Tao Te Ching LXIX

The strategists have a saying—

I dare not play the host but play the guest,

I dare not advance an inch but retreat a foot instead.

This is known as marching forward when there is no road,

Rolling up one’s sleeves when there is no arm,

Dragging one’s adversary by force when there is no adversary,

And taking up arms when there are no arms.

There is no disaster greater than taking on an enemy too easily.  So doing nearly cost me my treasure.  Thus of two sides raising arms against each other it is the one that is sorrow-stricken that wins.

All strategists are full of sorrow; the sorrow they maintain is created by the gap between things—between host and guest, advancing and retreating, activity and the lack of an object for such activity—and, more particularly, the strategist’s placing himself (if he did not place himself here, he would not be a strategist) on the side of guest, retreating, and lack.  Sorrow is that which is created by those who find themselves on the side of sorrow.

Sorrow does not win in itself.  In itself it simply weeps—or, more truly—is mute.  But for those given to fighting, the one also given to sorrow will win.  Death is at the center of strategy, as the strategist negates himself to see, as wholly as possible, the positions and rules of the game.  This negation is not done without feeling, and so the movement toward the strategic nothing point, an ever-present movement, is sorrow.

The one who is not engaged in this perpetual returning acts without sufficient knowledge of loss.  But the strategist has already embodied the loss—an embodiment re-encountered, re-known, re-cognized, almost hourly—and his passionate committed indifference to the outcome is what allows him to win.  Or, rather, his refusal to dare the spirits to play, to advance, permits him the distance necessary to engage and watch simultaneously, to correct on the fly any errors of position or method.

The strategist is full of sorrow because he is always in a state of preparedness, protecting his treasure, walking on roadless roads, fashioning himself with absent limbs, fighting enemies that aren’t present and may never be, picking up non-existent swords.  Is the strategist, then, like Macbeth, descending into the grey fogs of lunacy, seeing a dagger floating in the air?

No.

For Macbeth and his Lady lose their treasure, and lose it easily.  They vacillate on the axis between the power of dream and the flesh of loss, this vacillation itself a hallucinogenic—the hallucinogen of the common human scrimmage of work and love.  But the strategist contains within himself each moment dream and loss, power and death.  To contain each moment the oppositions of existence is also to contain calm sorrow and indifferent victory.

Look at the teams in sports, politics, art, business, law, knowledge (what is the difference?).  Look at the winners, look at the losers.  They are easy to spot, with their champagne and smiles, with their slouches and dejections.

But the strategist does not vary whether he wins or loses, for favor and disgrace, yes and no, good and evil … ambivalently swirl, forming deep eddies in his soul.  These constant eddies that he does not seek to escape or express are the attributes, the desolation, of the strategist.  And why he wins, but so according to different codes, given to different shapes, and without the accoutrements of victory, that to say he wins is to mislead all those without sorrow.