Beginnings & Endings
Janus was the Roman god of beginnings and endings.
The month of January is named after him, and I can’t imagine a more appropriate time than this chaotic, enraging, frightening and sadly unsurprising week to reflect on beginnings and endings.
Because he oversees both the beginning and end of things, he’s represented with two faces looking in opposite directions. For the Romans, the beginning of every day, month and year was sacred to him.
I picture him standing on the Capitol mall on Wednesday, January 6, 2021 and I wonder which face looks to an ending and which to a beginning.
We are at the threshold of eras, and the death throes of the old one are violent.
There is much to say right now. There is much to say about our broken, angry country and its legacy of oppression, entitlement and violence. There’s much to be said about art and the crucial importance of building inclusive, equitable community. There’s much to be said about white supremacy and how it is baked into every brick of the American foundation. And there are people more qualified than I am to talk about it.
I want to take a breath. I want to talk directly to you, the artist, and to your heart, the artist’s heart.
Artists deal in beginnings and endings. They are the stuff of creation. We’re accustomed to false starts and unexpected endings, to scrapping something and starting completely over, to edits and scratching-out, to phrases and images and melodies saved for later and sometimes reborn as whole new entities.
The act of art, the act of creation at its most distilled is the act of beginning. It’s the act in which a thing becomes.
We begin and we begin and we begin.
And that is what we must do today. This very moment. Begin and begin and begin.
In his introduction to the collection The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin wrote:
“A multitude is, I suppose, by definition, an anonymous group of people bound or driven together by fears (I wrote “tears”) and hopes and needs which no individual member could face or articulate alone …
A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State …
A mob cannot afford to doubt: that the Jews killed Christ or that n——-s want to rape their sisters or that anyone who fails to make it in the land of the free and the home of the brave deserves to be wretched. But these ideas do not come from the mob. They come from the state, which creates and manipulates the mob. The idea of black persons as property, for example, does not come from the mob. It is not a spontaneous idea. It does not come from the people, who knew better, who thought nothing of inter-marriage until they were penalized for it: this idea comes from the architects of the American State.”
A mob exists to destroy. An artist exists to create.
A mob seeks easy answers. An artist seeks truth.
A mob wants immediate satisfaction. An artist wants something complete, whole and considered.
A mob absolves itself of responsibility through anonymity. An artist welcomes responsibility through individuality.
A State wants control. An artist wants liberation. Artists want to liberate through truth, through beauty, through the unflinching communication of the great struggle that is being alive, being human and being moral.
It’s good and right to be angry. It’s perfectly normal to feel terrified, cautiously optimistic, proud of Georgia, disgusted by America and even hopeful for America all at the same time.
Use it. And I don’t mean “use it to get famous” or “use it because artists should be miserable.” I mean use it to tell the truth. Use it to tell your truth. Use it to heal. To create dialogue. To give you a reason to get up in the morning, a reason not to give up, not to relapse, not to succumb to rage porn or internet trolls.
Janus was perhaps the oldest of the Roman gods. One story tells of how he saved Romulus from enemy forces by conjuring a volcanic hot spring that burst forth and scalded, drowned and buried in ash Rome’s enemies. (And what had Romulus done to provoke the wrath of these enemies in the first place? He’d kidnapped thirty Sabine women and forced them to be Roman brides. Hmm.)
Today, like Janus, we can conjure our own scalding flood made of art, of facts, of community, of beauty, of love, and we can silence the mob. Defang it. Delegitimize it. Bid it and its handler farewell.
We can do our part to save America from its inner enemies … even though America might not deserve it.
Even though its system built the mob and created the problem. Even though it kidnapped people and brought them here as chattel labor to build the very system that would oppress them.
No court in the world would convict us for abandoning it.
But we don’t save America for its system. We don’t save it for majority leaders or career congressmen, for monuments or economies or parties. We save it for ourselves. We save it for our children. We save it for our ancestors who couldn’t save it themselves, but who sacrificed that we might. We save it for every displaced and discarded Indigenous person, every Black person, every immigrant, every disabled and disenfranchised person, and for every single lynched, tortured, mocked and degraded human being who deserved better from this place that calls itself Free.
Like Janus, we stand in the doorway between an end and a beginning. We get to choose which direction we move.
We begin and begin and begin.
