RZA: You Can Be Wisdom. You Cannot Raise the Dead.

In *The Tao of Wu*, RZA writes that when his mother left the physical world he lost one of his main links to the universe. People speak of an umbilical cord and an etheric cord, an invisible line to your soul, your mother's soul, and all other souls. When one person passes, you really lose something. It is physical and mental. Part of you dies. Lex Fridman asks what he learned about life from her. RZA says he learned life itself: one of eleven children, watching the sacrifice she gave them, which was a gift given to life.

What shook him as he wrote those words was the arrogance of youth. They called him the scientist. He was taught he was a supreme being, and that to be supreme you had to be supreme among other beings. He took it literally. The word God, he says, comes from Greek and meant wisdom, strength, and beauty, which a person can have. The power to control life and death is what you would assume is a God trait. He was reading the Bible, how Jesus brought Lazarus back. Then it was his turn. His mother lay in a hospital bed, air no longer going in or out of her lungs, and he asked where his power was to bring her back. He had none.

So you cannot truly be God, or else God is the wrong word for that power, because it is a translation of wisdom, strength, and beauty. You can be those. You cannot do that. He keeps her in his prayer every day. Beyond thanks, he prays that her name is honored and remembered by the family. He does not know if the world will remember, though in the film *Love Beats Rhymes* he named the school after her, to leave her somewhere in physical space. The pain of that passing, he says, is indescribable. Only people who have lost a mother share a nod. They will not describe it either.

The same death also delivered a strange joy. He realized his own mortality against his immortality, and felt free of an illusion about the body. The physical him, sitting in the chair, will die. He will not say the same of the soul. He can sit there and hum James Brown's "Please, Please, Please," and James Brown will not walk in to sing it. In one sense Brown is still here. In another he is gone.

Fridman says the soul lives through you when you sing it, listen to it, celebrate it, and that civilization continues by celebrating great minds and past work. RZA adds that immortality is not only because somebody sings it. Where is the fire right now? It is in the air. You just have to spark it. It is always there.

Is he afraid of death? No. He is also not trying to see it. All he knows is living, and he loves living. He has read a lot of ancient texts. One teacher he loves is Bodhidharma. Someone asked the master if he was scared of death, and what he would be after. Bodhidharma, who had answers to everything, said he did not know, because he had not died yet. Uncertainty terrifies some people, especially as a child. Fear permeated RZA's early life: horror movies, supernatural things, things he thought he saw, whether projected by his mind or actually there. He still does not know. Life is beautiful, he says. If we have it, we should use it to the last drop.

Quincy Jones told RZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard, when it rains, get wet. RZA was more conservative then: money, women who wanted him, things he could probably have. Quincy was saying enjoy this, it is raining on you. Do not put up the umbrella. Do not go back in the house. Get wet. Experience the moment. He did not take total heed at the time. A couple of years later he took some. He thinks he may have misinterpreted by copying Quincy's example of getting wet instead of his own. Now, he says, he is getting wet in his way.

Part of that is his mother. Part is his wife. He met Talani, his second wife, after his mother passed. At first she was a friend, a woman he thought was beautiful. Years later, in the middle of his divorce, the relationship became the real thing. He asked himself whether to run wild. He ran a little, not too wild. His uncle, who had known his mother before RZA knew her, said Talani reminded him of his mother. They dated, got engaged, and then her mother died. Now they share the nod of people who have lost a mother. They built each other back up.

He thanks his mother for the awareness and his wife for bringing it into actualization, into feeling. He does not think he would be talking this much, or sitting for this conversation, without the security, peace, and harmony he gained at home.

Quincy Jones, RZA says, is a great mind, a great artist, a treasure. He lived through years when he could not walk in or eat in the same places he played, and later owned places bigger than those. An hour with him is a lifetime of information. RZA was blessed to spend hours and days. What is special is that Quincy is always willing to share experience and knowledge. He would share his home with the right person if that is what they needed to get back on their feet. Quincy also, in his fifties, produced *Thriller*, one of the greatest albums and one of the greatest-selling. RZA notes that Quincy did it at about the age he is now. He might have a great year coming.

Asked to describe Quentin Tarantino in one word, RZA said encyclopedia. He calls him, for anything cinematic in his life, the godfather. Around 2001 or 2002 he humbly asked Tarantino to mentor him. That is a humbling thing to do coming from his neighborhood and from who he is. He was already a multi-platinum artist, already "the wizard," but he saw a craft of brain power that resonated, and he was only paddling in it. He was trying to make movies inside his music and videos. Tarantino was a master of that craft and a living dictionary of film history: actors, directors, cinematographers, maybe fifty of the greatest costume designers in memory.

Their relationship started as a contest of movie knowledge, especially kung fu. If it had been another category, RZA says, he would not have had a chance. In that one he could hold his weight. He may have named a few Tarantino had not seen, but Tarantino is older and can go back further, to 1972, films RZA had not seen yet. Tarantino's favorite is *Master of the Flying Guillotine*. RZA's doorway film, the one he would use to introduce someone to kung fu, is *The 36th Chamber of Shaolin*, also called *Master Killer*. Greatest ever is hard to say. It depends on the phase of your life. That one he would put first.

The wisdom in kung fu films, RZA says, is endless, and he draws it by deciphering it into his own life. In *Master Killer* the style is Hung Ga. The director was a Hung Ga expert whose lineage traces to the Shaolin Temple, and he wanted to keep the films pure and bring that lineage to the world. The action director of Tarantino's beloved *Master of the Flying Guillotine* is the director of *The 36th Chamber of Shaolin*. Some of what happens in the guillotine film is the infant stage of what that action director would later use. Generations fold: Tarantino may have been the age RZA was when he first watched that movie; when Tarantino became a director, RZA was Tarantino's age and watching his work. A symbiotic relationship.

Hung Ga works with five animals: tiger, crane, leopard, snake, dragon. Some systems go to seven or twelve. How does a man emulate a tiger? You see the paws curl before it pounces. A snake is not only a move. It is the ideology of the snake, the agility of the crane. At any moment a punch will not work, so you may have to poke the eye with the crane's beak. Having a mind that can adapt the instinct of the animal, when you are attacked or when you are the aggressor, is something you do not need a form for. That is mentality.

At first he was trying to harden the hand, bang it a thousand times on bricks, grow callus and muscle, or a hit would not hurt. The real thing is this: if they fought, he could tighten up, prance when it is time to prance, or fly away like a stork. Fridman, who loves competitive martial arts, says kung fu movies go deeper than technique, and that at the highest level, with millions watching, fighting becomes art under pressure. Sometimes the less talented fighter wins because he can deal with the arena. RZA agrees. Art under pressure is more beautiful.

RZA will not claim authority on The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac. He speaks as a fellow artist. Biggie was a dope lyricist, and he had a voice that was immaculate. Some rappers get on a beat and you have to get used to them, fight to vibe with them. Biggie makes a record sound like a record immediately. Take the raw voice, put it on anything, and for some reason it sounds like a record. He did all of that before twenty-five.

Pac had an immaculate voice too, and something else: a way of touching all the emotions, of infusing emotional thought, as on "Brenda's Got a Baby" and "Dear Mama," and of arousing the rebel. Those two together made him, in RZA's view, more dangerous than Biggie. You can still party with Biggie. Pac was heading toward the Malcolm X of things, and society fears that. He was good at communicating love and at starting revolutions. That is very dangerous. Fridman thinks about the world if both were still here. It is the way of the world, RZA says. Hendrix, a lot of those guys, go too soon.

Asked again about death, RZA repeats: not scared, not trying to see it. If death is a block up the street, he takes a left or a right, unless some greater good makes the drive through mandatory. It can still happen. That is the meditation: you could die at the end of today. Dying and death, he thinks, are two different things. You could die every day and not be yourself. A point of no return is another chamber. Fridman hears little deaths in the producer who becomes someone else on a film set, at a chessboard, in kung fu, as a family man. RZA will now call all of that life. It is fun.

For the greatest wordsmiths in hip-hop, RZA starts with Rakim and puts Kool G Rap in. If you want to get technical, start with Grandmaster Caz, a name many have not heard, whose lyrics they may still sing every time they sing the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," because that record copied him. Then he puts Nas in the category. There is a chessboard in front of them. Before Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer was the youngest grandmaster, a master at about fourteen. Susan Polgár later tied that kind of record as the youngest female grandmaster. RZA met Nas at fifteen. Nas was already a master lyricist. It takes about ten years to become one. By the time the world heard Wu-Tang, most of them had ten years of rapping in them, which is why the world met them at mastery. GZA was already a star at twenty-one when Nas was fifteen.

Nas is like the Mozart of rap, or Bobby Fischer: something in him from the start. Fridman adds that it is not only wordsmithing. There is depth, a message condensed into a small phrase. That, RZA says, is the whole secret of energy: how to pack it so it can fuel the other side. Nas was doing it at fifteen. RZA, four or five years older, had his confidence, then saw the kid and had to step up. When Nas turned nineteen, *Illmatic* arrived.

Asked for lyrics he is proud of, he names "Sunshower," on the international version of the *Wu-Tang Forever* double CD. If you write those lyrics down and put them in your pocket, he says, they will answer about 25 percent of your life's problems. There is also "Sunshine," on God. He recites: the answer to all questions, the spark of all suggestions of righteousness, the pathway to perfection, who gives you all and never asks more, the faithful companion that fights every war with you, the all in all you are searching for as the oracle. A mission impossible is purely philosophical, but you can call on your deathbed, when you are laying in the hospital. You will call.

The verse was partly inspired by debates with Neil, a scientist married to his wife's best friend Rebecca. They could go until daybreak on science and religion. Before a child, Neil was more adamant that he did not believe in God. After a child he kept his position, and RZA asked: if you were about to die, with a child to think about, you do not think you would make that call? Neil said he would. "Sunshower" is the prequel: trouble follows a wicked mind; 20/20 vision of the prism of life and still blind for lack of the inner; those who took a life without justice become just ice; your worst enemy could not harm you as much as your own wicked thoughts. It is a three-page lyric about character, integrity, how to be in the world. That, he says, ultimately connects to God.

Who is God to him? He wants a distinguishable separation. He recently heard a rabbi debate a historian, tracing etymology far back, and the first word they pronounced was Allah, from which came Elohim. He has already agreed in his heart that the proper name of the father of this universe is Allah. He does not think God is the same. He thinks Allah gives birth to God. Take A-L-L-A-H through numerology: A is 1, L is 12, add to the last denominator, and you get 7, which brings you back to the letter G. So Allah births God. God does not birth Allah.

How does that connect to the oracle you call from a hospital bed? In that verse, he says, we are looking for somebody else or something to help us, and at the end of the day nobody can really help you. He has read many books. The strongest he has ever read is the Quran, stronger to him than the Bible, than quantum physics, than the Bhagavad Gita. A British scholar called it the stupidest book ever written, and RZA understands why: the structure of the words is peculiar, the way some songs only make sense years later, the way a Dave Chappelle joke can hit long after you heard it. He is humble in the face of Allah's magnitude. He may not have been humble in the face of God, because God is a definable thing. People say God when they mean Allah, and they are not saying the same thing, because they put something beside it. That is why there are so many gods. There is nobody beside Allah. Allah is one.

If someone walks up and says "peace, God," he can take that. They are telling him he is a man of wisdom, strength, and beauty. Wu-Tang as gods of rap has wisdom, strength, and beauty. He hopes people, years from now, are still inspired. The name started as Witty, Unpredictable, Talent And Natural Game, then became Wisdom of the Universe, Truth of Allah for a Nation of God. Take the last two letters of that nation and you are back at wisdom, strength, and beauty. America calls itself the greatest country. Is it wisdom, strength, or beauty? The easy answer is strength: the nukes, a standoff with Russia. Wisdom, they will say, is the technology. Beauty, when there is so much suffering in the people? It is not complete. Wu-Tang, he says, started unpredictable and got deep pretty quick. They are striving for the full set.

RZA will go as bold as to call Bruce Lee a minor prophet, a concept he takes from the Quran: prophets sent to every nation and village, so nobody is left without the word in some form. If Allah is merciful, even a deaf man has to get a sign. Moses and the burning bush: maybe there was nobody else to talk to. Those, in this telling, are minor prophets. Lee brought a whole shift in the dynamic of thinking through martial art. He did not do it only in the physical. He was doing philosophy in the same process, and striving to be the best of himself. Three things at once.

RZA studied him in rounds. The first "Bruce Lee" he saw was Green Hornet clips cut together, then *Black Samurai*, then films like *Fearless Fighters*, where a woman puts a child on her back and flies across a lake. Bruce was not doing that. *Five Deadly Venoms* and *The 36th Chamber* are beautiful and heightened beyond the doable, a world that is not this world. Bruce played with this world, so at first RZA did not think he was as good. He cannot fly. Then *The Big Boss*, then *Fist of Fury* (*The Chinese Connection*), and he saw something different. *Enter the Dragon* completed it. That is why the first album is *Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)*: *Enter the Dragon* and *The 36th Chamber* put together, two epitomes. Young him studied the body. Teenage him saw that he was really moving. Later, what he was saying. Later still, what he stood for.

Does he prefer the real martial art or the surreal? The dance between the two. A movie is there to entertain. He is fine with Obi-Wan vanishing from the cloak when Vader strikes him down. Imagination, once stimulated, is what people strive to build. *Star Trek* is a precursor to the cell phone. A kid sees an idea on a screen, no matter how wild, and says I am going to build that. Somebody may yet build the *Back to the Future* time machine. The flying guillotine in the old film, surreal and engineered at once, is the same mix: chaos dropped into a real world, good and evil with a similar problem, and the lyric it gave Wu-Tang: the fatal flying guillotine chops off your head.

His favorite film is *The Godfather*. He saw it when his father was absent, so family structure and values were adopted from it. He and his brother Divine took so much heed that they mimicked the structure: somebody has to be the leader, even if younger, as Michael was younger than Sonny and Fredo but worthy. Divine is older; King is older; Divine sometimes calls King Fredo. King wants to argue. You are Michael, not by choice, by definition. Older sisters and brothers, and younger ones, look to him as a light in the family. They all watched these movies together: *The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter*, *Master Killer*, *Five Deadly Venoms*. Film gave them a language. Vito did not want the drug business; the time of that business was upon him. Family first is, RZA says, mathematically correct. Then it has to spread to the community, the state, the country, the world. Powerful families get overthrown when they stay strong and do not let wealth and opportunity expand. Wu-Tang made the family strong first, then each member formed corporations and sub-families. It had to grow out. Then they took over the world.

RZA is vegan. Fridman ties it to the expanding circle of empathy. RZA's realization is simple: nothing really has to die for him to live, not the animal, not in that sense the plant. Take a steak, top of the line, eaten for protein. A cow or a bull grows to about 1,500 pounds. A bull is muscle, and it is only eating grass. An athlete can perform without meat. An apple holds multiple seeds; plant one and you get a tree of apples with more seeds. Kill a fish and it cannot reproduce. Done. Even after you eat the apple, what you return to the ground feeds the next apple. A circle.

Fridman mentions David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster": cold water heated slowly, torture from the lobster's side. RZA does not think we should add suffering when it is not necessary. If you are in the desert and the only food is the lizard, the lizard has to go. Self-preservation is the first law. Dominion, when people say man has it, is supposed to be a caretaker. The way we do dominion is dominate, eat, cook. Who first looked at a lobster and decided to eat it? It is hard to eat. A crab, from childhood, gave maybe a finger of meat and an itchy throat, a lot of work for little return. A banana would have done better for the body and the appetite.

Fridman asks about AI systems that might feel, suffer, hate, and love. RZA asks whether emotion is a wave or a particle, like light, a shadow of something bigger called consciousness. In a song for a planetary documentary, "The World of Confusion," he wrote that we suck the blood from the planet and it needs a transfusion; doctors prescribe a physical solution, psychiatrists want a bigger institution, and neither has an instrument to measure the weight of the hate vibration. What is the weight of hate? Heavier than love? Heavier than the lead in a slug? Ten milligrams can kill a man. Fridman thinks it can be measured; we are in the dark ages of it. RZA thinks there is something physical that connects us, even though we walk around as distinct entities. On quantum uncertainty he is skeptical in a particular way: as long as you say there is uncertainty and make him believe it, there is uncertainty. What if there is not? A quantum computer turns two things into eight, like a chessboard going into millions of moves. The thing introduced is the uncertainty. You know this move; it has been played a thousand times. Sooner or later something uncertain comes in.

Chess, for RZA, is the most stimulating pastime: it works on his mind, his music, and his thoughts about life at the same time. Baseball can stimulate you depending on how you look at it, but a viewer will not get this much calculation or this much thinking about himself. Chess is a pastime that still gives him the stimulation of real time. It is also connected through centuries. Some of the most interesting people in history played it and projected their struggles onto the board. Nations fought over it: the Soviet Union versus the United States, Fischer for America, Spassky for the Soviets. Fischer wrote that every game of chess is a draw. The only way somebody wins is when one of us makes a mistake. RZA loves that line. It does not get any better.

He was in *American Gangster* with Denzel Washington. Being in it was a blessing and a treasure; the film would have been great filmmaking even without him. What he loves most is the process, a high-level education he would not have seen from the outside. Working with Ridley Scott, he makes a bold claim: Scott is probably the best living director. Watching him, RZA coined a principle he calls multi-vision, the capacity to see eight things at one time. He heard that on *Robin Hood* Scott had eighteen cameras. On *American Gangster* RZA watched him at the monitors with the playback guy, bringing every camera back to a point, nothing the same in the frame, already knowing whether he had it. Scott had placed the cameras. He had seen it in his own way. RZA asked him, humbly. Scott was gracious and confirmed it. As a filmmaker now, RZA can see three or four things. Not eight yet. He will get there. In this room he would already cut off a hanging watch or a wristband, because there is another story there. Is he dead? We do not know.

The editor, Pietro Scalia, has what RZA calls deciphering power, like breaking the Enigma. A feature can be a million feet of film, not two cameras but maybe six, and a good editor knows how to tell the story again. In *American Gangster*, when the brothers start their businesses, one in the Bronx, the cut captures every neighborhood in a minute and you know the whole rise. *Scarface* does a rise in two minutes for one character: bank, lion, wife, the house with the screens. *American Gangster* has to include five brothers. That is in the edit, and in the director keeping track of a story happening off to the side while the scene in front of him is people playing chess.

Fridman says RZA always seemed an old soul, as if he had lived two hundred years, able to see the finished piece faster than others. Where does the creativity come from? RZA does not have the answer. For some reason it seems endless, which is peculiar even to him. GZA introduced him to mathematics, hip-hop, breakdancing. Other cousins introduced graffiti, DJing, instruments. He had a lot of introductions, GZA the earliest and largest, and he does not see those teachers spanning as wide: the DJ cousin did not move from DJing into making beats; the cousin on instruments did not leave funk and rock, and RZA is now an orchestral composer. He accepts himself as an artist. If forced to say where it comes from, he will say life itself. During the pandemic more writing came. Is he receiving signals, grinding, waiting? None of those. A lyric of his: emceeing is as easy as breathing.

He has read that the atoms in the atmosphere are not infinite in the space they occupy, so at least a million atoms you have breathed were breathed by Galileo. Most of the atoms we are made of come from stars that burst, so we are connected. Atoms and cells come and go through us. Fridman feels less like an individual than a finger of a larger organism. RZA points at the coffee: you will digest those atoms, through bowel or urine or sweat or a sneeze. How do you digest Galileo? That is what an artist does. Some people eat and gain fat, some gain muscle. The artist breathes in and translates, but first they have to hear it. Most people receive it on the wrong frequency. He hypothesizes maybe a million true artists in the world, a tiny corner of the table, inspiring the rest, or maybe all the chaos is informing that corner and the artist is only watching. Forced to choose whether beauty comes from the artist or the chaos, he says life.

In *The Tao of Wu* he writes that confusion is a gift from God. When you feel most desperate for a solution, sit, wait, the information will become clear. Confusion is there to guide you. Seek detachment and become the producer of your life. For a young person who wants a life they can be proud of, he would have them read *The Tao of Wu* first, then *The Wu-Tang Manual*, skipping his usual order of knowledge then wisdom, the way a kid's generation watches *The Force Awakens* and then goes back to the old *Star Wars*. If someone wants to be one of those million artists, the beautiful thing is that footprints are left. Study the people who already did what you want to do. Civilization stacks. The seal is a pyramid with an eye because they did it before. Elon Musk is not the first to build a rocket or think of the electric car; he is doing it better, advancing it so whoever picks up after him might get to the flying car. A verse he loves, which he attributes in the conversation to Krishna: the fastest way to heaven is spending time studying the wise, the living and those who lived before. Study the masters.

What is the meaning of life? He will not rush. First somebody else's answer. At fifteen or sixteen, a brother studying mathematics said the letter I means the individual in total accord with Islam; Islam as an Arabic word for peace; peace as the absence of confusion; then Islam as an acronym, I stimulate light and matter. If you are not here, light and matter do not exist for you. You are stimulating them. Asked the meaning of life, that brother said love Islam forever, which RZA takes through those layers, not only as religion. His own definition is simpler. Life is for each of us to add on, to build, the way the masters build on top. Life gave you life. Give life back. Fridman closes with Plato: poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.