Letter from the editor
By Dan Mahoney
Since I began thinking about the 50th anniversary issue of the magazine and how to honor the past while looking toward the future, I’ve had the image of the Roman deity Janus in my mind. Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. In sculptures, drawings, and coins, Janus is depicted as having two faces looking simultaneously to the past and future.
I was introduced to Janus by the art film distribution company Janus Films. Starting in the early 1950s, Janus brought an amazing array of international films to audiences in the US, including the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, François Truffaut, and Yasujiro Ozu, among so many others.
Anniversaries are times we look to the past and the future. We look at where we were and where we are going. One purpose of an anniversary is to congratulate ourselves on making it this far. Huzzah, COA! Onward we go!
When my spouse and I were in Cuba, we happened to catch a televised speech by Fidel Castro. I should say, we caught some of a speech by Castro, as the entire thing lasted four hours and we had a whole country to see.
Chantal Akerman’s film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, distributed by Janus Films, features one of the most amazing scenes I’ve ever seen. The lead character, Jeanne Dielman, mixes and shapes ground beef into a meatloaf in real time. I’ll just say that again, she mixes and shapes ground beef into a meatloaf in real time. The whole thing is glorious.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger says, “If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.” I keep looking for a third face on Janus, one that signifies the present.
For a preteen a year is endless, but for an octogenarian 50 years passes in the blink of an eye. COA is moving into exciting territory: new faces, new buildings, new energy—don’t blink or you might miss it.
Beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings is a whole lot of territory for a single god to cover, but the Romans were nothing if not ambitious.
The directors of films distributed by Janus extended time in ways most directors in the US did not. Movies in the US seemed to want to crush time into a ball, to make two hours feel like 20 minutes.
Our host told us El Comandante regularly gave long speeches venerating the Cuban Revolution. He loved taking his audiences back to 1959, but was unable to register the boredom on their faces in 2000. For Castro, the present and future were in a constant state of surrender to the revolutionary past.
As Darron points out, COA founding president Ed Kaelber said: Any college that is not constantly seeking new ways of doing things is only half alive. I don’t know if it’s the natural beauty of campus, my smart and funny colleagues, the bracing wind off of the Atlantic, or the amazing students, but being at COA, I’ve never felt more alive.
The film Jaws came out in 1975, the same year as Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The amazing scene in Jaws where Quint, Brody, and Hooper sing after showing each other their scars, lasts as long as it takes Jeanne Dielman to shape a meatloaf..
There are wonderful pieces of writing in this issue of the magazine that deal with time and the challenges of being present: A conversation with Okwui Okpokwasili, College of the Ecstatic, and Today is not special. I hope you devour each of them.
According to Eleanor Roosevelt, the coolest first lady in history, “Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why we call it ‘The Present.’”
If Janus were to have a third face—a face for the present—I’d want it to look like COA emeritus faculty in philosophy John Visvader. For many years John led weekly Tai Chi sessions at COA. On certain mornings, in the midst of a chaotic 10-week term, there would be an oasis of calm movement happening in the center of campus. As he led these sessions, John would repeat the phrase: make it delicious…make it delicious…make it delicious… Dan
