Winning, Losing, and the Original Mind

This is a superb age.

I cannot imagine, or remember, the arena of thirty years ago — how many people put down what they were doing to watch, how many cheered for a victory. Today there is no victory, and there is no cheering. And yet as the position slowly grows complicated, as the sound of stones being placed grows louder, I think I can feel the same tremor that has run through people from antiquity onwards whenever a famous game took shape in front of them. A thousand-year-old game, carrying the desolation of winning and losing again and again, has walked all the way from the age of bronze weapons to the internet. In front of that small square, the people change, one after another — or perhaps they are only switching between zero and one. Strip all of it away, look only at the nineteen-line board, and the shock to the mind is not the slightest bit different.

At school a teacher told us that Romanticism is the constant leaping between two extremes. On the board, the exquisiteness of reason is exactly this dance on a knife’s edge: I do not advance a hair, and I do not retreat a hair. Black and white are tangled together, with nowhere to live and nowhere to die.

This is an age of breaking through.

The game has no boundary of its own; the people playing it do. That boundary was first a person, then a country, and now humanity. Within one country, the strongest player is the national hand. Perhaps at first the largest contest was only between the two people playing: you won, and that was that. Later the two sides came to stand for their organisations, their affiliations, their countries, their kind. We keep drawing ourselves into circles, the circles keep getting bigger, and the outcome keeps getting heavier. When we can no longer be told apart, we merge into a larger circle and challenge the next one. It is exactly through this loop — break out, merge, challenge — that we sharpen our craft, and that a game like this becomes something you can lose yourself in.

This is a noisy age.

Perhaps nothing is pure any more. Some hope for a human victory in the final match against the machine. Some mock how small human intelligence looks next to it. Some take the opportunity to sell a product with no apparent connection to any of it. None of this is right or wrong; we are already inside that turbid current ourselves. After all, beyond this game there is a great deal of life to get on with. But it is only at a moment like this — when we can ignore an opponent’s skin colour, ethnicity, even bodily form, and want nothing but to win, searching in agony for the divine move — that the mind throws off something magnificent. And for that I count myself lucky to be in this age, and to have witnessed a moment like this.

A passage I saw at a friend’s:

“Great Sage, where are you going?” “To tread the southern heavens, and shatter the highest firmament.” “And if you go and do not return —” “Then I go and do not return!”

After all, everything that comes from outside is beside the point. Winning and losing are a matter of the original mind.