Game of chess
There
are ways of playing chess
that no one knows about
whereby you are an expert
at drawing
but never at winning the match
with the best or the worst
where your most attacking move is always
the worst one you make
and the only time you matter is
when they can't your defence break
There is a pattern computers
and grandmasters do not know
It's how the mad play chess
on a board, as if alone
You mastered it long ago
and you always play that way
whether opposite you is a lady
a beginner, an amateur or nobody
or it may be Gary Kasparov
or Mr Endon himself
you weave grand arabesques on the board
and hey presto, in the middle of it
your end whether white or black
looks as if it's never been touched
This will not win you the game
but the shock in the opponent's eyes
to see withdrawn horses
and the queen
and the bishops play backwards is nice
to watch, its ripples
When nothing is left to be done
like the Bergmanian knight you can clear the board
and watch them take time to reset it
or eliminate you from the round
In chess, as in all other things
mathematics, music, words, computer languages
or at the game of love
what matters is to know
that, as in death
there is only one way out
the way that is no way out
and though some people call it
a joke
it is only a move that is not allowed
the only move that is not allowed
a board that reads no exit here
and a checkmate that can only be
foiled by the stopwatch
so foil it by a stopped watch.
that no one knows about
whereby you are an expert
at drawing
but never at winning the match
with the best or the worst
where your most attacking move is always
the worst one you make
and the only time you matter is
when they can't your defence break
There is a pattern computers
and grandmasters do not know
It's how the mad play chess
on a board, as if alone
You mastered it long ago
and you always play that way
whether opposite you is a lady
a beginner, an amateur or nobody
or it may be Gary Kasparov
or Mr Endon himself
you weave grand arabesques on the board
and hey presto, in the middle of it
your end whether white or black
looks as if it's never been touched
This will not win you the game
but the shock in the opponent's eyes
to see withdrawn horses
and the queen
and the bishops play backwards is nice
to watch, its ripples
When nothing is left to be done
like the Bergmanian knight you can clear the board
and watch them take time to reset it
or eliminate you from the round
In chess, as in all other things
mathematics, music, words, computer languages
or at the game of love
what matters is to know
that, as in death
there is only one way out
the way that is no way out
and though some people call it
a joke
it is only a move that is not allowed
the only move that is not allowed
a board that reads no exit here
and a checkmate that can only be
foiled by the stopwatch
so foil it by a stopped watch.
Bergman's The Seventh Seal -- Dudu Ramírez
In 1957 Ingmar Bergman wrote and directed "Det sjunde inseglet" (The Seventh Seal), in which Swedish Crusader Antonius Block (played by Max von Sydow) engaged Death (Bengt Ekerot) in a game of chess. When Death won the match he asked the knight if he had achieved the "meaningful deed" he had hoped for, and Block confirmed that he had. Before he died he prayed, "Have mercy on us, because we are small and frightened and ignorant."
ReplyDeleteGarry Kasparov was a chess grandmaster who was often regarded as the greatest in history. Between 1986 and his retirement in 2005 he was ranked #1 for 225 out of the 228 months. In 1985, at 22 he had defeated Anatoly Karpov to become the youngest-ever undisputed World Chess Champion. His 15 consecutive wins and his 11 Chess Oscars are records. (The "Oscar" statuette was sculpted by Aleksandr Smirnov and represented a man in a boat, The Fascinated Wanderer, based on an 1873 short story by Nikolai Leskov, a reluctant monk. In 1938, in Samuel Beckett's 1st published novel "Murphy," the title character, a nurse in a mental hospital, played chess with Mr. Endon, "the most biddable little gaga in the entire institution." Endon's moves were symmetrical and cyclical, like dancing, and by the end of the game his pieces moved back to their original positions, but nevertheless Murphy was unable to defeat him. Murphy finally resigned "with fool's mate in his soul" and committed suicide. The book was emblematic of Beckett's own view that humans are simultaneously free and unfree, capable of beauty yet doomed, and that chess combined the free play of imagination with a rigid set of rules; as the game progresses its opening symmetry is disturbed, kings are hopelessly trapped, and knights, bishops, and even queens eliminated. "Sometimes an entire pause would pass without any change having been made in the position; and at other times the board would be in an uproar, a torrent of moves." [Just as Murphy was clearly modeled after Beckett himself, Endon seems to have been a portrait of the surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp, to whom Beckett lost at chess when they knew each other in Paris at the time of the novel's composition: "Mr Endon was a schizophrenic of the most amiable variety, at least for the purposes of such a humble and envious outsider as Murphy. The languor in which he passed his days while deepening now and then to the extent of some charming suspension of gesture, was never so profound as to inhibit all movement. His inner voice did not harangue him, it was unobtrusive and melodious, a gentle continuo in the whole consort of his hallucinations. The bizarrerie of his attitudes never exceeded a stress laid on their grace." And his description of the final move also seems reminiscent of the painter's portraits of chess players: "Following Mr Endon's forty-third move Murphy gazed for a long time at the board before laying his Shah on his side, and again for a long time after that act of submission. But little by little his eyes were captured by the brilliant swallowtail of Mr Endon's arms and legs, purple, scarlet, black and glitter, till they saw nothing else, and that in a short time only as a vivid blur, Neary's big blooming buzzing confusion or ground, mercifully free of figure. Wearying soon of this he dropped his head on his arms in the midst of the chessmen, which scattered with a terrible noise. Mr Endon's finery persisted for a little in an after-image scarcely inferior to the original. Then this also faded and Murphy began to see nothing, that colourlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat, being the absence (to abuse a nice distinction) not of percipere but of percipi."]