(From Chess Asia, Vol. 14 No. 4)
The quest for excellence and supremacy is the alpha and omega of that uncertainty-ridden urgency that is life. It is a quest for the absolute, for God, if you will, a genesis that seeks to establish its own necessity by an act of freedom that is at once strife-torn and creative. It is also a quest for meaning, a journey to a decisive consummation that would make essence and eternity leap out from the mirror of nothingness. Threshold to infinity, ever-surging horizon of space and existential persistence, the acts of life are invitations to permanence and joy, beauty and ecstasy, fulfillment and realization.
If this is so with life in general, so is it with chess—the game of demigods bequeathed to men that they may endure their existence on earth—a realm of suffering and bliss, of heroes and scoundrels, nobility and ignominy, Machiavellians and principled protagonists, masters and slaves, innocence and darkness—and that they may find their own way to creation and that high ranging surge to fullness and endless soaring. Yes, chess is born of fantasy, but it is a fantasy that is anchored on codes of necessity, the rubrics of an unknown symbolism that is its own life—open-ended and hypnotical in its so many incarnations of variations and combinations, allegorical resonations of life and relationships, politics and history, art and myth, destiny and freedom. Chess is life—magical life…
Every man brings into his game the whole of his life: past, present and future. This statement maybe too expansive, at first glance, but when one considers that in the game of chess so much is at stake with victory or defeat defining a particular moment of destiny—grace or its absence, joy or sadness, fulfillment or disintegration—when so much of both the conscious and unconscious (since chess exercises the mind and the spirit, the known and the hidden, labyrinthine storehouse of memories, experiences, events) are activated to come up with that ongoing process that is the whole of the game—then one begins to understand the true chessplayer’s fount of intensity. It is a fount that wells up with manifold and multi-layered assertions towards existence, towards the substantiality of being versus non-being, presence over absence, meaning over non-meaning. Chess is a game, true, but it is very much more an act of life, and when a brilliancy is produced—it becomes also a fulfillment of life.
Chess Asia
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
CHESSISM
Obsession. Affliction. Addiction. Infection.
The adjectives list dynamically moves in perpetuity. Like the ramifying branches on a healthy tree, it naturally grows within the chess enthusiasts’ psyche. An all-consuming, steadily evolving, matter inherent upon its dawning, that claims a virtual birthright in the chessplayer.
There are no scarce manifestations in the observation. Two crouched adversaries on the opposite ends of an aging chessboard propped on a sidewalk pavement, on a weather-beaten park bench, under the verdant shade of Kilmer’s tree. Or the avid fan thoroughly lost in thought, eyes firmly riveted on an open chess book. Or one analyzing a chess game, or solving a chess puzzle, on a portable miniature. Or the exchange of murmurs in a blindfold game whilst the rickety bus travels or on a promenade.
The infinite glories of paradox, geometry, depth and flow only a chess game can offer is the reason sublime for a chessplayer to entertain oblivion to superimpose itself upon the decadent fragments of borrowed real time while a game progresses. This without doubt is why Caissa’s enduring ethereal beauty never fails to captivate the eye of her beholder. The smiting viral influence nary an admirer ever cares to overcome with an antidote. This affliction we might very well call “chessism”.
Undaunted, we continue with unrestrained passion, for the undying love of the game, being gladly obsessed, afflicted, addicted, infected. Specially now that we have reached a defining moment in the storied life of Chess Asia. (From Chess Asia Vol. 18 No. 1)
The adjectives list dynamically moves in perpetuity. Like the ramifying branches on a healthy tree, it naturally grows within the chess enthusiasts’ psyche. An all-consuming, steadily evolving, matter inherent upon its dawning, that claims a virtual birthright in the chessplayer.
There are no scarce manifestations in the observation. Two crouched adversaries on the opposite ends of an aging chessboard propped on a sidewalk pavement, on a weather-beaten park bench, under the verdant shade of Kilmer’s tree. Or the avid fan thoroughly lost in thought, eyes firmly riveted on an open chess book. Or one analyzing a chess game, or solving a chess puzzle, on a portable miniature. Or the exchange of murmurs in a blindfold game whilst the rickety bus travels or on a promenade.
The infinite glories of paradox, geometry, depth and flow only a chess game can offer is the reason sublime for a chessplayer to entertain oblivion to superimpose itself upon the decadent fragments of borrowed real time while a game progresses. This without doubt is why Caissa’s enduring ethereal beauty never fails to captivate the eye of her beholder. The smiting viral influence nary an admirer ever cares to overcome with an antidote. This affliction we might very well call “chessism”.
Undaunted, we continue with unrestrained passion, for the undying love of the game, being gladly obsessed, afflicted, addicted, infected. Specially now that we have reached a defining moment in the storied life of Chess Asia. (From Chess Asia Vol. 18 No. 1)
Monday, June 4, 2007
The Rhapsody of Chess
Chess is the magic life of symbols. Dynamic, turbulent, vital and inexhaustible, it is a storm of intensities that incarnates itself in a process or language that is not one of words, music, dance, gymnastics, or architecture, and yet is all of these in an allegorical manner composed of a certain movement with a complex structural genesis and meaning.
How could the initiate not "vibrate" to the many echoes and nuances of life, art and struggle that chess generates in its swirling rhapsody of thrust and distillation, tumult and consummation, a vortex rising into a crescendo of urgencies that cannot be denied, with a finality that reaches out to the eternal? No one who has been kissed by its terrible lips of midnight can forget, nor dispel ever the fever of its crimson possessiveness.
Yes, Caissa would ever be the jealous mistress who would command the tribute of a fealty that knows no bounds, the muse whose fatal embrace condemns the victim to a destiny of lunacies and brilliancies, exuberance and excess, breathless pursuer of that nameless splendor that ceaselessly haunts and enchants.
Yes, chess has its own irresistible magic. Not only has it "the power to make people happy", but chess also has the power to drive them to that point of joyful madness and exhaustion, where at last, like a metaphysics of the unknown, they can feel the vibrations of the invisible, that realm of transcendence where finally another life, another history is waiting to soar and unfold.
Like music, poetry, love and wine, chess is a sparkle of infinity on earth. (From Chess Asia, Vol. 14 No. 2)
How could the initiate not "vibrate" to the many echoes and nuances of life, art and struggle that chess generates in its swirling rhapsody of thrust and distillation, tumult and consummation, a vortex rising into a crescendo of urgencies that cannot be denied, with a finality that reaches out to the eternal? No one who has been kissed by its terrible lips of midnight can forget, nor dispel ever the fever of its crimson possessiveness.
Yes, Caissa would ever be the jealous mistress who would command the tribute of a fealty that knows no bounds, the muse whose fatal embrace condemns the victim to a destiny of lunacies and brilliancies, exuberance and excess, breathless pursuer of that nameless splendor that ceaselessly haunts and enchants.
Yes, chess has its own irresistible magic. Not only has it "the power to make people happy", but chess also has the power to drive them to that point of joyful madness and exhaustion, where at last, like a metaphysics of the unknown, they can feel the vibrations of the invisible, that realm of transcendence where finally another life, another history is waiting to soar and unfold.
Like music, poetry, love and wine, chess is a sparkle of infinity on earth. (From Chess Asia, Vol. 14 No. 2)
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