(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.