Barry Jenkins: 'Moonlight' (2016)

Barry Jenkins, Moonlight (2016), based on Tarell Alvin McCraney's In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue (2003). Set mostly in Florida (plus Atlanta) and divided into three sections (Little, Chiron, Black), Moonlight, made on a relatively tiny budget, is intensely poetic, much more like an independent international film than a traditional American Hollywood movie. 

Moonlight can be approached from multiple angles, including race/ethnicity, poverty, sexual orientation, gender roles, cultural attitudes, existential philosophy and more. However, because so many of these have already been discussed elsewhere, here I'd like to consider another theme of the film: isolation vs. connection. 

Maybe because it's set along the Atlantic Ocean side of Florida, I think of Howard Thurman (1899-1981) when he was growing up just a little north of where Moonlight is mostly set, but during the Jim Crow era. In Moonlight, the main character (Chiron) is isolated by circumstance: his mother is a menace, school brutes are a menace, he is falling through the social cracks; with Howard Thurman, white society at large was the principal menace. 

In order to survive and function, let alone thrive, one must be connected to another person or other people. Howard's father died when he was very young, but, despite being poor, other relatives helped him enough that he could begin his own arc; for him, libraries (and librarians) became his bedrock for hope. Once he began reading in earnest, and with the kindness of strangers, he was able to become his own person, despite the obstacles of Jim Crow. Howard Thurman went on to become a mystical philosopher, education and civil rights leader, author and co-founder of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco in 1944, still in existence.

Chiron, in Moonlight, has to go it more alone, but it is mainly because of the intervention and kindness of characters like Juan, Teresa and Kevin that he can nurture a modest hope for his own arc. 

Social isolation is such a tragic, fearful position to be in that even small gestures of kindness are magnified. 

Still, given how much his school seems to neglect him, and his mother, I wish Chiron could have found refuge in a library, where he would have found additional support in the same way that Howard Thurman had. But he does, at least, find some connection, and that's a start.

Because the US (and much of the rest of the world) still has so many fearful hangups about sexual orientation, specifically, and sexuality in general, Moonlight is highly important not only as its own story, but for its ability to boost consciousness raising and awareness, especially unto those feeling isolated, letting all who see it know they are not alone in the world, no matter how restricted their initial life situation may be. It is a profound reminder, too, for those who are socially well-connected, to reach out and be kind, to welcome those who are feeling left out in the cold. 

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India

Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt's Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011) works nicely in tandem with Thurman's wondrous autobiography. Some of the same ground is covered, often from a different angle, with the core of this book built around Thurman and the four-person delegation from the United States that extensively and intensely criss-crossed India in the mid-1930s. The parallels between Jim Crow in the USA, British imperial administration in greater India, the caste system and various other forms of socio-economic power interactions were clear, as were emerging methods utilized to change things up. Howard Thurman and his companions did their part in seeding the ground for change, embracing "interculture" and ahimsa, or "nonviolence" (a word Mahatma Gandhi is credited with having "coined" in 1920), a pragmatic and also transcendent long-term approach that begins with consciousness raising.   

"The delegation visited more than fifty cities during their tour . . . There were at least 265 speaking engagements in the 140 days the tour was in Asia, with Thurman speaking at 135 of the engagements" plus "interviews with [Rabindranath] Tagore and Gandhi." (Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India, pages 86-87).  The latter was the first meeting of Gandhi with an African American delegation, and it was a resounding success. 

During the Second World War (in 1944), Howard Thurman and his family moved to San Francisco and worked to build up the Church for the Fellowship of All People, an integrated, intercultural organization. Until then, there had been very few integrated religious bodies in the USA -- besides small groups in San Francisco, Oberlin, Philadelphia and Detroit, little success had yet been realized in breaking down race-perception barriers. "The need for whites and blacks [and others] to work together was precisely to overcome the abstractness of race relations lived in separate segregated worlds" (page 157). This was a new beginning at changing the status quo.

Reaching beyond the status quo is one of the many aspects of Howard Thurman's action-worldview that resonates with me. I am in accord with his thinking and his hopes, seeking to live, inspire and seed the opposite of what he called "The Tragedy of Dull-Mindedness."

Today's Rune: Flow. 

Howard Thurman (1899-1981): With Head and Heart ~ Take II

Yeah! I finished a first read-through of With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (originally published in 1981). There's so much in this book that another round of reading it will be necessary.

One interesting facet: how Howard Thurman traveled around, extensively, despite the obstacles of segregation in the USA, and cultural-political barriers globally. It hearkens to the adage: If there's a will, there's a way; if there's no will, there's no way - a truth that applies to so much in the way of human activity.

Thurman traveled by foot, by rail, by ship, by plane and by automobile. Incidental details of these modes of travel are woven throughout With Head and Heart. And then there's always the matter of where to stay, and how to stay alive and thrive during each journey.

Howard Thurman (Boston University http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/web/howard-thurman/howard-thurman-collection)

While reading With Head and Heart, it came upon me that I have become significantly more attuned to things over the years (or possibly I've become more self-aware of this attunement). In Texas, for example, I've become more immediately attuned to shifts in air quality  -- not only from day to day but also from space to space. Likewise, I've become more attuned to what other people are attuned to, interested in, driven by, fascinated with. 

Besides travel, I'm attuned to Howard Thurman's interweaving of fiscal matters, funding, the costs of moving around, taking up new responsibilities while holding personal space as sacred. Thurman was always attuned to how one must pay for things along the way -- and he took none of it for granted. In fact, he was very imaginative and resourceful.

And a third facet in With Head and Heart that I'm attuned to is Thurman's awareness of both differences and unities. From an early age, he witnessed doctrinal differences between Baptists and Methodists in his home town in Florida (Daytona Beach and thereabouts) -- silly distinctions that often came down to such matters as sprinkle baptism or full immersion baptism. And worse, Howard had to contend with the social damnation by narrow-minded Christians of people like his father, who chose not to participate in Christian rites. Thurman came to think of these differences and prejudices as absurd, and really he developed a spirit similar to that of today's Pope Francis and Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama.

And so, a real mentor for us now, Thurman was able to come to a meeting of the minds and spirits among a diverse group of people, whether Cree and Chippewa in Canada, or Muslims in Nigeria, or Jews and Buddhists in California, or Hindus, Buddhists and Christians in India, or secular people, agnostics and atheists anywhere -- he could meet them all, and did. The unities of people are real: we are mortals, we think and feel, eat and sleep, have a limited time here -- and so on. Good stuff.

Today's Rune: Harvest. 

Howard Thurman (1899-1981): With Head and Heart ~ Take I

Just about finished reading With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (originally published in 1981). What a life! What an arc!  

He's looking up and seeing Halley's Comet in the year 1910. Around the same time, a traveling salesman is peddling "comet pills" to save you from comet-crashing-infernos. . .

Hungry, resourceful and often on the move, Howard makes friends with librarians wherever he goes -- and reads as many books as he can at all times when not writing his own. Like Frederick Douglass, he is propelled by the initial ability to read, and thereby to ponder, and thereby to kick out the jams, and thereby to bust another move way on down the line. . .

He outflanks segregation time and again, raising consciousness -- his own and that of those he encounters -- along the way.

Thanks to one act of kindness by a good Samaritan, he's able to take a train with luggage and some food . . . on to Morehouse College in Atlanta; later to Rochester, New York and Roanoke, Virginia; King's Mountain, North Carolina; Oberlin, Ohio; Howard University, District of Columbia; to India and meetings with poets, writers and Gandhi (in 1936, mind you); to San Francisco and the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in the very midst of the Second World War; to Boston University; to the Middle East and Africa; and back to San Francisco . . . almost all this time during the segregated/American Apartheid/Jim Crow years . . .

Thurman's thinking-journeying is advanced and inspiring for any age or time -- including the 21st century. 

"In my mind, religion had become so identified with sectarianism, and its essence so distorted by it, that I felt a need to bring to bear all the resources of mind and spirit on the oneness of the human quest. . . the human situation, the human predicament, the human plight" (1st edition, pages 199-200).

You read this, you want to do things, and communicate them.

Today's Rune: Fertility.