the use of this war?’” and Ellmann adds, “Joyce was convinced that the war was distracting the world from reading Finnegans Wake, in which the unimportance of wars in the total cycle of human activity was made perfectly clear.” He also said that “Cain and Abel were the origin of war” and that he chose Ulysses because “he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness.” Finally, Ellmann points out that, in Ulysses, Stephen states “his contention that the authorities, religious and secular, must be defeated in spiritual rather than corporeal warfare.” Contemplate Joyce’s books: Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

In FINNEGANS WAKE, page 518 rings with “this war has meed peace.” This evokes Vonson Cunningham writing about the play “Spain” by Jen Silverman in The New Yorker (December 11, 2023): “The play is, above all, about the sometimes terrifying power of art—how it can be used to change, by minute degrees, the minds and hearts of a social set, or a generational cohort, or, God forbid, an entire mass-media-hypnotized populace. As dismissive as some artists, even now, tend to be about the political implications and possible ramifications of their work, you can’t deny that the powers that ring the boundaries of acceptable discourse—governments and corporations, deeply rooted and venerable institutions—treat the divine play of art with deadly seriousness.”
Cunningham continues, “Take today’s atmospherics: a war breaks out and writers lose invitations to festivals and public talks, magazine editors get run out of town by nervous boards of directors, collectors dump painters, and on and on. Art matters, whether artists like that fact or not.”

Does art matter? What really changes us? Can printed matter genuinely change us? Can agitprop artivism, prankterism, culture jamming, billboard banditry change us?

Can cinema? In 1924, D.W. Griffith proclaimed “In the year 2024 the most important single thing that the cinema will have helped in a large way to accomplish will be that of eliminating from the face of the civilized world all armed conflict.” Reely?

Can comedy? Robin Williams said we should fight wars with rubber chickens and yell “your mama wears army boots” instead of warfare. What are the alternatives?

In the WAKE, Joyce engages in a “war in words” (page 98) invading English with a barrage of dozens of other tongues, “Miscegenations on miscegenations” (page 18). Jacques Derrida, riffing on the single phrase “he war” from the WAKE page 258, insisted Joyce “declared war in language and on language and by language.” (from Derrida’s Two Words for Joyce) Yet Joyce’s “war in words” is powered by feelings of love and laughter, an undermining of the structures of authority through humor and levity. After all, Shem the Penman, emblematic of the author of the WAKE, composes “o peace a farce” (page 14), a piece of art that is farcical and also a force for peace. “Is the Pen Mightier Than the Sword?” the WAKE asks on page 306. From his “inkbattle house” (page 176), Joyce/Shem the Penman cunningly attacks the powers of “awethorrorty” (page 516) with his comedic art. Joyce said “Let them leave Poland alone and concern themselves with Finnegans Wake.” “When you are laughing, you are learning” – Robert Dobbs.

When McLuhan was asked “What do you suggest as alternatives that we offer instead of the search for identity through violence?” Marshall wisely responded: “Dialogue. The alternative to violence is dialogue, which is a kind of encounter interface with others, people and situations. Yes, we live in a world in which we have so much power. In the old days, you could fire or pull a trigger on a revolver and hurt people, but today, when you trigger this vast media that we use, you are manipulating entire populations.”

Krishnamurti said: “Violence is ‘like a stone’ dropped in a lake: the waves spread and spread; at the centre is the ‘me.’ As long as the ‘me’ survives in any form, very subtly or grossly, there must be violence, apart from dealing with the problem of individual and collective violence, also contain frequent references to what is and what is not the religious mind.”

On my Youtube podcast “I’m Probably Wrong About Everything” I asked Sam Slote, who co-edited the landmark book How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake, “how has studying Joyce shaped your behavior?” He said, “I try to be more tolerant, but I probably don’t always succeed.” Sam emphasizes these words from the WAKE: “First we feel, then we fall.” How can studying Joyce make us more tolerant?

Face it, people, Joyce’s 1939 book FINNEGANS WAKE probes and promotes peace over military in resolving conflict. Today, we still resort to military. What’s up with that? Is no one awake? In the tradition of promoting peace, Joyce’s response to the nightmarish history of warfare is exactly stressed in three words on page 364 “peace peace perfectpeace!”

Writer Philippe Sollers famously pronounced that this novel is the most formidably anti-fascist work produced between the two World Wars. Author Benjamin Boysen stresses: “Joyce’s self-declared war on language in the WAKE effectively fuses the poetic with a hilarious socio-ideological critique. Joyce’s new language thus paves the way – through its linguistic ridicule and deconstruction of the established, repressive power-ideologies – for an opening up of the new: a dynamic potentiality stressing freedom, love, and solidarity.” Let us echo “stressing freedom, love, and solidarity.” That is pure, uncut humanness. Is it possible?

“Joyce joked that Finnegans Wake dealt in ‘unfacts [ . . . ] too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude’ (page 57), but the book’s challenge to factuality most frequently arises from the proliferation of possible alternatives rather than their scarcity.” – Matthew Creasy.
What are the alternatives to war? Let us turn to the words of painter/poet William Blake, “For mercy has a human heart, Pity, a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.” We must don the human dress, and manifest another Blake maxim, “We become what we behold.” Do we embrace fire or enlightenment?

Jesuit priest/poet Daniel Berrigan practiced civil disobedience and declared, “Better to burn papers than children.”
“And wars are always wars against children. In every war, unforgivable numbers of children die.” – Howard Zinn.

Deborah Tannen wrote in The New York Times (May 12, 2024): “We would do well to move away from agonism and closer to irenicism – a term, and stance, deriving from the Greek word for peace.” Stand strong in our common ground to find alternatives to war.

Please consider: “To live PEACEFULLY and NOT ‘go postal.’” Mull over non-Finneganese McLuhanite Neil Postman’s 1985 book title, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Oh yeah, forget to die!

Charlotte Shane’s New York Times February 2, 2024 review of the book Tripping On Utopia – Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen set forth: “Mead’s interest in psychedelics stemmed from her lifelong quest to find a way to help humanity design peaceful, culturally diverse societies full of self-actualized individuals – in essence, a utopia.” Let us all aspire to this lifelong quest. Alt-search?

What else? Well, we “can can” achieve peace with culinary arts. Author Christina Ward enlightened me on my podcast, “I’m Probably Wrong About Everything,” that utopianist Charles Fourier believed nations could resolve conflict with a cook-off. Both sides halve a feast. Sharing food can be an act of trust, building community and society. We will not poison each other. Love is the way.

“The Ethics of Love reads the entire output of James Joyce, from Chamber Music to Finnegans Wake, in the perspective of the Irish author’s wish to celebrate secular love as the all-pervasive power that can be experienced in a ‘post-metaphysical’ world. Boysen grounds his outstanding essay on the table-turning thesis that, far from abolishing the power of love, the ‘death of God,’ this essential staple of twentieth century continental philosophy, makes mutual love all the more necessary to us; it warrants, in fact, the universality of our encounter with the Other.” — Gian Balsamo, author of Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence, and the Messianic Self (2005) and Rituals of Literature: Joyce, Dante, Aquinas, and the Tradition of Christian Epics (2004). . . . “We are the other people.” – Frank Zappa.

“But just because there is always a hidden pain in humor, there is also a sympathy.” – Kierkegaard. Is fighting humankind’s most productive state? Probe the hidden, as Marshall McLuhan help break the WAKE’s code with his Menippean satirized translation via books like War and Peace in the Global Village.

How do we keep our governments from going to war? How about reading aloud a book with a group of people. It can cause community, empathy, tranquility, patience, respect, compassion, kindness, self-control, courage, moderation, forgiveness, equanimity, and the ability to see the big picture.

The Los Angeles Times November 11, 2023 reported that “Media literacy is about to become required learning.” That is what both FINNEGANS WAKE and Marshall McLuhan do. They continue to guide us in finding alternatives toward by expanding media literacy and critical thinking. And, they both stress the importance of poetry.

Can poetry help? Consider Christina Gerhardt’s contribution: “‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ – Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher and sociologist, made this statement in his essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ in 1949. He was reflecting on the moral and ethical implications of creating art, particularly poetry, in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Adorno believed that any attempt to create art, especially poetry, after such a horrific event could potentially trivialize or aestheticize the suffering and trauma of the victims. He argued that the traditional forms of art and culture had been compromised by their association with the societal conditions that led to the Holocaust. Adorno’s statement sparked much debate and continues to be discussed in the context of ethics and art.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley thought poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and W.H. Auden insisted that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Read these maxims on the power of poetry.

“…I say let the poets run the country, we’ll be better off with books and pens, instead of the misery of weapons…let the poets run the country who speak from the heart…we will have a country filled with rhymes and justice if for once, we let the poets run the country.” – Quique Aviles.

“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.” – Seminal experimental filmmaker, Jonas Mekas, who also commented, “You don’t have to be a communist to be anti-capitalist. It is enough to be a poet.” “If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.” – JFK.

In 1962, JFK asked Norman Cousins to help convince Khrushchev to improve relations and negotiate an arms treaty. Cousins was the editor of Saturday Review and an antinuclear activist. During the meeting, Khrushchev said, “Peace is the most important goal in the world. If we don’t have peace and the nuclear bombs start to fall, what difference will it make whether we are Communists or Catholic or capitalists or Chinese or Russians or Americans? Who could tell us apart? Who will be left to tell us apart?”

Then in 1963, JFK asked, “What kind of peace do we seek?” He continued “… the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living…Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future.”

Being a lifelong advocate for world peace, Cousins wrote in 1953, the year I was born, this hopeful affirmation: “War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.”

The Pogues led by WAKE superfan Shane McGowan (RIP) centered the cover of their debut album “Red Roses for Me” around a portrait of JFK, who once quoted Joyce in a speech in Ireland. JFK delivered a famous speech on the need for peace and how to achieve world peace— “With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor–it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.”

Can books help? Poet Walt Whitman voiced “The real war will never get in the books.” Stéphane Mallarmé observed “Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.” Sontag expanded it to “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” For me, everything in the world exists to end up in an essay in New Explorations or Medium.com or an article in the Venice Beachhead, or even a Pixelvision short film. So what? Yeah . . .”So What” – Miles Davis.

And, please keep asking new questions, and inventing new metaphors. The father of Japanese animation, Hayao Miyazaki, said, “You have to be determined to change the world with your film, even though nothing changes.” Do not give up!

Can TV stop war? Study the effects of The Day After, the profound 1983 TV film about nuclear war and the 2020 documentary, Television Event about its making. Reagan said it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a “nuclear war.” Is a picture worth a 1,000 words?

NYC artist & activist Zool Zulkowitz says, “As Bob Marley sang ‘Everywhere is war.’ We know this is our reality. Marley prophesied ‘international morality.’ That can be authentic in our radical imagination. I believe that the stronger our imagination is, the less imaginary ‘international morality’ becomes. This resonates in the WAKE, Joyce’s brilliant antiwar manifesto!” George Carlin quipped: “How is it possible to have a civil war?”

Joycean Bruce Woodside writes, “Joyce himself was not prescribing a cure for humanity’s misery. Rather he was writing to observe and describe, with as much accuracy as words provide (especially the ones he made up) a fairly static portrait of human behavior, ‘the same anew’ (page 18) starting with the relationship dynamics of family politics and moving from the nightmare of the past into an uncertain future on a planetary scale. If he had ever entertained any notion of improving mankind’s lot, the years after the WAKE’s publication must have been profoundly disillusioning for him.” WWII started 4 months after the WAKE was published.

“His producers are they not his consumers?” (page 497) – James Joyce, the WAKE. McLuhan embellished the sentiment by updating “the medium is the message/massage” to “the user is the content” mid-career. Keep hitting the refresh button.

I wrote “Can music stop war?” on a local bulletin board. A few days later, someone changed the spelling of the word “music” to “muses.” We continue to understand that all art aspires to the condition of music. Confucius proclaimed “When music and courtesy are better understood and appreciated, there will be no war.” “The world suggest cultural action remains the only real transforming and redeeming force available to us. In an increasingly autistic international political environment, culture in the sense of what we know and create is our only hope of regenerating social empathy.” – “How Opera Can Stop War?” by Nigel Osborne, The Guardian, October 1, 2004.

Writer Haruki Murakami says, “Can music stop war? Probably not. But I believe music can certainly stir up listeners into thinking they’ve got to stop the war.” Can architecture stop war? Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.” (McLuhan transformed it to “We shape our tools, then they shape us.”) I asked a prominent Venice architect to be part of my Venice Culture Salons at the Venice Heritage Museum. He declared, “Architecture is boring. I want to do projects that make the world a better place.” That inspires me deeply. Let us all move this peace project forward.

McLuhan archivist Robert Dobbs declares that the WAKE is “rock’n’roll in print.” It is like a group of vibrant party people singing The Kingsmen’s version of Louie, Louie with the Richard Berry lyrics in front of them. When John Lennon read a chapter of FINNEGANS WAKE, he said, “It’s GREAT and I dug it and I felt like – here’s an old friend.” Since 1969, we continue to sing aloud, Give Peace A Chance. PEACE PEACE PERFECT PEACE, PLEASE.

John & Yoko’s “The War Is Over – If You Want It” peace campaign marked its 50th year in 2022. Full page ads in newspapers like the New York Times are a well-orchestrated wake up call to propagate the much-needed peace message.

All together now, let us sing it “All we are saying … is give peace a chance.”

American popular song lyricist, Yip Harburg wrote a poem that teaches us: “We learn this after every war, That life is not worth dying for.” A McLuhnesque retelling might be, “The Wizard of Us.” Dorothy is told to get the Wicked Witches’s broom (which writes in the sky as an advertising tool, “create the disease and offer the cure”). When she delivers it, the man behind the curtain is revealed because Toto (the Atomic Dog representing the “artist”) pulls back the curtain, and we learn what really is behind the doings. Reveal the obvious and hidden psyche effects! And the Witch all along wants to kill that little dog, and interfere with the artist as the antennae of the race. So “shake your esp ear” ala William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “‘Cry Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war.” Oops! Yikes! Bow Wow, Wowie Zowie!

Making or matching? Bush advisor Michael Ledeon described a 2004 Iraq invasion as “a war to remake the world.” Yeah, well how do we remake to world to be a better place, a peaceful place? Consider Gandhi: “The movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help the gnawing fear that the movement will fail if it does not touch the root of all evil — human greed.” “And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls.” – WAKE page 628.

How do we recognize and propagate the paratext into action? Influential author Sun Tzu proclaimed “The best war is the one that doesn’t have to be fought at all.” Two words from the title of this essay appear in the title of his significant book The Art of War.

Is art anything you can get away with? Marshall quipped, “If it works, it’s obsolete.” Since this essay possibly does not work, it renders you, the readers, as the content. Deal with it! Our critics, and we ain’t even ignoring them, criticize the length, the scattershotness, the ramblings, and the blah, blah, blah. Reinvent “everything but the kitchen sink”, and wash war away. We insist that McLuhan’s quote about the satellite conductor Jimmie Joyce nails it: “Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language.”

How can you re-word these epiphanies? “O peace, this is heaven!” (WAKE page 571, and then page 577) “stop-that-war and feel-this-feather.” “We are still learning to be Joyce’s contemporaries.” – Richard Ellmann.

“Satisfaction stops wars.” –Duncan Echelson. “We can’t get no” . . . “Yes, we can can.”

So ReJoyce these lines from the WAKE: “Wasting war and ? Watch!” (page 499) and “Send us and peace! Title! Title!” (page 500) and “They did not know the war was over.” (page 518).

“Fact” and “fake” both derive from the same Latin root “to make.” Juggle the paradox. Yes, we CAN make it if we try. The novelist, Richard Powers writes, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” Keep telling stories to propagate peace through printed word, spoken word, film, comedy, food and poetry. P-L-E-A-S-E.

Again, I ask, “Can art stop war?” Rob Hutton wrote, “Only people, not movies, can stop war.”

People, do we have the will power? Can we collectively draw upon the mental and emotional resources of ourselves? Or the Will Shakespeare sway? How about the Will Rogers way? Wisely, with wit, Will said, “You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.” So folks, please practice your own new ways of peace-making. And more importantly, Will powered, “I am a peace man. I haven’t got any use for wars and there is no more humor in ’em than there is reason for ‘em.”

“MAKE PEACE, NOT WAR.” “MAKE ART, NOT WAR.” Shout it loud, and tell us how these words make you feel?

We welcome your input, Gerry Fialka pfsuzy@aol.com

Addendum: This essay is aka The Art of Peace, aka ReJoyce PerfectPeace, aka War & Peace in the Metaverse, aka Make A Joke Instead. Thanks to Peter Quadrino, Roy Benjamin, Peter Coogan, Christina Ward, Zool Zulkowitz, Bruce Woodside, Mike Sakamoto, Jim Miller, Corey Anderson Dansereau, Sam Slote, Jack Friery, Lois Beckett, Suzy Williams, Bill Meyer and everybody who helps, especially all the FINNEGANS WAKE Reading Groups. Joyce wrote, “Let us pry.” Let us . . . “phew!” I meme pray, I mean PRY!!! JOIN IN . . .