by Ed Simon
In Renaissance Europe, a Wunderkammer was literally a “Wonder Cabinet,” that is a collection of fascinating objects, be they rare gems and minerals, resplendent feathers, ancient artifacts, exquisite fossils. Forerunners to the modern museum, a Wunderkammer didn’t claim comprehensiveness, but it rather served to suggest the multiplicity of our existence on this earth, the nature of possibility. Wunderkammers developed alongside that literary form which Michelle de Montaigne called “essays,” literally an “attempt.” Essays, like Wunderkammers, at their most potent are also not comprehensive; rather their purposes is to experiment, to riff, to play. In that spirt, half of my columns at 3QuarksDaily will be dedicated to what I call a “Word Cabinet,” a room dedicated to literature, neither as theory nor even as reading, but to do what both wonder cabinets and essays do, and that is to hopefully provide intimations of possibility. All essays will take the form of “On X and Literature,” where the algebraic cipher indicates some broad, general subject (fire and labyrinths, trees and infinity, etc.). As always, feel free to suggest topics.
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Behind the gleaming, modernist, smooth sandstone façade of Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland, a temple to all things Hibernian from the Covenanters to the Jacobite Rebellion, the Highland Clearances to James Watt’s steam-engine, there is a small thirteenth-century walrus tusk ivory carving of a Medieval Nordic soldier. Discovered in a simple stone ossuary buried in a sand dune on the foggy, rain-lashed Bay of Uig on the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis in 1831, the little sculpture is just a bit over an inch tall, yet it’s easy to make out the distinctive Scandinavian designs on his pointed helmet, his comical bulging eyes, and his teeth over the top of the shield that he clutches and bites. His is clearly a pose of frenzied, martial wrath. A berserker – the feared caste of Viking warriors who in an enraged fugue state (possibly aided by hallucinogens) terrorized people from Novgorod to Newfoundland, including the Scotts who lived on Lewis where this small figurine would be entombed for six centuries, alongside ninety two other pieces. Not just berserkers, but a mitered bishop of the recently converted Norseman; a tired looking queen with her eyes wide, resting her face upon her balm; a bearded, wise old king.
The berserker isn’t just a tiny statue of a Norse combatant, he’s a warder; what is more commonly known as a rook. This tiny berserker was a chess piece, who even nine centuries ago had the responsibility of charting that distinctive L-shaped course across checkered boards. From India into Persia, than the Arabic world into Europe, chess had already been played for half-a-millennia by the time whatever Norse craftsman took chisel and scorper to a walrus tusk. The rules would be recognizable to contemporary players, though the sterling craftsmanship of the Isle of Lewis chessman – with enough pieces to constitute three complete sets – is rather different than the boring black-and-white pieces used by players today, whether the prodigies competing against paying tourists in view of Washington Square Park’s triumphal arch or the celebrated 1972 match in Reykjavik between Fischer and Spassky.
The bulk of the pieces were pilfered by the British Museum, that repository of stolen rocks which includes the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles, but eleven remain in Edinburgh where I got to see them in 2007 when I lived in Scotland. The rook – that pointy helmet, those bulbous eyeballs, that tweaked grimace – is hilarious looking (I’m not the only one to think so). While the rest of the pieces – and there is substantial variation between the multiples kings, queens, bishops, knights, and pawns – are appropriate to their intricate craftsmanship, the rook is cartoonish and lovable. Part of what delights me about the rook is the disjunct between his appearance and the reputation of the game in which he is but a player.
If chess is cerebral, analytical, cold, and rational, than the tiny berserker is all frothing anger. Whether or not the anonymous artists who made these pieces similarly delighted in the irony is impossible to know of course. I’ve got a little model of the berserker, along with a king and bishop, all larger than the originals, which I bought from the museum giftshop. They were joined by a fridge magnet, a small print, a keychain of the rook which I’ve never used, and a complete set housed inside of an anachronistic Celtic-designed board. An incongruous bit of chessomania from somebody who is possibly the worst player in the game’s centuries-long history. Growing up, most of my experience with the beautiful game was a kitschy Nintendo adaptation called Battle Chess, where when following the taking of a piece the player would be treated to a pixelated, 8-bit, two-tone, red-and-blue clip of a buxom scantily clad queen in a barely clinging bikini-top garroting a mitered bishop, or of a lance-wielding knight defenestrating a pathetic pawn. Deep Blue it wasn’t. That I know how to play chess at all is a bit of a personal victory (though I’m still a bit uncertain on how to castle), because I think that I’ve won a grand total of three, maybe four, games in my life, and one was when after beating me several times in a row on a crisp New York October afternoon while playing at the iconic Central Park sets my wife threw the game out of pity.
But the game itself, or perhaps the idea of the game, fascinates me. The metaphorical evocation of war, this game of strategy and geometry, simultaneously robotic and deeply human. Chess seems to bring out the poets in the mathematicians and the mathematicians in the poets. It has endured for a reason. “Games, as a general rule, do not last,” wrote David Shenk in The Immortal Game: A History of Chess. “They come and go.” Who now regularly plays Senet or Mancala? And yet the black-and-white board of chess remains as if a map of the universe itself. Originating on the subcontinent where it was called chaturanga, originally having required four players and the randomization of dice, chess was a means for members of a maharaja’s court to strategize battle (shades of my Nintendo game). From India it made its way to Persia, from Persia into Arabia, from Arabia into Moorish Spain, and then through the rest of Europe. The Spanish would standardize it, the Renaissance Italians would perfect it, the Russians would idolatrize it. Yet as with algebra or the number zero, chess still embodies its Indian roots, or at least it does in the Western imagination, as an import from an exotic east that exemplifies something intrinsic about reality. The Indians “have extracted chess’s mysteries from supernatural forces,” wrote Said al-Andalusi in the eleventh-century, a few decades before the Lewis pieces would be carved. “While the game is being played and its pieces are being maneuvered, there appear the beauty of structure and the greatness of harmony.”
Because of its mathematical rigor and the complexity of strategy, chess has endured for millennia. The game of over a hundred-thousand manuals, with some of the earliest including Pedro Damiano’s 1512 How to Play Chess and Games and Ruy Lopez de Segura’s Book of the Liberal Invention and Art of the Game of Chess in 1561; the game of complex strategies from the English Opening to the Scandinavian Defense, the King’s Gambit to the Albin Counter Gambit; the game of exulted tournaments such as Steinitz-Chigorin in 1892 Havana or Petrossian-Spassky in 1966 Moscow; the game of wizardly chess masters – Mikhail Botvinnik, Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer, Kasparov. All of them, in their sterile manner dogged and determined, pursuing what the novelist Vladimir Nabokov in The Defense described as “combinations, pure and harmonious, where thought ascended marble stairs to victory; there were tender stirrings in one corners of the board, and a passionate explosion, and the fanfare of the Queen going to its sacrificial doom.”
Maybe it took a Russian soul like Nabokov’s to speak of something with such precision and difficulty as chess in terms of tenderness and passion, for while chess manuals are written in a language more algebraic than prosodic (where the first four moves of the New York 1956 “Game of the Century” between Fisher and Donald Byrne is rendered as “1. Nf3 Nf6 2. C4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7 4. D4 0-0”), the novelist sees it as an activity engaged with feeling. For chess is not just the play of symbols and ciphers, but of characters – the dutiful but doomed pawns, the stalwart and persistent rooks, the elaborate and baroque knights, the sly and cunning bishops, the anemic but absolute king, and of course the grand triumph that is the queen, privy to treat the board as her dominion. In their most standardized form, the iconically familiar pieces that can be found at grand master tournaments and inner city high school’s alike, there is a certain poetry. The pawns with their rounded heads, the equine magnificence of the knights, the strangely hermetic oblong spheroids of the bishops. What should be recalled, is that each game is not just a set of algebraic notation, of complex formulas dutifully inscribed in chess manuals, but a story as well.
Certainly the lives of players have lent themselves to brilliant fiction, often by central and eastern European authors who feel a certain proprietaries to the game. Nabokov’s The Defense of course, but then there is also also Stephan Zweig, the Austro-Hungarian novelist and arguably the most European man who ever lived, in The Royal Game. There the mysterious Dr. B., tortured by the Gestapo, splits his psyche into two and becomes the chess genius who beats the world master idiot savant prodigy Mirko Czentovic on a Buenos Aires-bound ocean liner. In Zweig’s estimation, “is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories?” Not just a science or an art alone, as suggested by some writers, but indeed a metaphor for life, or perhaps life itself. “It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played,” writes Lewis Carrol in that hallucinogenic, psychedelic masterpiece Through the Looking-Glass. If life is like chess then chess is like life – an indication as to why the game is still being played some fifteen centuries after that first raja threw a pair of dice in a match of chaturanga. From 64 squares, 32 pieces, and two players comes, according to the calculations of mathematician Claude Shannon, an astounding 10¹²⁰ number of potential games, bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. That’s 10¹²⁰ stories, that’s 10¹²⁰ narratives, tales of battle and strategy, regicide and sacrifice. Now consider how many more squares there are in our world, how many more pieces, and consider the limitless number of games that we can play, in our fiction or in our lives?
“God moves the player as he the pieces,” writes Jorge Luis Borges in a poem considering the game, “But what god behind God plots the advent/Of dust and time and dreams and agonies?” Only the Japanese game Go is as mythologized as chess, but the later still acts as the most potent symbol of narrative’s limitless possibilities, though the answer to Borges question is the same in play or in life. Perhaps there are two players, two gods of the board, but the conclusion to a game or to a life must be the same, even if there are 10¹²⁰ ways of getting to the end. Albertus Pictor, a Medieval Swedish painter, depicted all games’ inevitable conclusions in a 1480 piece at the Taby Church outside of Stockholm. A respectable burger in white tights and green velvet jacket plays a game of chess; his opponent is a grinning, rotting, skeletal cadaver, all missing tooth smile and taut browned decaying flesh. This was the image which director Ingmar Bergman saw that inspired The Seventh Seal with its black-clad, pale-white corpuscular Death playing a game against a Crusader knight returning to his plague-ravaged homeland. If chess be a metaphor for life, with all of the intricacies and possibilities of how that life may be spent across trillions and trillions divergent stories, than the ending remains the same, so that the game is all the more poignant. Pictor’s skeleton stares at the man out of empty eye sockets, expressing an inviolate truth – “I checkmate thee.”
Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, a staff writer for LitHub, and a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily. The author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Relic will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in January as part of their Object Lessons series, while Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain will be released by Melville House in July of 2024.