July 13 2024 The Flag of My Skin
Here is a poem which I originally wrote in French for a publisher in Switzerland, a nation with four official languages including German, Italian, and Romansh, and where place name conventions and other government business is conducted in Latin. I have often used its title, a phrase of my own invention, to refer to identity politics and the construction of ideas of race and nationality as authorized identities and an imposed condition of struggle, divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood and soil.
In my journals I refer to this idea in terms of the redemptive power of love, an interrogation of what is human, and how we may reply to death. I find it bears a definition in context; here then is my poem, and may it serve you as a Rashomon Gate event of transformation and liberation.
On one face of this coin, the tyrant Janus; the terror of our nothingness, commodification, falsification, dehumanization, abjection, and theft of the soul. On its reverse the liberator Janus; the joy of total freedom, seizure of power, self ownership, love which exalts us beyond the limits of our flesh and the discovery of our best selves as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
A maker of mischief, I; named for the god of Chaos, Jay being a form of Janus, Roman god of doors and Guardian of the Gates, change, fate, beginnings and endings, who faces both directions of time and being at once. My mother said her immediate inspiration was Dr. Seuss’ figure of anarchy as a Trickster god in his iconic 1957 book The Cat in the Hat, and at times introduced me as Thing One and Thing Two, dyadic beings or a being with two forms who always do the opposite of what they are told, characters which reference Lewis Carroll’s court jesters as agents of subversion Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Non Serviam, I Will Not Serve, the declaration with which Milton’s great hero launches his rebellion in Paradise Lost, a legacy of freedom given to me by my mother as an informing, motivating, and shaping force enfolded into my name.
Becoming human as a process of identity formation, self-construal or personae which is the word for a character mask which actors speak through in classical Greek theatre and which I believe describes identity as a performance and a narrative structure with precision, clarity, and great explanatory power, remains fluid, ambiguous, relative, ephemeral, and a primary ground of struggle.
Who chooses how we are to be defined, the boundaries between our limits and the possibilities of what we may become?
This is the first question to ask of any story; whose story is this?
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Let us abandon this claiming and naming, taxonomies of identification and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, this use of social force as ideas of virtue, beauty, normality, membership, nation, of the violence of us and them. For until our boundaries become interfaces, the leading edges of such identities draw blood.
When we have escaped the legacies of our history and created ourselves anew as autonomous beings bound by nothing but our own visions and desires, what have we become, and who are we then?
Whoever we wish to be.
The Flag of My Skin
Time, memory, history, identity, and the revolution of becoming ourselves;
the skin I have escaped in serpentine transformation has become a flag,
but of what nation?
Who owns this kingdom of flesh that we share?
This realm of the senses is both a boundary we must transgress
to discover ourselves and seize ownership of our freedom and being,
and an interface by which we shape each other, a propulsive and generative force of the human sublime, of truths written in our skin.
We are interdependent, vast and oceanic beings, exalted by our passion beyond the limits of our form but also autonomous individuals who create ourselves and one another over enormous gulfs of time, limitless in our possibilities of becoming human but also forms described as negative spaces of each other.
Being is a dance of myriad partnerships, transforms of messages and principles of organization and growth which are recursive, chaotic, a beauty of strangeness and the bizarre, a realm of Medusa, goddess and monster.
There is but one rule in nature; anything goes.
Who authorizes and validates the possibilities and performances of our identity?
Shall we not dethrone, mock, and challenge such tyrannies of normality?
Let us forge an art of fire by which to liberate us from the shells of our history, a poetics of revolution by which to incite, provoke, and disturb.
There are no maps of the unknown; only of the history written in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation, assigned values, interpreted meanings, and created ourselves through our anchorages of civilization, a prochronism whose purpose is to buffer the shock of change and shield identity from loss.
Yet it is this history and memory we must escape to create ourselves anew as we wander this wilderness of mirrors and of echoes, a labyrinth of shifting paths which leads both inward to our true selves and outward to other peoples and to their different truths and possibilities of becoming human.
Our senses are transducers through which we change energy into messages and topologies of reality; it is this logosphere within which we live and from which we arise and recreate ourselves continually, transcendent and surreal.
Humans are a system for transforming things into ideas.
So also do we transform our world and each other by our ideas, the real and the ideal reflecting and shaping each other in recursion. And this revolutionary and ongoing coevolution and process of becoming human is the central creative force of existence and of humankind.
The struggle for ownership of identity between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight. And what of the flag of our skin, of our history which we have unwound from ourselves as an endless scroll of signs, as a shroud, a chrysalis?
This I leave to you, to those we claim and who in turn claim us, to others who are different as well as those alike, and to us all.
We may belong to our past, but the future belongs to us.
It is yours and ours, the undiscovered country; use it wisely.
Prolouge
7 juillet 2024 Le drapeau de ma peau
Voici un poème que j'ai écrit à l'origine en français pour un éditeur en Suisse, un pays avec quatre langues officielles dont l'allemand, l'italien et le romanche, et où les conventions de toponymie et autres affaires gouvernementales se déroulent en latin. J'ai souvent utilisé son titre, une expression de ma propre invention, pour faire référence aux politiques identitaires et à la construction d'idées de race et de nationalité en tant qu'identités autorisées et conditions de lutte imposées, aux divisions d'appartenance et à l'altérité d'exclusion, et aux fascismes du sang et du sang. sol.
Dans mes journaux, j'évoque cette idée en termes de pouvoir rédempteur de l'amour, d'interrogation sur ce qui est humain et sur la façon dont nous pouvons répondre à la mort. Je trouve qu'il porte une définition dans son contexte ; voici donc mon poème, et puisse-t-il vous servir d'événement de transformation et de libération de la Porte Rashomon.
Sur une face de cette pièce, le tyran Janus ; la terreur de notre néant, la marchandisation, la falsification, la déshumanisation, l’abjection et le vol de l’âme. Sur son revers le libérateur Janus ; la joie de la liberté totale, la prise du pouvoir, la propriété de soi, l'amour qui nous exalte au-delà des limites de notre chair et la découverte du meilleur de nous-mêmes comme vérités immanentes à la nature et inscrites dans notre chair.
Je suis un faiseur de mal ; nommé d'après le dieu du Chaos, Jay étant une forme de Janus, dieu romain des portes et gardien des portes, du changement, du destin, des débuts et des fins, qui fait face aux deux directions du temps et de l'être à la fois. Ma mère a dit que son inspiration immédiate était la figure de l'anarchie du Dr Seuss en tant que dieu filou dans son livre emblématique de 1957, Le chat au chapeau, et m'a parfois présenté comme Thing One et Thing Two, des êtres dyadiques ou un être à deux formes qui font toujours le contraire de ce qu'on leur dit, des personnages qui font référence aux bouffons de la cour de Lewis Carroll comme des agents de subversion Tweedledum et Tweedledee.
Non Serviam, I Will Not Serve, la déclaration par laquelle le grand héros de Milton lance sa rébellion dans Paradise Lost, un héritage de liberté que ma mère m'a donné comme force d'information, de motivation et de modelage enfermée dans mon nom.
Devenir humain en tant que processus de formation d'identité, de construction de soi ou de personae, qui est le mot désignant un masque de personnage à travers lequel les acteurs parlent dans le théâtre grec classique et qui, je crois, décrit l'identité comme une performance et une structure narrative avec précision, clarté et grande pouvoir explicatif, reste fluide, ambigu, relatif, éphémère et un terrain de lutte primordial.
Qui choisit la manière dont nous devons être définis, les frontières entre nos limites et les possibilités de ce que nous pouvons devenir ?
C'est la première question à poser à propos de toute histoire ; à qui est cette histoire ?
Se faire une idée sur un type de personnes est un acte de violence.
Abandonnons cette revendication et cette nomination, les taxonomies d'identification et les hiérarchies d'appartenance et d'altérité d'exclusion, cette utilisation de la force sociale comme idées de vertu, de beauté, de normalité, d'appartenance, de nation, de violence de nous et d'eux. Car jusqu’à ce que nos frontières deviennent des interfaces, les contours de ces identités font couler le sang.
Lorsque nous avons échappé aux héritages de notre histoire et nous sommes recréés en tant qu’êtres autonomes liés par rien d’autre que nos propres visions et désirs, que sommes-nous devenus et qui sommes-nous alors ?
Celui que nous souhaitons être.
Le drapeau de ma peau
Le temps, la mémoire, l'histoire, l'identité et la révolution de devenir nous-mêmes;
la peau que j'ai échappée dans la transformation serpentine est devenue un drapeau,
mais de quelle nation?
À qui appartient ce royaume de chair que nous partageons?
Ce royaume des sens est à la fois une frontière que nous devons transgresser
de se découvrir et de s'approprier notre liberté et notre être,
et une interface par laquelle nous nous façonnons, force propulsive et génératrice du sublime humain, de vérités écrites dans notre peau.
Nous sommes des êtres interdépendants, vastes et océaniques, exaltés par notre passion au-delà des limites de notre forme mais aussi des individus autonomes qui se créent et se créent au-dessus d'énormes gouffres de temps, sans limites dans nos possibilités de devenir humain mais aussi des formes décrites comme des espaces négatifs de L'une et l'autre.
L'être est une danse de myriades de partenariats, de transformations de messages et de principes d'organisation et de croissance qui sont récursifs, chaotiques, une beauté d'étrangeté et de bizarre, un royaume de Méduse, déesse et monstre.
Il n'y a qu'une seule règle dans la nature; tout va.
Qui autorise et valide les possibilités et les performances de notre identité?
Ne détrônerons-nous pas, ne nous moquerons-nous pas de ces tyrannies de la normalité?
Forgeons un art du feu pour nous libérer des coquilles de notre histoire, une poétique de la révolution pour inciter, provoquer et troubler.
Il n'y a pas de cartes de l'inconnu; seulement de l'histoire écrite sous notre forme de la façon dont nous avons résolu les problèmes d'adaptation, assigné des valeurs, interprété des significations, et nous nous sommes créés à travers nos ancrages de civilisation, un prochronisme dont le but est d'amortir le choc du changement et de protéger l'identité de la perte.
Pourtant, c'est à cette histoire et à cette mémoire que nous devons échapper pour nous recréer en nous promenant dans ce désert de miroirs et d'échos, un labyrinthe de chemins changeants qui mène à la fois vers nous-mêmes et vers d'autres peuples et vers leurs différentes vérités et possibilités. de devenir humain.
Nos sens sont des transducteurs par lesquels nous transformons l'énergie en messages et en topologies de réalité; c'est cette logosphère à l'intérieur de laquelle nous vivons et dont nous surgissons et nous recréons continuellement, transcendante et surréaliste.
Les humains sont un système pour transformer les choses en idées.
De même, nous transformons notre monde et les uns les autres par nos idées, le réel et l'idéal se reflétant et se façonnant mutuellement en récursivité. Et cette coévolution et ce processus révolutionnaires et continus de devenir humain sont la force créatrice centrale de l'existence et de l'humanité.
La lutte pour la propriété de l'identité entre les masques que les autres fabriquent pour nous et ceux que nous fabriquons pour nous-mêmes est la première révolution dans laquelle nous devons tous lutter. Et qu'en est-il du drapeau de notre peau, de notre histoire que nous avons déroulée de nous-mêmes comme un rouleau de signes sans fin, comme un linceul, une chrysalide?
Je vous laisse ceci, à ceux que nous revendiquons et qui à notre tour nous réclament, à ceux qui sont différents ainsi qu'à ceux qui nous ressemblent, et à nous tous.
Nous pouvons appartenir à notre passé, mais l'avenir nous appartient.
C'est le vôtre et le nôtre, le pays inconnu; fais-en bon usage.
And here is my celebration of Chaos:
January 2 2023 Begin We the Festival of Janus
Janus represents the principles of change, duality, transformation, and the interfaces between bounded realms, though we know him now mainly as a god of Chaos through his portrayal in Halloween, episode six of season two, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
He is called the Gatekeeper, a guardian and guide of the soul on our journeys through the myriad possibilities of the multiverse and its limitless futures, roles primary to dreamwork, ecstatic trance, and poetic vision, aligned with the mysteries of Orpheus, Asclepius, and Dionysius, whose role as god of beginnings and endings echoes the primary role of Ganesha as opener of the ways. Janus shares with Saturn or Chronos his role as Old Father Time.
Plutarch describes Janus in his Life of Numa; “For this Janus, in remote antiquity, whether he was a demi-god or a king, was a patron of civil and social order, and is said to have lifted human life out of its bestial and savage state. For this reason he is represented with two faces, implying that he brought men's lives out of one sort and condition into another.”
Ovid writes of Janus in his Fasti; “But what god am I to say thou art, Janus of double-shape? for Greece hath no divinity like thee. The reason, too, unfold why alone of all the heavenly ones thou doest see both back and front.”
My name, Jay, is a form of the name Janus, though also derived from the Latin name Gaius, “to be joyful”; if we are an unfolding of our ancestor’s actions, intentions, dreams, visions, and wishes, part of the history which possesses us as DNA and inhabits us as stories, I imagine being named for the god of Chaos, time, and poetic vision, a name which also suggests states of rapture and exaltation, may have been a shaping force in becoming who I am, a kind of spell cast by my mother who named me so.
Who did my parents want me to become? When as a child I asked my mother why she named me Jay, she said; “It means new beginnings. I wanted you to know you can do anything, be whomever you choose, right now, every moment, every time you hear your name. And whatever uniqueness and truth you create will be just as right and true as anyone else’s.” She said her immediate inspiration was Dr. Seuss’ figure of anarchy as a Trickster god in The Cat in the Hat, and at times introduced me as Thing One and Thing Two.
When I asked my father as a teenager, he said; “Who is Jay? You tell me.”
Of myself in my chosen role as a Bringer of Chaos, transgressions of the Forbidden, violations of normality, and liberation from the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue I have written often, also of Chaos as the adaptive range of systems and both destructive and creative forces of nature, of fracture, disruption, delegitimation, and the collapse of order, law, and authority as revolutionary struggle. In the context of the Festival of Janus I mention here that it can also become, as Foucault described, a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.
His startling image of wholeness as a dyadic figure with two faces which may be assigned to any oppositional forces, masks of comedy and tragedy from which developed theatre and the idea of the soul or individual personal self as personae, roles we play, from ritual performances in times of great peril and threat to discover and create paths forward into the future, but is also an image of the masculine and feminine sides of a whole person. In Janus we have at the origin and heart of our civilization a figure and festival of counternarrative and subversion of patriarchy and authorized identities of sex and gender, and a celebration of idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty which also interrogates them. Go ahead, frighten the horses.
Herein we may perform those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and create and discover our own truths through performance of our best selves.
To begin our Festival of Janus at the birth of the new year, I invite you to play a game with me; a Game of Possible Selves. Choose six characters you would like to perform, traditionally in the Roman Festival of Janus three male and three female though any will do, as nature has but one rule; anything goes. If nothing else, randomizing identities as theatre and creative play will tell you what you value, and who you should be looking for in partners as instruments through whom we create ourselves. Write them down, cast a six sided dice, and let the dice decide who you will be today. No matter who you perform, you will still have five identities in reserve, and tomorrow is another day.
That one twelfth of our year is dedicated to Janus as January, figure of the new year, should tell us of his importance in our civilization, and the centrality of Chaos, transformation, rebirth, and change to our historical constructions of identity and its legacies which we drag behind us as shadow selves, like an invisible reptilian tail.
Here I think of patriarchy and sexual terror, white supremacist terror and the epigenetic trauma of slavery and the Holocaust, divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
And in the context of the shadows of historical and systemic inequalities and injustices, atavisms of instinct and fear weaponized in service to power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, the liminal time of the new year during the month of January, sacred to change and the emergence of the new like a serpent sloughing off its old skin, is a gate of entrance into the world for hope, that final curse or gift of Pandora, in the midst of our public trauma and grieving since the capture of America by the Fourth Reich in the Stolen Election of 2016 and the final act of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump in the January 6 Insurrection, and the endless chasms of darkness, subversions of our democracy, perversions of our values, and violations of our ideals we have all endured since.
For the principle of change offers us a transformational moment of decision in which all things are possible, and we may escape the consequences of our histories in creating ourselves anew.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
Here follow excerpts from some of the people who have written beautifully of Janus.
As written on the Anderson Lock website; “The ancient Romans had a specific god who held the key, so to speak, to the metaphorical doors or gateways between what was and what is to come—the liminal space of transitioning out of one period of time and into something new.
In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of doors, gates, and transitions. Janus represented the middle ground between both concrete and abstract dualities such as life/death, beginning/end, youth/adulthood, rural/urban, war/peace, and barbarism/civilization.
Janus was known as the initiator of human life, transformations between stages of life, and shifts from one historical era to another. Ancient Romans believed Janus ruled over life events such as weddings, births, and deaths. He oversaw seasonal events such as planting, harvests, seasonal changes, and the new year.
According to Roman mythology, Janus was present at the beginning of the world. As the god of gates, Janus guarded the gates of heaven and held access to heaven and other gods. For this reason, Janus was often invoked first in ancient Roman religious ceremonies, and during public sacrifices, offerings were given to Janus before any other deity. In fact, there is evidence that Janus was worshipped long before many of the other Roman gods, dating all the way back to the time of Romulus (the founder and first ruler of Rome).
And if you’ve ever wondered how the month of January got its name, you have Janus to thank. As the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, Janus is the namesake of January, the first month of a new year.
Why does Janus have two faces? What is unusual about the god Janus is his iconic image. As the god of transitions and dualities, Janus is portrayed with two faces—one facing the past, and one facing the future. He also holds a key in his right hand, which symbolizes his protection of doors, gates, thresholds, and other separations or openings between spatial boundaries. In ancient Rome, the symbol of the key also signified that a traveler has come to find safe harbor or trade goods in peace.”
As written by Caillan Davenport in The Conversation; “January 1 can be a day of regret and reflection – did I really need that fifth glass of bubbly last night? – mixed with hope and optimism for the future, as we make plans to renew gym memberships or finally sort out our tax files. This January ritual of looking forward and backward is fitting for the first day of a month named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings.
Doorkeeper of the heavens
In Roman mythology, Janus was a king of Latium (a region of central Italy), who had his palace on the Janiculum hill, on the western bank of the River Tiber. According to the Roman intellectual Macrobius, Janus was given divine honours on account of his own religious devotion, as he set a pious example for all his people.
Janus was proudly venerated as a uniquely Roman god, rather than one adopted from the Greek pantheon. All forms of transition came within his purview – beginnings and endings, entrances, exits, and passageways. The name Janus (Ianus in Latin, as the alphabet had no j) is etymologically related to ianua, the Latin word for door. Janus himself was the ianitor, or doorkeeper, of the heavens.
The cult statue of Janus depicted the god bearded with two heads. This meant that he could see forwards and backwards and inside and outside simultaneously without turning around. Janus held a staff in his right hand, in order to guide travellers along the correct route, and a key in his left to open gates.
War and Peace
Janus is famously associated with the transition between peace and war. Numa, the legendary second king of Rome, who was famed for his religious piety, is said to have founded a shrine to Janus Geminus (“two-fold”) in the Roman Forum, close to the Senate House. It was located in the place where Janus had bubbled up a spring of hot boiling water in order to thwart an attack on Rome by the Sabines.
The shrine was an enclosure formed by two arched gates at each end, joined together by walls to form a passageway. A bronze statue of Janus stood in the middle, with one head facing towards each gate. According to the historian Livy, Numa intended the shrine; “as an index of peace and war, that when open it might signify that the nation was in arms, when closed that all the peoples round about were pacified.”
The gates of Janus are said to have stayed closed for 43 years under Numa, but rarely remained so thereafter, although the first emperor Augustus boasted that he closed the shrine three times. Nero later celebrated his conclusion of peace with Parthia by minting coins showing the gates of Janus firmly shut.
Happy New Year
Romans believed that the month of January was added to the calendar by Numa. The association between Janus and the calendar was cemented by the construction of 12 altars, one for each month of the year, in Janus’s temple in the Forum Holitorium (the vegetable market). The poet Martial thus described Janus as “the progenitor and father of the years”.
From 153 BC onwards, the consuls (the chief magistrates of the Republic) took office on the first day of January (which the Romans called the Kalends). The new consuls offered prayers to Janus, and priests dedicated spelt mixed with salt and a traditional barley cake, known as the ianual, to the god. Romans distributed New Year’s gifts of dates, figs, and honey to their friends, in the hope that the year ahead would turn out to be sweet, as well as coins – a sign of hoped-for prosperity.
Janus assumed a key role in all Roman public sacrifices, receiving incense and wine first before other deities. This was because, as the doorkeeper of the heavens, Janus was the route through which one reached the other gods, even Jupiter himself. The text On Agriculture, written by Cato the Elder, describes how offerings would be made to Janus, Jupiter, and Juno as part of the pre-harvest sacrifice to ensure a good crop.
So if you’re feeling caught between two worlds this January 1, why not head outside and celebrate Roman-style?”
As written by Michael Shanks of the Janus Initiative, which he defines as “archaeological perspectives on understanding and managing change and innovation”; “Our case is that being mindful of the past, hindsight, is essential to being able to act for the future. Looking back, researching and exploring, that we might be better prepared for uncertain futures.
This is not about history – knowing what happened in the past. JANUS is about an archaeological sensibility – connecting (what remains of) the past with the future through our experiences and actions now.
Janus? Janus was the Roman divinity associated with transition, passages from pasts through to futures, windows, doorways and thresholds.
Simultaneously looking back and forward, Janus connects pasts and futures, gaining perspective with hindsight and foresight, finding orientation now, not by telling the story of the past, not by predicting what is to come, but by seeking relationships, passages, flows from the past, ways the past lingers to haunt, hinder, and inspire the building of the future.
The scene offers insights into relationships between temporality and agency – our capacity to matter, to make things happen – exactly the themes we are foregrounding in our initiative.”
The power of story: A quick recap of the story in needed to understand the connections.
Cronos (Kronos, Cronus) was the youngest of the first generation of Titans, giant offspring of primordial Ouranos (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). Ouranos offended Gaia by imprisoning some of their younger offspring and she sought revenge by persuading Cronos to move against his father. With a stone sickle, gift from Gaia, Cronos castrated Ouranos and threw the bloody parts into the ocean, from which Venus (Aphrodite) emerged.
His actions haunted Cronos. Fearing that one of his own offspring would turn against him, he ate them all as they were born, devouring a threatening future. His wife Rhea eventually put a stop to this when she hid Zeus and tricked Cronos to swallow a stone instead, wrapped as a new-born. Zeus returned in his maturity, poisoned Cronos, and defeated him and his Titans with the help of his brother and sister gods, vomited up alive because of the poison emetic.
Cronos was regularly been associated with Chronos, a divine personification of time. He cut and severed Ouranos, marking the rift between heaven and earth, a gash in eternity. The scythe or sickle has become symbol of the grim reaper harvesting mortal lives.
Dramatis Personae
Romano draws Chronos holding an Ouroboros. Serpent devouring its own tail, a symbol since at least antiquity of eternal return, rebirth, reincarnation. The divinity is Aion, cyclical time, unbounded, the circuit of the heavens represented by the Zodiac, the seasons, in contrast to the divisible, empirical and sequential time of Cronus, cut into past, present, and future. Aion is a god of the ages, of saecula, circling generations of life.
Aion, god of the ages, is within the circuit of the Zodiac, (an eternal mobius strip) between a summer and winter tree. In front is Gaia, Mother Earth, with four children, the four seasons.
The winged figure is usually taken to be Nike, Victoria, holding out the winner’s crown at the moment of success. But another interpretation is possible.
This is a scene from the great conflicts between the Titans and the Gods. With Gaia’s help Cronos has seized the opportunity and cut open the heavens. He too will fall when Zeus in turn seizes his opportunity, poisons Cronos and releases the Olympians to overthrow the Titans. Son of Cronos, or perhaps brother, the god of seizing an opportunity to act is Kairos. And Kairos is usually depicted as a winged youth, and as weighing opportunities in a scale balanced on a knife edge.
Kairos is time to act, or not. A central principle of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, Kairos is a passing instant when an opening appears to be driven through (there are links with shooting an arrow and passing a weaving shuttle through warp and weft). The key to agency, one’s capacity to achieve, to realize potential, is the ability to adapt to and take advantage of changing, complex and contingent circumstances. This is Kairos.
Janus stands by, a horrified witness. Romano has modeled the god(dess) on Aphrodite, who had been born of the castrated heavens, Cronos cutting eternity. Janus is involved, part of the many stories woven in and through this group of four characters or principles, seeing the interconnections between eternity and event, birth and mortality, persuasion and action, planning and opportunity, the return of the past to take vengeance.
Time, decision-making, persuasion, opportunity, action.
This cast of characters and principles, this dramatis personae, takes us into an allegorical world of time eternal, cyclical, and eventful, of perception, persuasion, decision and action.
Connections of past through to future potential, the intermingling of hindsight, insight, foresight: these are also the core of an archaeological sensibility and imagination.
Imagine a person from another time in human history, from any region, race, gender, or religion. No matter the place, time, or status, you will find differences from your present situation. However, one thing remains unchanged: the need to begin again, to follow new paths and to move forward.
If we look at it through the beliefs of ancient times, we realize that the concept of new beginnings is present throughout the history of human beings. For this reason, I explain the relationship between new beginnings and mythology. Because by looking at the past we can better understand the future.
In the ancient Rome, they did not escape this need either. They had their own god to whom they used to pray to give them hope and protect their efforts to start afresh.”
Ritual of Janus as a god of Chaos in "Halloween", the sixth episode of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; note the ritual use of masks of our true or possible selves in Halloween trick or treating in connection with Chaos as a sacred path in pursuit of the truth of ourselves
https://buffy.fandom.com/wiki/Halloween
Peter Gabriel - Games Without Frontiers
https://theconversation.com/who-was-janus-the-roman-god-of-beginnings-and-endings-86853
https://scribalo.com/en/scribablog/new-beginnings-and-mythology-janus-the-romans-god/
https://mshanks.com/2020/06/02/janus-hindsight-and-foresight-creative-pragmatics/
https://www.andersonlock.com/blog/god-doors/
https://witchesofthecraft.com/2019/01/02/about-the-roman-god-janus/
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/janus-words-sanction-and-cleave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus
https://www.lionsroar.com/the-wisdom-in-the-dark-emotions/
https://truthout.org/articles/letting-go-wisdom-from-our-grief/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=7167dc0d-5060-4f49-8029-ff773aaf5072
https://that-which.com/schopenhauer-on-death-and-philosophy/?fbclid=IwAR2P_77zMkKZL3lBUNOZVwVxJGtpjbwuUxvlod0xlzVYDgfmGyySmA2e6ng