Chess--Curses and Comforts

      A little bit of paranoia doesn't hurt when you're playing chess.  In fact it may help your concentration, especially if you're inclined toward a defensive posture rather than an aggressive approach.  After all there is someone out to get you, and your King's safety depends on your vigilance. 

   As a child I never played chess, never learned.  In our house we had various board games and checkers.  One of my sisters was wicked good at the hop scotch of checkers and she reigned supreme.  I knew of chess but was only told that it was very difficult.  I did not learn to play until I married.  My spouse taught me.  Over time I became more interested in the game than she but while I have improved and strengthened as a player, I can hardly ever prevail on those rare occasions now when Anita and I play.  It's hard to beat the one what taught ya.

   When we moved to Europe in our heady days of graduate school, pre-children, I did a fair amount of teaching in Germany with the University of Maryland through the U.S. Military.  I would travel from kaserne to kaserne where I had teaching assignments at the the education centers.  I got around mainly by train and usually had with me a rolled up rubber chess board and a snap-lock box of pieces.  In the bahnhof waiting area and nearby watering holes, all one had to do was plop down with a beverage of choice, roll out the board, set up the white and black armies and wait.  Almost always some stranger came over, sat down and it was game on! 
   Any language barrier was a minor impediment.  Conversation during a chess match is conspicuous by its absence.  What is appropriate is tense silence.  I won my share and lost my share. 

   One one occasion, the play without speaking standard was marred by an opponent who muttered to himself.  After about ten moves he erupted.  "Schweinhund!" he thundered at me after I had castled on the queenside.  According to him that was illegal.  I informed him that he was a chess moron.  He cursed me some more.  I then told him to "Kiss my royal Irish ass!"  He left. 

  When I returned to the States and settled down to full time work, and began helping to gestate progeny, my interest in the sixty four square game faded.  I found myself focused on other strategies of combat and survival, the world of work and worry.  What got me started again was coming across chess on line.  Actually not even on line at first but the program that my PC was equipped with.  You needed no partner, or physical set to prepare, and no clock to rush your participation.  I was amazed at how poorly I played at first.  I was not succumbing to "Fool's Mate" but my blunders were patzer-like.  Then I discovered that you could dial the difficulty level up or down.  I obviously had set it too high.  With an adjustment made, my results were more encouraging. 

    As with anything else, you can stay at the chess board (or screen) too long.  I became curious about the intersection between literature and chess.  Not the literature of chess theory and practice but how the game has been represented in fiction, poetry and the arts.  There are many examples that are well known.  Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass," Nabokov's The Defense and Ingmar Bergman's film "The Seventh Seal" are famous works that embrace the intricacies of chess and instantiate its perverse dilemmas.  But there are many renderings of the game that have flown below the radar.  For example Caissa, the goddess of chess who functions as muse emerged from a medieval poem, "Sacchia Ludus" ("The Game of Chess").  In the modern era, works by Tevis, Zweig and Beckett notwithstanding, it may be that the more accessible literary renderings are in writings that background rather than foreground the opposing armies.  Julian Barnes has a lovely piece of recollection, "Playing Chess with Arthur Koestler" that provides the reader a vivid portrait of the intellectual creator of Darkness at Noon just before his planned double suicide of husband and wife.  Wells Tower's story, "Executors of Important Energies," focuses on a father who is losing his focus on most things in life, save chess.  He has a "glorious" moment in the park when he defeats a stronger player.  "To hell with orgasms," he mused, leaning into the table.  I'll take a clean rook-ending any day.  I mean, Jesus, Wade, what is it?  What is it that makes it such a joy to beat a man at chess?"  My answer to that is the sweet savor of the tightrope tread between the appetite for destruction of the other, and the decorum demanded by the need to appear civil and considerate.  There's nothing more fun than maintaining the latter while internally reveling in the former.  The best combination then for an opponent is someone whom you've always regarded as a jerk and who is inferior to you at the board.

   Beyond these bent delights, the real wonder of chess resides in its essential dimension of grand uselessness.  We recall Oscar Wilde's Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray which concludes: "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.  The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless."  I felt the truth of this ostensible paradox recently in endgame when my computer enemy queened a pawn and my next move was to deliver mate.  Summum bonum!

   I have the feeling that I'm regaining my chessic mojo.  After twenty games, I had a win percentage in the 70s.  I moved to the next level.  After fourteen games I have an 80% success rate.  Should I dial to the next notch up?  I know, pride goeth before the fall.  But absolutely nothing is at stake.  That's the beauty of the beast.