Chess Diary I.2 - personalities
It seems to me that if human beings are to ever prevail again against the computer in chess, it will not be by means of a computational method. Men -- animals -- are better off approaching chess as a game of instinct. They should take notice of the game's symbolic elements and attribute qualities of personality to the pieces, the way a child would to action figurines.
But first, the board itself. How are the sixty-four checkered squares analogous to our world, the environment, the society in which we struggle? Assuming it even matters, is the delineation between black squares and white squares too dichotomous to signify a state of things in actual life? No; the squares are the ground on which families stand! Each chess piece has a life of its own, and its behavior on the board reflects the way of our world; that is, that we as whites and blacks must set foot on a square of earth that haunts our natures with questions.
The knight, a beast, is the least conscious of this affront to his identity and so switches the color of his quarter his every move. The knight almost wants to be corrupted, two-faced; after all, his merit is to be the least predictable piece and the one without a code, or the team's favorite unscrupulous hypocrite, a cheap Machiavellian who flouts standards of honor, dupes, and obeys no rules of mobility but the occupancy of a fellow.
A player's bishops are the psychical opposites of his knights. They are unerring ideologues committed to the pathos of their origins. One bishop is a conservative and the other is an iconoclast, and they alone will both live, kill, protect, threaten and die just as the spirits they said they were by virtue of their inception. The bishop standing on the color of his own form lives for his queen, who stood on the same at game's outset. The bishop standing on the color contrary to his form lives for his king, because the king fought the gods just to start the game in the first place and marks the paragon of irony as a leader who woke upon a lie the first morning of a holy war. The iconoclast is the team's flag of sanctification; chess is dirty tricks and bluffing, not celebration of color and integrity.
The pawns are gullible, adolescent progeny of the king and queen. If they kill they affirm the color of their ground, also if they advance two spaces in adventurousness. If they contradict a station it tends to be for the sake of a fellow -- any -- and the pawn's pride is his belief in the glory of the team and its kingdom. A pawn's a soldier with no prospect of a section eight but rather the opportunity to pray on a sword hilt and strike the dignity of a queen at war's end. When the battlefield opens up at some point and the late mopping begins, the victimized pawns in their humiliation envy their brothers killed on the early hot squares, whose deaths more surely accounted for an advantage.
Rooks have the least personality because they do not have souls. They are the war machines of modern default, whose capabilities both players grasp easily and whose use is applied more mathematically. Rooks are cold as iron boomerangs and reflecting no ideological predisposition of color whatever; neither rebellious nor pious, and massively destructive -- prized by the king and reserved until game's tide yields a chance to devastate. There's no heroism in a rook, but only the psychology of fear and economics. He's an asset, tradeable for none but his opposing models.
Checkmate. The king does not fear death. He fears demotion to servitude in the court of another man. What do you suppose happens to him defeated? His opponent does not butcher him; only annexes his estate and brings his patriarchy to splinters. The king does what he can when he must do it, but his queen takes chess more seriously. The queen is the mother of the team, stationed of origin in the quarter of her sympathy and agreement but willing to do anything. For her side's hegemony she will kill herself to kill her enemy counterpart (and pray for the womb of a pawn) if need be. Both populations decimated, she will mate the foreign king herself and conceive a half-breed army with him to fight and exalt her name for fighting's sake to time indefinite.
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