Continuous Showing
There was a time, until about the 1950s or ’60s when movie theaters played films on a loop. The audience could come in at any point in the movie, see it to the end and then stay to see the beginning. It gave birth to two terms: “Continuous Showing” – doesn’t matter when you arrive, the show will be playing again, and “This is where we came in”.
Years ago, I made a collagraph (a type of printmaking), and titled it Continuous Showing. If I had made it eons ago, its subject would still be relevant: War through every age, the movie on a loop. I’ve been pleading for peace forever even though I know I’m just pissing into the wind. I also know I’m not alone.
An aggressor strikes. A nation calls upon its people to defend. The photo below from WWI captures a response to a nation glamorizing war, claiming it would be short, with guaranteed victory. The volunteers believed they were going on a great adventure. What they walked into was a killing field of nightmares seeded for PTSD. None of it would have been necessary without the first three words of this paragraph.
GI Joe Doll
He’s thinking of the romance
of his dress uniform.
Dismembered by the child-at-play,
GI Joe doll is thrown in the closet corner.
Although he lay in parts
his senses are on auto replay. He
sees
the blood and bones
of butchered bodies,
tastes
the sweat and grime
of suffocating fear,
hears
the shrieking whistle
of flesh-tearing weapons,
smells
the trench stench
beside his puking brothers,
feels
his fading soul
departing
The day he is reassembled
how handsome he will be
displayed in his plastic box
wearing dress blues, medals and
arms.Too graphic? Not enough for the people who lived it.
War Torn
Time has etched its course
upon your shell but has not
released the bits of hell
knocking on the walls within.
Eyes now heavy and creased
turn vacant when buried scenes
rise like specters to haunt you.
Time does not heal.
It embeds.
I’ve included this poster because, although it’s from WWII, its title has carried forward every day somewhere. It is as relevant today as it was then and will be tomorrow. It’s almost a knee-jerk reaction that we ask Freedom from Fear “of what”. The list is long and persistent. I’ll leave it there for you to make your own list.
Jane Goodall, the personification of kindness, struggled with a truth she learned about the chimpanzees she studied. They could war. They could attack with vicious brutality. The events that revealed this trait are described in this article about the Gombe Chimpazee War if you’re interested.
In her 1990 memoir Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe, she wrote:
For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind—Satan [one of the apes], cupping his hand below Sniff’s chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; old Rodolf, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi’s prostrate body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Dé’s thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes. [Goodall 2010, p.127]
She took some heat for publishing this because it might lead to the conclusion that war is inevitable; if you believe in evolution, it is part of our inherited DNA. She responded with a version of “not so fast.”
During an interview with our national treasure, Terry Gross, Dame Goodall explained why it doesn’t have to be that way.
I believe that we have quite a strong free will and that we are able to choose the direction we go. We don’t have to go around being violent. In fact, most people don’t. Most people are quite disciplined and we have to also remember that equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage are compassion, love, and altruism because we find wonderful examples of these qualities in the chimps that we’ve studied.
There’s the crux: We can choose.
Jimi Hendrix summed it up with the purest clarity:
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
If “thoughts and prayers” worked, if we showered the powerful aggressors with thoughts and prayers to choose differently, to choose love, would it work? Is that a rhetorical question?
Peace and War
Peace:
She sits stoop-shouldered
backlit by a gentle haze
still radiant and
alluring
in her tender way.
Man infinitely longs for her
while she, forever hopeful,
sighs,
I am always on perilous ground.
War:
He stands spread-eagle
in hell’s doorway
still awful and
alluring
in his collared cloak of causes.
Man hotly lusts for him
while he, vain and powerful,
boasts,
I am always forging battle grounds.The following is excerpted from Mark Twain’s short story War Prayer written about 1905 but not published until about 1923. If you’re interested in learning about the background for his searing prose poem, there’s a good recounting here. For those who see their version of God as either being on their side or abandoning them, please recall that word choose. I’m no God expert, but maybe S/He just isn’t taking sides in the children’s disputes.
“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it –
“For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
“We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
You can also watch Jesse Welles’s moving recital of this prose poem here.
On earth, we hear the cries of pain and grief, the rage of loss and injustice, the eternal mourning of the masses. What does the universe hear? Humanity’s haunting howl echoing across the canyons of time.
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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace."
Looking at the "Continuous Showing" reminded me of something that I've long pondered. If only we could resolve our differences, over a game of chess - would the hunger for battle, and the thirst for blood be quenched? Or will the GI Joes still need to dress up in combat gear, and play soldier with real lives?
"Time does not heal.
It embeds."
This is such a powerful, heart-wringing article. Especially sitting at my desk in Minneapolis, every word on here had me in tears. This country that I love...
Thank you, Linda.