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Monday, December 04, 2006
The Immortal Game
Our Scott posted some bad Tom Waits lyrics not so long ago:
But Bush is reluctant to risk his future,
In the fear of his political failures,
So he plays chess at his desk and poses for the press,
Ten thousand miles from the road to peace.
Obviously it’s impossible to imagine Bush playing chess at his desk or in the bath or on the moon or anywhere else. It’s quite out of character.
But I’ve just been reading The Immortal Game, a History of Chess
Large rocks, severed heads, and flaming pots of oil rained down on Baghdad, capital of the vast Islamic Empire, as its weary defenders scrambled to reinforce gates, ditches, and the massive stone walls surrounding the fortress city’s many brick and teak palaces. Giant wooden manjaniq catapults bombarded distant structures while the smaller, more precise arradah catapult guns pelted individuals with grapefruit-sized rocks. Arrows flew thickly and elite horsemen assaulted footmen with swords and spears. “The horses . . . trample the livers of courageous young men,” lamented the poet al-Khuraymi, “and their hooves split their skulls.” Outside the circular city’s main wall—100 feet high, 145 feet thick, and six miles in circumference—soldiers pressed forward with battering rams while other squads choked off supply lines of food and reinforcements. Amid sinking boats and burning rafts, bodies drifted down the Tigris River.
The impenetrable “City of Peace” was crumbling. In the fifty years since its creation in A.D. 762, young Baghdad had rivaled Constantinople and Rome in its prestige and influence. It was a wildly fertile axis of art, science, and religion, and a bustling commercial hub for trade routes reaching deep into Central Asia, Africa, and Europe. But by the late summer of A.D. 813, after nearly two years of civil war (between brothers, no less), the enlightened Islamic capital was a smoldering, starving, bloody heap.
In the face of disorder, any human being desperately needs order—some way to manage, if not the material world, at least one’s understanding of the world. In that light, perhaps it’s no real surprise that, as the stones and arrows and horses’ hooves thundered down on Baghdad, the protected core of the city hosted a different sort of battle. Within the round city’s imperial inner sanctum, secure behind three thick, circular walls and many layers of gate and guard, under the luminescent green dome of the Golden Gate Palace, Muhammad al-Amin, the sixth caliph of the Abbasid Empire, spiritual descendant of (and distant blood relation to) the Prophet Muhammad, sovereign of one of the largest dominions in the history of the world, was playing chess against his favorite eunuch Kauthar.
A trusted messenger burst into the royal apartment with urgently bad news. More inglorious defeats in and around the city were to be reported to the caliph. In fact, his own safety was now in jeopardy.
But al-Amin would not hear of it. He waved off his panicked emissary.
“O Commander of the faithful,” implored the messenger, according to the medieval Islamic historian Jirjis al-Makin. “This is not the time to play. Pray arise and attend to matters of more serious moment.”
It was no use. The caliph was absorbed in the board ...
You can go read how it all turned out. (It all sounds rather Terry Gilliam directs Baron Münchhausen, doesn’t it?)
As I was saying, the Shenk book is pretty good. I think it would be especially good for non-chess players - you do know how the horsey moves, right? - who might like to learn a lot of fun facts and anecdotes without actually being obliged to get up to speed. For example, did you know that Duchamp’s wife glued his chess pieces to the board on their honeymoon, because he was a chess addict? And they divorced three months later. (It says so in the book.)
I am presently annoyed because I’ve lost several incidental chess references I was hoarding for my chapter. I distinctly recalled that Habermas wrote, in “Taking Aim At The Heart of the Present,” that one could be sure Foucault did not like chess, because he wouldn’t have liked rules he couldn’t break. (Or something like that.) Then again, perhaps it was in Ian Hacking, “Archaelogies of Michel Foucault”. Upon examination, the answer would seem to be: none of the above. Also a Richard Rorty quote that implied that poetry is better than chess. Possibly from Achieving Our Country, of all places? (For a chess quote, that is.) But is it worth it rereading the book just for the quote? Alas, and then it will probably turn out to have been in that essay on Derrida instead.
UPDATE: That’s weird. Not 10 minutes after hitting publish on this post I put ‘Habermas + “taking aim at the heart of the present”’ into google, hoping to find some text somewhere. And, lo, this very post is already the 6th hit. Needless to say, I did not find my own post helpful in the least.
Comments
The intertubes still haven’t filled up yet. I am the #3 Google for “Mandelbrot + economics” despite the fact that I don’t know much about either one. I just posted the name of an article about Mandelbrot which had the word “economics” in it.
On the other hand, Wikipedia has already posted on the new book on the Qarakhitai, a great book on a very obscure subject, and the bibliography that have posted on the even more obscure Kushan kingdom looks pretty good.
In the future, everyone will have a post that is the number 1 hit for something, for fifteen minutes.
I am #1 for “Fish Milk”, McCumber’s “Time in the Ditch”, “Michel Meyer” (a sadly unread philosopher), and “Lithuanian Empire”. These ratings have been stable for some time. It helps to keep things obscure.
If you can’t be a big fish in a little pond, be a big fish milk in a big pond. It’s an old, old strategy, my friend.
I’m #3 for Melvile + Confidence + Man. #1 and #2 are the hypertext and its intro.
I’m #1 for Joanna Newsom sucks, which pleases me immensely.
I’m number 1 for the abstract of my forthcoming dissertation on the ideological, methodological, and phrenological similarities between Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, and Paul Morphy, Louisiana chess player. It has to do with conditions of possibility in the the nineteenth century, the cult of the genius/prodigy, and the always-already reinscribed, “rebellious” valorization of the gambit or poetic “leap.”
You’re kidding, right, Joseph? I mean obviously you are half kidding. You aren’t really writing about Rimbaud and Morphy, are you?
I have my own crankiness about Rimbaud, and I’m the #1 Google for Rimbaud, Nietzsche, St. Augustine, Thoreau, and it makes sense. too.
I disagree with Holbo’s belief that crankiness being a bad thing.
I’m No. 3 and 4 for “Scorsese’s Blues," beat out by PBS and Scorsese. Emerson doesn’t make the first ten for “emerson cranky," but Ralph Waldo is right up there. Can we harness the power of the blogosphere to rectify this situation?
Today I coined a neologism, and I googled it to be sure it wasn’t already in circulation. Sure enough, it had been used: by me. It was, “anarchrologism.”
John, of course I’m mostly kidding, particularly with the references to phrenology, and the jargon talk of reinscription and “always-already.”
However, given world enough and time, I would write a paper on the two of them. There is a fascinating correspondence between their contempt (both of them abandoned their “artistic” pursuits young) and the audacity of their style. The little volume I own, Morphy’s Games of Chess, was as formative as The Great Gatsby when I was a teenager. It’s sad to consider how Capablanca led to the forgetting of some of the possibilities in Morphy.
Well, now, let’s not be a-badmouthing Capablanca. He was a genius. It was stepping through the moves of some of his games, as a young-un, that gave me an insight into how clever and elegant chess could be. Him and Spassky-Fischer, which was in the news a great deal when I was 7 and at my first chess-impressionable age.
[repost]
Capa didn’t even like chess. (Kinda like Morphy in dis regard, who gave it up as too lowbrow.)
(Were anyone to line up past masters with philosophers, Alekhine would be the Nietzsche of chess.)
Meanwhile, Kramnik just lost the final game of his six-game match with Deep Fritz. Seriously outplayed, unlike his overlooking a mate-in-one in Game 2.
(and on googlespotting, topspot for my blogname belongs to Matt’s post “to: the only person reading these things")
Alekhine as Nietzsche? Hmmm. Maybe in terms of sheer attacking will-to-power or something. But for Nietzsche we need more formal perversity: I was thinking more along the lines of Nimzovich or Réti - but now that’s striking me as a bit anachronistic. But then so would Alekhine be. Again, hmmm. I must waste more time on this pointless line of thought.
captcha: thinking52 (but that’s bridge, not chess)
And how about Capablanca as Kierkegaard? Sets up their match play ...
Also see: The Tragic Sense of Chess.
Most just driving by with a link to Scott McCloud’s autobiographical webcomic, “My Obsession With Chess.”
ChessCafe reviews Shenk, deems okay as far as pop-scholarship (yes, oxymoronic) goes [1-week-link, embeds link to GodWinter’s “Was Alekhine a Nazi?"].
This very page is now 53rd for Mandelbrot + economics, thanks to John E.’s comment.