Discussion here about chess. It is difficult (not everywhere and always, sure) to play chess without also reflexively signalling that one is ‘the sort of person who plays chess’. Not that that’s a ‘bad thing’. G. began playing chess at Café Amato in Soho. It wasn’t just about signalling that he was the ‘sort of person who plays chess’; it was about signalling that ‘this is the sort of café in which people play chess’ – which, thereafter, it indeed became. He thus half-succeeded in recreating, in a little corner of London, some wish-image of European café society. C. got me playing chess about 3 years ago. For him it is doubtless a signifier of the cerebral but also of a certain partly imaginary era populated by Beckett and Duchamp and Debord. I agree with IT that chess is an important reference point for a certain modernism. Pared down, pure form, hermetic, with a hint of aristocratic apartness. The suggestion that this cerebral hermetic game is played in the shadow of immanent catastrophe, so that chess is both a defiant turning away from this and its own appropriate metaphor (endgame)
What do they say?
That Lugaidh Redstripe and that wife of his
Sat at this chess board, waiting for their end.
They knew that there was nothing that could save them,
And so played chess as they had any night
For years, and waited for the stroke of sword.
I never heard a death so out of reach
Of common hearts, a high and comely end. (Yeats)
What do they say?
That Lugaidh Redstripe and that wife of his
Sat at this chess board, waiting for their end.
They knew that there was nothing that could save them,
And so played chess as they had any night
For years, and waited for the stroke of sword.
I never heard a death so out of reach
Of common hearts, a high and comely end. (Yeats)
_____
Something also about the fusing of ‘aesthetics’ and pure aggression. Fischer I think said that he wanted to crush his opponent’s ego. The opponent is encircled and defeated, his moves only serve a larger attacking orchestration of which he/she is utterly unaware and of which he is now the hapless and crestfallen victim. the fact that this ‘crushing of the ego’ has been accomplished by a poker-faced neutrality, a cold violence of intelligence, only adds to the enjoyment. Thus, the satisfaction of the checkmate is both a ‘detached’ aesthetic satisfaction, that something complex has been conceived and executed with such aplomb and the satisfaction of a knockout punch. Not that I’d know, mind.
Something also about the fusing of ‘aesthetics’ and pure aggression. Fischer I think said that he wanted to crush his opponent’s ego. The opponent is encircled and defeated, his moves only serve a larger attacking orchestration of which he/she is utterly unaware and of which he is now the hapless and crestfallen victim. the fact that this ‘crushing of the ego’ has been accomplished by a poker-faced neutrality, a cold violence of intelligence, only adds to the enjoyment. Thus, the satisfaction of the checkmate is both a ‘detached’ aesthetic satisfaction, that something complex has been conceived and executed with such aplomb and the satisfaction of a knockout punch. Not that I’d know, mind.
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