Life & Chess

I have not played chess for a long time. At my best I wasn’t very good. But Chess is great subject matter, 2D or 3D. When I was heavily into ceramic sculpture I made several chess pieces with human heads and sometimes limbs; and I made at least two chess sets. I’ve wanted for a long time to draw or paint all the moves of a chess match in comic-book panel continuity, warping the board and pieces with each move to show the drama that was going on. But that is a MAJOR project and will have to wait.

Life and Chess overlap in the realms of Conflict, Positioning, Caste, and Planning. With chess AI proving sufficiently good to defeat chess grandmasters, it has become apparent that the ability to exhaustively review all possible moves “checkmates” ingenuity and intuition. Perhaps we will be humbled enough to move on to endeavors that are not combative. Therein lies Peace On Earth, my friends.

Life & Chess

Loose astringents may be styptic
Tight dual portraits form a diptych
Friend turned foe may grip may seize
Even with bewobbled knees
& find looseness holds the keys

Notice the mistake I made in line 2. I forgot the second letter was an I, and looking at it thought it was an T, the base of the L doing double-duty as a crossbar. It’s an easy fix–change “Tight” to “Inked” and it even makes more sense, although we lose the dichotomy from line 1’s “Loose”–but let’s let it be. It’s Human.