I've had a long look at failure. The thing is like an old die-cast toy, at once rudimentary and infuriating, one you can turn over in your hands and examine, but can't quite grasp the mechanics of. It clinks and clunks, whirrs when you pick it up off the floor, but doesn't go anywhere when you put it back down.
I haven't been around forever, but I've turned that bastard over in my hands a few times. And here's the point: it's the very idea of a mechanism that makes stuff fail. A business, a marriage, a life – in constructing them with mechanisms and balances in mind, we wire the failure ourselves. We're so fucking clever, full of buzzwords and concepts and snippets from the smaller columns in the press; we go no farther than tacking together towers of what's expected.
As if defining the thing intellectually helps us deny the real source of triumph and defeat: energy.
There's an aristocracy of energy in the world, made up of people who have failed, and might fail again, but who realize that breezes, winds, and gales of energy are at the heart of all fortune. You'll know these people when you come upon them. No zealots or enthusiasts are among them, neither pragmatists nor faint hearts. Still passion quietly ripples everything they say and do. They feel the breeze each morning and walk in its stream all day.
Backgammon is the way to meet and confirm that energy. Play backgammon, play it drunk, play it high, play it sober, deploy the dice in every mood and before and after good and bad and bent sex. Play without dice cups, refuse to play with anyone who insists on using a cup to throw the dice. Dice are an organ from beyond the body, hold them in your hands, rub them, rattle them. That's where energy will sing.
Steal energy if you have to. Tell your opponents they will lose; chances are their power will default to you. Just play, use the doubling cube, play for money, frighten yourself. At the height of a rabid game you'll find that the numbers you call are the numbers you get, once, twice, thrice. And in that game you'll see the source of all endeavour sparkling unambiguously, guaranteed, you'll feel the heat of its shine.
Energy. Neither triumph nor defeat. Arriving without a notion of itself. Just raw fortune.
Raise a drink to it, court it.
Call it motherfucker, call it sweetheart.
Say hi from me.
"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That puts it not unto the touch,
To win or lose it all."
Marquis of Montrose, 1612–1650
