Why?

I was surprised when I found Wu Tang Clan's "36 Chambers" in the 99 cent record section. Then I remembered I was in a rock record store. Needless to say I bought it. A few days later, I was walking by Fredrick Douglass boulevard around 134 st. when I heard my favorite track from that record coming out of a little joint. Only now do I understand the beauty of that conjunction.

After reading Douglass' memoir, I listen to "Can It Be All So Simple" differently. 

The memoir's ending feels rushed, a bit exhausted, just as I imagine Douglass feels after all he has done. The last paragraph of the narration is so unlike Douglass' solemn, ceremonial tone that it doesn't feel like the ending of the story. The reader does not sense closure. The ending is not happy, I feel. When Douglass says in his last paragraph, "The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down." He reminds the reader of how much more work is yet to be done. Douglass learned that official freedom does not mean credibility, or equality. I am reminded by Douglass' remark of the times he wished he hadn't been born, of how his circumstance made his life so tough, just because he was born of black parents. 

The song's title "Can It Be All So Simple" is a straightforward longing for tranquility. In the song RZA and Ghost talk about the hardships they had to pass while growing up. The arbitrariness of being born to your family, social class, ethnicity, is the factor that sadly determines in a good part, your live's fate. Why can't it be simpler for us? They asked in the 1990's. Douglass asked the same question a century before. 

This book leaves me with a distaste for humanity, but also a certain drive toward bettering the situation. I firmly believe that an imposed condition as is skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc should not be the limiting agent of a life. I know that an equitable world is but a dream. Because I do not recur to faith in order to justify monstrosity, and because I believe there is no true justification for it, all I am left with is the book in my hand, the record on my table, and the thought that perhaps art, by transforming temporary disgrace into eternal beauty, is the only thing that makes everything worth it. 

In the words of Walt Whitman:

"Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,

But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another

(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,

Yet out of that I have written these songs)."