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“Borrow a Corpse to Bring Back a Spirit” by Mark Hatmaker

 


The erudite martial scholars among us will recognize that title as a quote from the ancient Chinese essay The Thirty-Six Strategies.

It is tenet #14.

[FYI-I use the masterful Thomas Cleary translation.]

The tenet is vaguely cryptic, but only a smidge.

Those steeped in the poetic metaphor of Chinese teachings will immediately divine the advice.

Let us dig into “Borrow a Corpse to Bring Back a Spirit.”

The advice is an urging to resurrect tactics and strategies that have fallen by the way. To burrow into what may have been unjustly forgotten.

Let us allow our translator, Mr. Cleary himself, to still the waters.

“…don't use what everyone else is using, but use what others aren't using. This can mean reviving something that has dropped out of use through neglect, or finding uses for things that have hitherto been ignored or considered useless.”

The advice is to resurrect the useful, NOT to reanimate the deservedly dead.

It is a directive to become martial Burkes and Hares in the graveyard of tactics and strategies of the past and revive what still has utility, and leave interred what has succumbed to rot or should remain at eternal rest as its time of service has indeed passed.

“Borrow a Corpse to Bring Back a Spirit” is the basis behind the frontier Rough ‘n’ Tumble Black Box Project. Via martial archeology we grid-by-grid use small brushes to unearth artifacts of the frontiers of the past, re-assemble them from their, at times, distant spread from one another as one would re-construct scattered shards of Apache pottery. Carefully reassemble them and test them to see if they still hold water.

Those that still do can be put to use immediately.

Those that do not, can be respectfully reinterred.

The wisdom of “Borrow a Corpse to Bring Back a Spirit”

There is the visceral connection with the past, one can enjoy the beauty of walking in steps that were trod by ancestors, walking ways that once were and can be again if one puts the time into the archeological process.

And there is, as Mr. Cleary states “…don't use what everyone else is using, but use what others aren't using.”

To shift from the standard to what is non-standard is often the tactical element of surprise needed to more immediately grasp victory where the level playing field of standardized modern tactics is so well known, so saturated in the cognitive sphere that the only surprise can be athletic attributes.

Whereas, arsenals, tactics, weaponry, strategies that have dropped from living memory these can turn tides by dint of the very essence of surprise.

By pure force of a brutal vocabulary that does not suffer from the civilizing forces of rule sets that turned much into a sport and then to make it serviceable again must be “un-sported.”

The wisdom of “Borrow a Corpse to Bring Back a Spirit” allows us to a step backwards in time to grab what was designed to be brutal from the get-go, take two steps forward into the present via practice and drill, and then three steps towards a winning edge with true surprise and candid brutal utility in the scuffle itself.

One can practically grab any of the Black Box volumes and feel that Old School revival, be it in the conditioning, as with the Unleaded material, or in the tactics.

Case in point or recent volume Down ‘n’ Dirty A Rough ‘n’ Tumble Arsenal of Dirty Tricks or our upcoming The Lumberjack Ax & Haft Kicks Lowline Mayhem from A to Z.

What is known now, is, well, known now.

What was known then is uncommon.

Hence, the wisdom of “Borrow a Corpse to Bring Back a Spirit.”

For info on The Black Box Project and all of our sundry products and training programs see here.

Or try our podcast: Mark Hatmaker Rough n Tumble Raconteur.

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