I recently came across the following quote by psychotherapist and author Francis Weller, and it spoke to me at a deep level.
Because of this, the photo at right seems like an appropriate one to use to accompany Weller's words. It's a self portrait I took when recently down by the Mississippi River, close to my home in south Minneapolis.
The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.
How much sorrow can I hold? That's how much gratitude I can give.
If I carry only grief, I'll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I'll become saccharine and won't develop much compassion.
Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps makes compassion possible.
This was the weekend that climate change, in California, stopped being about the future. The weekend that the idea that COVID-19 was worse than climate change, or fascism was worse than climate change, disappeared. The experts, of course, had known this for some time. But by the point August turned into September, the drumbeat of California’s environmental anomalies had grown so horrid and relentless that not even the professionals could stay detached. Way back, a lifetime ago, on Sept. 3, Daniel Swain, UCLA’s extreme-weather climate scientist who’s made a name from himself by tweeting, in plain language, just what the hell is going on, wrote, “This *gesturing wildly and in every direction* is utterly exhausting.”
Still, through Friday the 4th and into Saturday the 5th, Swain tried his professional best to keep his readers up to date on the all-time record high temperatures in a staggering number of California cities and the unheard-of airlift rescue of 200 people from the Creek Fire surrounding Mammoth Lake. But by Saturday evening, his emotional and lexicographical reserves were growing thin. “Yeah, it is almost literally unbelievable, but I’ve been saying that a lot lately,” he wrote while commenting how the Creek Fire had exploded to more than 100,000 acres even before it reached the part of the Sierra where, due to climate change, bark beetles killed millions of trees.
For a moment early Sunday morning, he appeared to get his vocabulary and mojo back: “Active pyrocumulonimbus ("fire thunderstorm") activity occurred through night – resembling volcanic eruption . . .”
But by 8 a.m. he’d exhausted his vocabulary and himself: “These are getting harder and harder to write.”
The stakes had shifted; the essential subject-object dynamic changed. The earth – at least the part of it that is California – was no longer a backdrop for our actions, the set of our play. It had become the diva, the star of our horrible drama, the villain demolishing cascades of plans for all of us little specks hubristic enough to believe we could still make them.
Image 1: The Bidwell Bar Bridge surrounded by flames of the North Complex fire – Lake Oroville, California, September 9, 2020. (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images) Image 2: California wildfire – 2020. (Photo: Photographer unknown) Image 3: Wildfires in California's Butte County – 2020. (Photo: AP/Noah Berger) Image 4: A California forest fire in 2018. (Photo: Kellan Hendry)
. Where does the time go? . . . I meant to write this post much sooner than now! And yet here we are, and so here I go . . .
The cover story of the July issue of Dance Magazine celebrates Calvin Royal III, a dancer I've come to greatly admire.
In her piece entitled “A Royal Arrival: The Singular Elegance of American Ballet Theatre's Calvin Royal III,” Marina Harss writes, in part, the following about Royal's dance style.
Royal – tall, lanky, with a silken, elegant way of moving and a gentle and open stage manner – would seem ideally suited to play Romeo [groundbreakingly paired with Misty Copeland's Juliet]. There is a quiet persuasiveness to his dancing. He doesn't show off. Instead, he imbues each movement with an aura of beauty and lyricism. As Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director of the American Ballet Theatre (ABT), puts it, “Calvin has an inner light.” . . . His ascent [in the dance world] has been gradual, even painstaking at times. You get the feeling he has earned every role, every opportunity through determination and the integrity of his dancing, but without ever losing that grace that makes him such a joy to watch onstage. He is hungry without being driven by ambition.
Harss also makes the following beautiful observation on how the professional and personal aspects of Royal's life come together in a very special way.
The poetry in Royal's dancing is related to his deep, subtle musicality; music flows through him. It's not surprising that his partner, ABT pianist Jacek Mysinski [pictured with Royal at left], is a musician. Their work spills over into their downtime; Mysinski practices at home, and they talk about the ballets in the rep. When Mysinski is playing from the pit during a performance, Royal can feel his presence, he says: “It's almost like having him at my side, almost like a partner.”
Interestingly, the metaphor of light in relation to Calvin Royal III was used by the dancer himself, as quoted in Gia Kourlas' October 2019 New York Timespiece on Royal in the lead role of George Balanchine’s Apollo. (above).
“For Calvin,” writes Kourlas, “the ballet – which Balanchine considered to be his turning point as a choreographer – resonates with his own artistic journey. 'It’s this young god that goes from adolescence to stepping into his light,' says Calvin. 'As a dancer that’s something that I see for myself: I feel like I’m really just stepping into my own domain and embracing that.'”
Following, with added images and links, is more from Dance Magazine's recent cover story on Calvin Royal III.
Royal didn't get his start in ballet until age 14, at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School in St. Petersburg, Florida. Before that, he had been a serious piano student. It was his grandmother Linda, a social worker and a lover of classical music, opera and dance, who first encouraged his artistic tendencies. When he was 10, she bought him a Yamaha electric keyboard for Christmas. “I'll never forget it,” she says. “He called me one Sunday morning and said, 'I want you to listen to something.'” On the other end of the line, he started to play Beethoven's Für Elise. He had learned it by ear.
Royal excelled at his piano studies, but also loved to move. For a few years, he took part in a local production called The Chocolate Nutcracker, which included hip hop, West African and other styles of dance. One of his fellow participants encouraged him to audition for the high school dance program. Without ever having taken a formal dance class, he was accepted.
There was so much to learn, he sometimes felt he might never catch up. “I think it intrigued him that ballet took so much effort,” says Suzanne Pomerantzeff, his main teacher at Pinellas. The intellectual challenge drew him in as much as the physical.
That focus carried him through some difficult times at home. In his sophomore year, he injured his back in a car accident and had to sit out ballet classes for several months, excruciating given he had only just begun to make progress. He would take notes on the side, “visualizing dance in my mind,” as he puts it. Dance became a lifeline, a source of steadiness and hope.
In his junior year, he competed in Youth America Grand Prix, where he was spotted by Lukens and Franco De Vita, of the JKO School. “I was immediately struck by his elegance, his musicality and his coordination,” remembers De Vita, who offered him a scholarship.
After a year in the school and two and a half in ABT II (now the ABT Studio Company), he got into the main company, initially as an apprentice, at 21. He was still getting his technique where he wanted it to be — quick footwork and beats were a challenge for his long, lithe physique. (“I wanted to move like those little guys,” he says, “but it wasn't easy with these legs.”)
But he also wondered whether he fit the typical mold of a principal dancer at the company. “It was only when I came to New York that I started to become more aware of race in ballet,” says Royal. In Florida, his ballet classes had been mixed. In New York City, less so. When he first joined ABT II, he overheard other dancers from the company making snide comments about a fellow African-American dancer there. “Oh, well, I guess they needed a black girl,'” he heard one of them say.
He began to wonder whether he might never be given the chance to prove himself as a leading man by McKenzie and the rest of the artistic staff. “Will they see me as Romeo or Albrecht? Not only because I'm black, but also because I'm gay?”
At the time, he says, the company culture was different: “There was this sense of machismo, and this idea that the guys had to look sort of like football players.” Ethan Stiefel, José Manuel Carreño and other powerhouses in that vein were company stars. Just a few years earlier, in 2003, the company had put out a video, Born to Be Wild, that depicted its male dancers as testosterone-driven guys who rode motorcycles and posed as matadors.
Since that time, much has changed. Fewer international stars come through ABT; a new generation of home-bred principals has risen to the top, and they are anything but cookie-cutter. (Only one, however, is black: Misty Copeland [pictured with Royal at left].) Rigid notions about what Romeo or Siegfried should look like have finally begun to relax, to the benefit of the dancers.
. Kate Bush’s third album, 1980’s Never for Ever, was the first album I ever bought. And I remember the day as if it were yesterday.
Back then, of course, it was a proper vinyl album that I purchased – from Gunnedah Sound Center, the little record store in my Australian hometown. I was fourteen . . . and it was a Saturday, as I remember walking around the corner to the main street and meeting up with some of my high school friends for lunch at the Monterey Cafe. I also remember keeping my purchase in its brown paper bag, as I didn’t want greasy finger prints all over the album’s strange and fantastical artwork!
Like everyone in Australia at that time who wasn’t living under a rock, I’d known of Kate Bush since her spectacular (and wildly original) emergence onto the music scene two years earlier with “Wuthering Heights.” It was my purchase of Never For Ever in 1980, however, that set me on course to being a lifelong admirer of Kate Bush. I soon added her two earlier albums (The Kick Inside and Lionheart) to my collection and from then on would purchase each new Kate Bush album upon its release – The Dreaming in 1982; Hounds of Love in 1985, my second year of college; The Sensual World in 1989, my second year of teaching; The Red Shoes in 1993, my last year teaching and living in Australia; Aerial in 2005, well into my new life in the U.S.; and 50 Words for Snow in 2011.
My most recent purchase has been Kate Bush Remastered – Part 1, a box set of her first seven albums, beautifully remastered and repackaged.
As I write, I have Never For Ever playing, and I must admit I find it hard to believe it’s been 40 years since its release. But there you have it. To my ears, the album remains strangely and compellingly contemporary. Or perhaps better still, timeless.
Ben Hewitt of Quietus has penned a wonderfully insightful appreciation of the album in which he writes that although it’s not Kate Bush’s most celebrated recording, “it might be her most pivotal – the start of her transition from artist to auteur.”
Following, with added images and links, is an excerpt from Ben Hewitt's Quietus piece on Never For Ever.
_______________________
Despite being overshadowed by what followed, [Never For Ever is] the start of [Kate Bush's] transformation into a one-of-a-kind auteur, the record that made her later, greater glories possible. Tired of EMI’s conveyor-belt approach to rushing out LPs, Bush assumed more ownership in the studio and changed the way she made music forever. “The whole thing was so satisfying,” she enthused in 1980. “To actually have control of my baby for the first time.” Forty years later, it’s no less significant: Never For Ever isn’t Bush’s best album, but it might well be the most important.
By late 1979, Bush was long used to battling EMI. If the label had gotten its way three years previously, her first release would have been the fun-yet-forgettable ‘James And The Cold Gun’; Bush pushed for ‘Wuthering Heights’ instead, and duly became the first woman to hit No 1 with a self-written single. Still, there were only so many fights a 19 year old could win in a sexist, stuffy industry. After the success of 1978’s The Kick Inside EMI demanded an instant follow-up, giving her only weeks to write new material and forcing her to mostly use years-old compositions. Worse, they then backed producer Andrew Powell’s decision to again replace her group, the KT Bush Band, with session musicians. The patchy Lionheart, released nine months after her debut, left her cold. “Though they were my songs and I was singing them, the finished product was not what I wanted,” she later told Keyboard.
Never For Ever would change all that. Draining as it was, Bush’s gruelling Tour Of Life gave her the chance to co-produce 1979’s On Stage EP with engineer Jon Kelly, convincing her they could handle a full album together. She ousted Powell and combined the session hands with her band members, swapping them in and out like rolling subs and making them record take after take. Bush biographer Rob Jovanovic, estimates she spent an unprecedented five months writing and demoing at Abbey Road, honing new and old ideas alike, while keyboardist Max Middleton [has said that] the sessions were so exacting because of her obsession with finding “something nebulous that was hard to pinpoint.” For Bush the autonomy was worth savouring, no matter how painstaking the process. “It was the first step I’d really taken in controlling the sounds,” she said, “and being pleased with what was coming back.”
Listen now and you can still hear that fundamental shift Bush spoke of, the birth of some new, peculiar magic. It starts with ‘Babooshka,’ in which a paranoid wife impersonates a younger woman to test her husband’s roving eye, and ends up destroying her marriage.
It’s a wonderfully wicked premise: Bush based it on the cross-dressing, happy-ever-after hijinks of the traditional English folk ditty ‘Sovay’, but her revamp is less a cheeky romp than a surreal, bitter farce, pitched somewhere between Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tales of the Unexpected. Most startling, though, is the way it sounds, like unearthly Russian folk music: there’s something both archaic and futuristic about its echoey keys, eerie synths and the ethereal strings of her brother Paddy’s balalaika, as uncanny as a Cossack band playing on the Mir space station. Bush sings like two different people, flitting from coy trills to operatic shrieks, and eventually her world comes crashing down in a crescendo of squalling guitars and the Fairlight’s splintering glass.
Then, before the debris has cleared, she drifts into the wispy beauty of ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’, which recounts how Frederic Delius’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby, took down his idol’s compositions from dictation after he was waylaid by syphilis. All the same, if “moody old man” Delius was difficult, there’s no rancour in its shimmering reverie of hazy sitar and bubbling percussion: it hums with the heady buzz of the olde British countryside, and Bush’s vocal has the crisp, bucolic freshness of dandelion and burdock. Both tracks size up the album’s big themes – the push-and-pull of thorny relationships, the constant churn of emotions – but one bursts into thunder, and the other floats on the breeze.
. . . Like ‘Wuthering Heights’, Never For Ever made history: the first No 1 album by a British female solo artist. Yet its significance transcends chart milestones. For the next decade Bush would build on its potential to become, as she joked to Q in 1989, the “shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet.” Whereas her first three albums were squeezed into two-and-a-half years, the subsequent three spanned nine. The next one, the bewildering, avant-garde masterpiece The Dreaming, was the first she produced entirely by herself; soon after, she built a studio-come-sanctuary near her family home and hunkered away to make the flawless Hounds Of Love. Each record introduced new inspirations, new instruments, new collaborators and new methods, all indebted to Never For Ever’s triumph of bloody-minded determination. It doesn’t belong in her imperial period, but that imperial period wouldn’t exist without it.
Author, activist, and former Democratic Presidential candidate Marianne Wiliamson was one of a number of progressive figues who spoke last Sunday at the People's Convention 2020.
Oh, and before anyone gets bent out of shape worrying about this movement taking votes away from Joe Biden in his race against Donald Trump, you can relax. The Movement for a People's Party plans on running its first crop of candidates in the next election cycle.
Following is an excerpt from The Progressive's Christopher D. Cook's report on the August 30 People's Convention.
In a surreal year that has spiraled from surging hopes for a Bernie Sanders presidency to today’s pandemic-hemmed fear and a tight election between centrist Democrats and fascistic Republicans, now may be just the right time for a new political party.
As voters face a dismal “lesser of two evils” election in which a Biden/Harris ticket represents the only alternative to four more years of Trumpian fascism and racism, the Movement for a People’s Party aims to prevent such dreary and sparse choices in the future.
“We’re going to get that neo-fascist out of the White House, and we’re going to build a People’s Party and get to work,” said former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, chair of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, as she culminated the first-ever online creation of a political party on Sunday, August 30, following five hours of webinar speeches melding outrage and inspiration.
On the heels of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, the Movement for a People’s Party (MPP) speakers blasted this “duopoly” for its long bipartisan allegiance to corporate power, oligarchy, and militarism. Speaker after speaker skewered the Democratic Party and its nominee for decades of adherence to corporate and Wall Street interests, military spending increases and war, and its refusal to support Medicare for All, even amid a deadly pandemic.
By press time today, 7,639 convention participants (among viewers and online listeners, who numbered roughly 95,000 on Periscope) had voted to approve the official creation of the People’s Party. As of now, organizers say, there are three active state chapter Twitter pages – Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – and the MPP’s all-volunteer crew is working on building local chapters in other states. Organizers aim to tap local activists across the country to help launch party chapters as well as state-level hubs and nine regional branches.
The stakes of the moment are starkly clear: a raging pandemic, soaring unemployment and poverty, and a fascist and racist president versus a Democratic nominee who has stated, “nothing would fundamentally change.” Against this backdrop, speakers warned against both the continuation of Trump and the perils of a Democratic Party that relies on corporate money and stifles fundamental change.
Actor and activist Danny Glover said “in face of growing fascism . . . when peaceful protesters are viciously attacked . . . if we don’t act now, we’ll find ourselves in a darker moment than we can imagine.”
Cornel West, citing the “marvelous militancy” rising in the streets, called for a “prophetic fight-back that is intersectional,” in a multiracial, multigenerational movement to combat “the neofascist in the White House,” and the “milquetoast neoliberals who keep voting for his military budgets,” along with “unbelievably grotesque levels of inequality.”
From the convention’s opening moments, the rage and hope were palpable. Host Nick Brana, MPP’s national director and a veteran of Bernie’s 2016 campaign, provided a stark lay of the land. “The kind of crises we are facing indicates the two parties can’t deliver what we need,” said Brana in his opening remarks. “There’s a word for that – it’s called a failed state.”
Four days after the convention, Marianne Williamson was a guest on Rising with The Hill's Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. In this interview she discusses her support for the People's Party and her involvement in last Sunday's People's Party Convention. It's well worth watching.
I continue today my series that draws from the wisdom found in the books on my shelf at work. As most reading this would know, my “work,” since September 2018, is that of a palliative careinterfaith chaplain at a hospital just north of the Twin Cities.
(NOTE: To start at the beginning of this series, click here.)
I am an ordinary person working with ordinary people dying ordinary deaths. The people I work with are neither saints nor sages. Although occasionally devout, they are not spiritual adepts. These are the people who have been in line with us at the supermarket or in the next lane at the traffic light; they are our parents, our friends, our spouses, our children, ourselves.
The deaths I observed do not include the sudden, violent ones of attack or accident or the unexpected ones of a heart gone suddenly awry. They are the routinely prognosed deaths of terminal illness, the final fading away of a body riddled with cancer or stilled by a failing essential physiological system: ordinary people dying ordinary deaths.
What I have observed in these deaths, however, and what I have experienced is most certainly not ordinary; it is profound, transcendent, and extraordinary. By and large, people die in solemnity, peace, and transformed consciousness, radiating energy that can only be described as spiritual. Death, as no other moment we encounter in life, announces itself in resplendent silence. Death is so absolute that anyone’s encounter with it is transforming. It provokes the strongest of feelings: terror, sadness, rage, utter fascination, and an interior acknowledgement, an intuitive recognition, of liberation.
William James, the American giant of psychology and philosophy, once observed: “The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main these experiences and those of the world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.”
It is my observation, after having been with hundreds of people who are dying, that death is most definitely one of those points where “higher energies filter in,” where, as Mircea Eliade describes it, there is “a rupture of planes.”
Wisdom traditions have acknowledged this for millennia. In the West, a series of treatises in the Middle Ages referred to as the Ars Moriendi, the “Art of Dying,” set forth a cartography, a map, of the psycho-spiritual transformations of the dying process in Christian religious terms. At that time in that culture, there was confidence in the prevailing worldview that death, like life, is a pilgrimage. Dying persons, at the edge between life and death, were seen as beings glimpsing the mystery in a way that is rarely possible for those of us in the midst of life; they were seen as beings moving more rapidly in their pilgrimage into spiritual dimensions.
In the East, Padmasambhava gave a precise map and explanation of the dying process in the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in the eighth century. The essence of its teaching is that, in the dissolution of dying, we move beyond the personal sense of self and the delusions of ordinary mind. In the gap created by that movement, the nature of Reality is revealed, experienced, and entered into. Buddhist psychology sees dying as the moment when the fundamental nature of mind, the essence of who we are, sometimes called the Ground Luminosity or Clear Light or Immutable Radiance, naturally reveals itself in its vast glory.
These viewpoints contain great wisdom. Our culture – America, at the turn of the third millennium – has lost much of that wisdom and we are only now in the process of regaining it. A profound shift is occurring in human consciousness regarding the perception of death and dying. This shift was ushered in by the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and others who first turned to dying as a legitimate, heretofore unexamined, area of research. The shift gained further impetus from the hospice movement, the AIDS epidemic, and the advancement of medical techniques that increase the probability of near-death experiences. The limited, yet significant, resurgence of spiritual practice in the West as well as a general and evolutionary maturing of human consciousness have also contributed to the emergence of the study of death and dying as a field of research and interest. Unequivocally, death is coming to be seen as our final stage of growth.
. . . It is time for us to observe and to describe the psycho-spiritual transformations normal and inherent in the dying process. . . . [to] describe the experience of dying by exploring the transformations that many of us who work with the dying are beginning to see. These transformations appear to be inherent in the dying process itself.
It has been said that death is a mirror in which all of life is reflected. When we look into this “mirror” of death and dying, we get a clearer image of ourselves, a clearer image of the inherent possibilities of human consciousness. Increasing our insight into what is generally considered to be the unfathomable nature of death and dying – particularly knowledge that reveals dying’s transformative and transcendent power – helps us to understand our fear of death and to decrease this fear. With this insight, we can recognize death as a part of life as beautifully conceived as every other part. We can come closer to accepting the fact that, of course, part of the experience of physical existence involves the organism’s natural design for death. Why do we die? We begin to answer the question simply: because we are alive. In the words of the American sage Ram Dass, “Death is not an outrage.”
A greater understanding of the process of dying, in both its physical and psycho-spiritual dimensions, also will enable us to better guide our loved ones and ourselves through this difficult and profound time. To observe and intimately participate as a dying person’s consciousness becomes one with the Clear Light or the Ground of Being is an act of great value, inexpressible and unforgettable. It is to be pierced by a power beyond our separate sense of self in a moment that sources both compassion and wisdom.
As we deepen our understanding of the entire human journey from conception through death, we deepen our capacity to live more fully and freely, awed by the fact that we are alive. We become different beings through the transformative power of our insight into the dying process. We become larger, more integrated, and somehow more real with this expansion of our horizons and remapping of our boundaries. We enter levels that allow our now deeper being to open to what is – giving and taking, in living and dying, with fewer gimmicks and simpler truth, with less frivolity and more joy, with less suffering and more gratitude.
America has been blessed with the most extraordinary resources, talent, prosperity and power. Yet over the past 40 years, as a nation, we stopped even trying to be good, to be just, to be ethical, to be merciful. Such concepts went from the elements of a moral spine to the quaint platitudes of a discarded righteousness. Who can name one domestic or international policy – backed, as policies are, by the tremendous force of American wealth and power – where the dominant political conversation had anything to do with words such as those? Our collective behavior toward children, the poor, the planet, one another and other people around the world has been and remains so devoid of any sense of moral responsibility that we have landed on a trajectory of chaos that could hardly have led us anywhere other than where we are now.
We were unprepared for this moment because we did nothing to avoid it. We have been so drunk on the pleasures of the material world, so sold on an amoral view of economics and social policy, and so worshipful of the false god of short-term profit. Our entire economic system has been based not on loving one another but on exploiting one another, and not on stewarding the Earth but on raping it, all for the most rapacious goal of extracting whatever money we could. And there, in our collective iniquity, lies the root of our problems, as well as the beginning of their solution, should we have the courage to face it.
As a nation, we have slithered like snakes across the floor to whatever hole where money lay, sacrificing the depths of our own humanity as we did so. And we are surprised now at the various crises among us? What should surprise us is that this didn't happen sooner. Just as the face of a fascistic president could have belonged to anyone, so the consequences of our spiritual malfeasance could have come in any form.
– Marianne Williamson Excerpted from “America's Karma”
September 4, 2020
Chadwick was such an elegant man with great integrity and tremendous talent. He inspired an entire generation to stand up and be king. Honor him by emulating him – show kindness and love to others. Share your talents in ways that impact. Always strive to be a light in the darkness.
– The Russo Brothers, film directors
via Twitter
August 29, 2020
It's been quite some time since the death of someone from the entertainment world has impacted me as much as that of actor Chadwick Boseman, who died Friday at the age of 43.
Since 2016, Boseman had been living with colon cancer, something about which he never spoke publicly. Like many people, I heard about his passing late Friday night on social media. I was both shocked and saddened.
Above: The tweet announcing the death of Chadwick Boseman. It is now the most liked tweet of all time. Twitter confirmed the accolade on its own verified account Saturday, stating: “Most liked Tweet ever. A tribute fit for a King. #WakandaForever.”
Following is a video montage by Variety celebrating the life and legacy of Chadwick Boseman. (NOTE: Sources conflict on whether Boseman was born in 1976 or 1977; the most reliable and relevant sources agree on 1976.)
It was reported last year that Boseman had signed on to a film project in which he would play Yasuke, the Japanese name of a samurai of African origin who fought under Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga during the 1580s. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “the period action drama is based on the historical tale of the only known African to reach the samurai ranking in feudal Japan.” Sadly, Boseman died before filming of Yasuke commenced.
His role as Yasuke would have continued his commitment to portraying historical Black figures of strength and dignity. That commitment is now Boseman's legacy, about which Leslie McLemore writes:
Chadwick was genuine. He was at peace. Like, he knew who he was.
Like, he knew he was here to serve a purpose.
He took on these roles for us because he knew the stories needed to be told. He knew the stories of Black icons, both real and fictional, needed to be told. Because they were all superheroes. Black superheroes who were flawed. Black superheroes who were heroic. Black superheroes who needed their story told.
And Chadwick gave it to us.
This unselfish, genuine Black soul gave us all he had. He gave us his Black soul so these Black souls he either birthed or resurrected could continue to live, and fall, and prosper through the art of cinema.
. . . Black Panther meant everything to us. It meant everything to me. I’ve always love being Black. I'm always proud to be Black. And I didn't think I could love being Black more, or proud to be Black more. But he made me love being Black a little bit more. He made me proud to be Black just a little bit more. When he put on that Black Panther suit, it lovingly made me proud to be Black just a little bit more.
Chad played roles that embodied the true essence of who we are as Black people. He didn’t take the traditional slave roles, or roles where we overcame being black, or the gangster role, or the crackhead role.
Chad embodied the true essence of who we are as Black people. We are lawyers breaking barriers (Marshall). We are talented athletes (42 and The Express). We’re singers and songwriters (Get on Up). Last but certainly not least, we are Super Heroes (Black Panther).
This is the true essence and a mere glimpse of who we are as Black people. To lose a person, a legend, an icon, who embodied these roles to showcase for the world to see, hits home for all of us.
Taken from us so young, but your memories will more than certainly live on. May God take your pain away, and you rest heavenly in peace!
I found myself drawn to Chadwick Boseman and his performances for a number of reasons. One was the gravitas that imbued so much of what he said and did.
In watching and listening to him perform, I was often reminded of Jane Fonda's description of Vanessa Redgrave, whose voice, said Fonda, always “seems to come from some deep place that knows all suffering and all secrets” and who always seems to be “in another reality, working off some secret, magnetic, inner rhythm.”
Of course, in retropect, one can't help but wonder to what extent Boseman's awareness of and private struggle with a terminal illness contributed to his cultivation of – and living from – this “deep place that knows all suffering and all secrets.” We're all capable of creating such places within ourselves, a creation often set in motion by the ways we chose to respond to adversity, tragedy, and loss. Our grounding in and living from such a place can't help but kindle a “secret, magnetic, inner rhythm.” Such a rhythm was brought to life within Boseman, one which both inspired and shone through his performances.
The cultivation and embodiment of such a deep inner rhythm of awareness and empathy is, of course, a choice; the choice to cultivate and embody soul.
Chadwick was (and will forever remain) a beautiful soul.
I also found Chadwick, physically, to be an incredibly beautiful man . . . and a stylish dresser to boot. This can be readily seen in each and every photo of him!
At right, for instance, Chad is pictured with his wife, Taylor Simone Ledward, at the 2019 premiere of 21 Bridges.
Following are a few more pics of the stylishly-dressed Chadwick Boseman.
As a gay man, I not only appreciated Chadwick Boseman's looks and sense of style, but also the queer sensibility with which he imbued the character and story of T'challa / Black Panther.
The film Black Panther is, of course, based on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's revolutionary comic book character of the same name. And as I've noted previously at The Wild Reed, Black Panther, as both a comic book and a film, has a definite queer appeal.
What do I mean by this? . . . Well, I've come to understand that to be “queer” is to attempt to expand or go beyond (in thought, word or deed) the parameters of gender, race, heterosexuality, patriarchy, and other socially-constructed (or manipulated) concepts. Laurence Coleman, in discussing vocalist Dusty Springfield as a queer icon, says that embracing this understanding of queer “denotes a spectrum not only of identity and practice but also inquiry.” Accordingly, to be queer is to be a questioner and subverter of what Michael Warner has called “regimes of the normal,” and not just in matters to do with sexuality and sexual expression, but also in matters of gender, class, and race.
For many people, a definite appeal of Black Panther is that it boldly questions and subverts in entertaining ways, “regimes of the normal” as they relate to gender and race. (It almost did the same with sexuality, as Linda Lang documents here.)
I celebrate the subversion and transformation of any status quo that is oppressive and limiting, and without doubt Black Panther does this. Accordingly, I think it's fair to say that it is queer in the broadest and deepest sense of the word.
Black Panther is also queer in the more focused sense of sexuality. Though not as obvious or resolute as its focus on race and gender, a queer take on sexuality is nonetheless observable, simply and beautifully, in the film's celebration of the impressive physiques of the main Wakandan characters (both male and female); in Black Panther's body-hugging outfit (one that emphasizes the male body's “tools of attraction”); in the sensuous, cat-like way T'challa / Black Panther moves; and in the young King of Wakanda's journey and travails in becoming a hero.
This last observation is important as for many people who do not identify exclusively as heterosexual, the trials of comic book superheroes are often perceived to reflect their own struggle to be who they really are in a world that fears and misunderstands them.
“When I was a teenager,” one gay man told Gerard Jones, author of the book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, “superheroes were obviously about being queer. Clark Kent shedding that hideous [business] suit and shooting into the sky in his tights? What else [could it be about]?”
I think a very similar thing can be said for T'challa, not only in his donning of his tight-fitting Black Panther suit, but in his efforts to move Wakanda out of the shadows so as to openly reveal and share the country's immense riches and unique gifts with the wider world, a move that is both liberating and risky, much like coming out as queer.
I conclude this tribute with images of Boseman in some of his most memorable movie roles and with three short videos, the first being Boseman's February 12, 2018 appearance on Good Morning America, and the second his March 4, 2018 appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. In both interviews, Boseman talks about the significance of Black Panther. The third video is Nicki Swift's look at Boseman's inspiring final social media posts.
Above: Boseman as Jackie Robinson in the 2013 film 42. Boseman died on the observance of Jackie Robinson Day, seven years after his portrayal of Robinson in 42. (NOTE: Jackie Robinson Day is April 15, but was observed this year on August 28 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Above: In the 2016 film Gods of Eygpt, Boseman played Thoth. In responding to the backlash to the whitewashing in the film, Boseman said, “I'm thankful that it [happened], because actually, I agree with it. That's why I wanted to do it, so you would see someone of African descent playing Thoth, the father of mathematics and astronomy, and the god of wisdom.”
Above, right and below: Boseman in what will be remembered and celebrated as his most well-known and influential role, that of King T’Challa of Wakanda, aka Black Panther. Boseman brought this comic book character to vivid and believable life in four of Marvel Studio's popular superhero films: Captain America: Civil War (2016), Black Panther (2018), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: End Game (2019).
Above: Boseman in the 2020 film Da 5 Bloods. Director Spike Lee, in choosing Boseman for the divine-like character of “Stormin” Norman, said, “This character is heroic; he's a superhero. Who do we cast? We cast Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and we cast T'Challa.”
_______________________
Artwork: Adéyínká Adébáyọ̀
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, “I used everything You gave me.”
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
