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Poetry

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This is a poem I posted on Facebook in April 2020.

Poetry

in our disasters we are reduced to you,
you whom we forget; while life throngs with noises,
anxieties, joys, quick mental calculations
about different types of bus pass, we can glance on you
and think,
“what, in the end, does this string of words really mean?”
or,
“I know, when I was younger, this did something for me.”

But when we are brought low and hollowed out,
when our joys and securities have voted for an exit,
and our worries show us their pettiness at last
in the wake of some vast disturbance; when towers slough down,
or the banners of civil wars are raised in our midst—
in our shattered state, we find you have not abandoned us,
who abandon you in a heartbeat, oh our heartbeat.
Still dance, sung image, rhythm given meaning
and meaning rhythm, when we run home in fear
in the fire-lit cave of our skulls we become our ancestors,
feeling your pulse above the deep work of a drum.

Audit Tyrannus Anxius

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Today is December 28, the fourth day of Christmas, also known as the feast of the Holy Innocents. This day commemorates the episode, in Matthew’s version of the Christmas story, when King Herod has all male children below the age of two in Bethlehem put to death to avert the coming of a rebellious King whose rising threatens to destabilize the region. Like many events in the Gospels, the evidence that this “really happened” as an historical, earthly event is dubious (and irrelevant). As a spiritual event, it has happened repeatedly, is happening now, and will happen throughout human history until the Lord comes to abolish ICE and hold tribunals.

The Latin hymn for this feast day is Audit tyrannus anxius, which I subjected to a loose “translation”/adaptation a couple years ago. One side is a relatively close poetic translation (although not an exact translation as it came out in a different meter; unusually, in this poem the Latin lines mostly come out more concisely in English) while the other is a more loose adaptation touching on the present. I could never choose between the two versions, and neither is exactly spectacular on its own, but I thought that side by side they are at least interesting.

Audit Tyrannus Anxius

The anxious tyrant hears:
a prince of kings is come
to rule all Israel
and royal David’s home.

He rages at the news:
“He’d stand where I have stood!
Go soldier, take up steel,
and drench the cribs in blood.”

What profit from such evil?
From Herod’s crime, what gain?
The Christ is borne unmarked,
alone from all these slain.

All glory to you, Jesus,
who from a Virgin came;
with Father and kind Spirit
eternally the same.

The petty tyrant hears:
the long work has begun
to mend his nation’s name,
remake what he’s undone.

He screams at the fake news:
“We must defend our land!
What if, not saying, but what if
someone took it in hand?”

What grows from his corruption—
who profits? (Pray, do you?)
Through all the cracks in his wall
let pure light still slip through;

from what is uncorrupted
the glory creep out, slow;
what parents learn, and lovers,
each hideous age must know.

The Two Violences

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CW: Analytical discussion of violence and related loaded terms

The word (and idea) of violence means two different things, and there are people in America who use it and think about it in predominantly one way or the other. The nature of these two usages creates a venn diagram with a big abdominal section where there are acts/events that either side would describe as violence – one person angrily punches the other in the face. We generally agree that this is some kind of violence. But when we look at the two wings of this weird butterfly of violence, at the usages that seem incorrect (even dumbfounding, even hilarious) to one side or the other, we can identify what these two usages are.

On the one side, let’s say the right side of the diagram, there is violence used to describe actions against property. This seems deeply confusing and alienating to people on what we’ll call the left, because to them violence must be against humans or other conscious, feeling beings. But this usage of violence has a long pedigree, as long as the word; in this usage, violence is a property of the action, which could be against anyone or anything. Consider “a violent outburst,” “he said violently” etc. It refers to actions which are sudden, eruptive, damaging, angry. Compare also the use of vehement, which comes from a Latin word that can be translated as violent, but also ardent or eager.

On the other side, we have the use of violence to refer to psychologically harmful words and treatment. The practice of describing various microaggressions and other verbal offenses like misgendering as violence reached its peak a few years ago, and I have not seen it as much recently, but we can also include on this side of the diagram any descriptions that classify verbal sexual harassment, offensive terminology, or “routine” and “random” stops and searches as violence. The further removed it is from active, physical violence done in anger, the more likely it is to seem like a laughable misuse of the word to people on the other side. But in the usage on the left side of the diagram, violence is characterized by its effect on the victim, in terms of pain, harm, and trauma. We could relate this to the etymological relationship of violence with violation, a word whose cognates in Romance languages tends to refer to rape.

So we have two usages of violence, one of which places criteria on the actor and their actions, the other on the recipient and their experience. In a big middle ground of cases where there is both an aggressive act and a sensitive victim, both usages apply and we get the illusion that we are using the same word. Who uses which usage? I don’t have data, but my subjective sense is that people using the agent-centering usage of violence trend white, male, cis/straight, and conservative, and people using the victim-centering usage trend non-white, female, queer and progressive. That might be wrong, but I think it matches who I’ve seen express bafflement at each usage over the years. If we assume that’s right, does it tell us anything? Is there a reason for a white man to be more likely to think of violence as something you do, and a Black woman to think of it as something that happens to you?

Thoughts on Games, Sports, and Beauty

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“Beauty,” according to David Foster Wallace, “is not the goal of competitive sports,” and it might seem odd, misguided, and sort of pointless to argue otherwise–but that is still exactly what I would like to do. He goes on: “but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. . . . Beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty.” And yet later in the essay, when DFW is observing the technical and tactical intricacies of Roger Federer’s play, he is not transfixed solely by the gorgeous kineticism of the body but also by the perfection of tennis. What arouses DFW’s literary imagination is the sort of inverse mysticism of the body transcending the mind, the necessary neurological pre-consciousness of Federer’s responses, however tactically ingenious; but it is also the particular beauty of a particular game played at its highest competitive level.

If I want to show that this special kind of lusory beauty is central to the purpose of competitive sports—and, for some fucking reason, I do–it’s necessary to defend the classification of sports as games in the first place. I don’t mean the existence of an overlap between the two categories, which is pretty much incontestable, but the total inclusion of “sports” within “games,” which must not be, or the philosopher David Papineau couldn’t have recently mounted an attack on it. Papineau confronts this notion in the form of Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits, whose book The Grasshopper: Life, Games, and Utopia has become a philosophical cult classic. The Grasshopper, framed as a charming dialogue in which the ill-prepared Grasshopper who starves to death in Aesop’s fable (having somehow acquired the personality traits of Socrates and Jesus Christ), gives a definition of games; thoroughly defends the definition through many fanciful examples; and gives a more cursory defense of games’ value through their indispensable role in an ideal state of society.

Here, to get the topic of debate firmly before us, is Suits’s (or rather the Grasshopper’s) full definition of games :

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]. I also offer the following simpler and, so to speak, more portable version of the above: playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (Suits, 41)

“So far, so good,” writes Papineau,

But Suits goes wrong when he suggests that sports are a subspecies of games. In truth, while some sports are games—tennis, cricket, soccer—many others are not—running, rowing, skiing. And in assimilating sports to games, Suits misunderstands what makes them worthwhile. In Suits’ view, the value of games, and therefore of sports, lies in meeting the challenge of the arbitrary obstacles they impose. This seems to me to trivialize things. If something isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing even when it’s made difficult. If that was all there was to it, we may as well stick to snakes and ladders.

Papineau misplays here in three ways (setting aside the literary-critical misstep of conflating Suits and his Grasshopper, which is real but not strictly relevant here): First, he engages primarily with Suits’s “more portable version” of the definition, which is easier to invoke in a brief blog post but which clouds the rigor with which Suits suits his definition to everything Papineau would class as sports. Second, Papineau offers a competing definition of sports:”If you want a definition of sport, I would say that it is any activity whose primary purpose is the exercise of physical skills.” But to argue with Suits he needs a competing definition of games—after all, the Grasshopper spends many chapters demonstrating that his definition applies to this and that example, and saying the examples also fit a separate definition of sports doesn’t change whether they are games. It’s understandable, since the value of sports is what Papineau wants to talk about, but it still leaves Suits unscathed.

Here’s something of an edge case: competitive weightlifting. On its surface it might seem like just the sort of case where Papineau’s definition of a sport might obtain and Suits’s of a game might not. Lifting heavy objects is patently a physical skill and competitive weightlifting is all about exercising it. Meanwhile if the (prelusory) goal is to lift up very large weights, the permitted means of lifting them line up pretty well with the natural considerations of how to lift them without injuring oneself. But the limiting prohibitions, as Suits would analyze it, are against using any means other than ones body to lift the weights. This is relevant as competitive weightlifting at high levels deals in weights one might plausibly employ heavy machinery to move. Why do the participants submit to the restriction of using only the body to lift massive weights? Because it makes possible the activity of competitive weightlifting—the “lusory attitude” in Suits’s full definition. So even a case such as this is a game under Suits’s rubric, and it’s hard to see what wouldn’t be that is also a sport under Papineau’s. Suits would probably have to concede that mere strength training, when undertaken not for its own sake but to build muscle, is not a game (since the means adopted, of lifting heavy things with the body, are not arbitrary but simply the best way of achieving the end of muscle-building)—but would Papineau want to concede that it’s a sport?

The third and most crucial misplay: Papineau misconstrues what Suits means when he writes “just because they make possible such activity”; he seems to take “such activity” to mean overcoming arbitrary obstacles, but “such activity” means the game in question. So golfers do not restrict themselves to propelling a ball with certain types of clubs for the sake of overcoming arbitrary restrictions, but they do do it for the sake of playing golf. This is a different thing from, as Papineau would contend, doing it for the sake of the physical skills exercised in golf—more on this later. This misreading leads to a serious misunderstanding of where games derive their value according to Suits’s Grasshopper. I’m not certain that Suits really makes any positive claims regarding where games get their value. His closing chapters, which cover the utopia part of “Life, Games, and Utopia,” do make the case that in a society with sufficiently abundant resources and sufficiently automated labor, games become the only form of human activity possible—or rather all forms of human activity collapse into Suits’s definition of games. This is to say the lusory attitude becomes the only avenue of approaching all human activities, but this is only a good thing inasfar as those activities have some value in themselves, for the sake of which they’re undertaken (as the definition of lusory attitude in fact implies.) These chapters are also where the identification of Suits and his fanciful Grasshopper becomes, to my mind, most vexed and ironic; but even setting that aside, Papineau’s reading of Suits seems like a willful misreading, perhaps motivated by his palpable distaste for Suits and his fans, whom he suspects of pasty, unathletic characteristics. Papineau gets jockishly squeamish about Suits’s personality, and so attributes to him an absurd position.

Many sports comprise actions that exist outside the defining rules of any sport—running, rowing, etc. But when these actions are considered as sports they must mean the actions when socially constructed as activities undertaken for their own sake. Running as mere exercise is not the sport of running; rowing as the best way to get to a remote island is not the sport of rowing; subsistence hunting in the Alaskan bush is not hunting for sport. It is precisely when the activity is voluntarily undertaken for its own sake—when it is a game à la Suits—that it becomes a sport. The American/Canadian usage of sports vs. the British sport may have an impact on Papineau’s analysis; perhaps framing things in British English makes it more tempting to grant all athletic activity, even when it is not clearly a sport, a general inclusion in a broad category of life called sport.

So perhaps I’ll grant this, in the end, on linguistic grounds. But when we talk about competitive sports (as in our DFW quote, above) we are always talking about a discrete sport as constructed and instituted, and this is invariably a Suitsian game. But how does the player relate to that game?

It is time to talk about Kobe Bryant, and the poem he used a few months ago to announce his retirement from competitive basketball. (Though I’ve watched every season of Friday Night Lights and am therefore clearly an expert on this topic, it still seems convenient to let a competitive athlete answer.) I’m not going to talk about its artistic quality, which the literary establishment (poor godless creature!) long since had its mean-spirited fun with. Rather I’m interested in why the whole poem, nominally framed as a letter, is built around the old-fashioned device of apostrophe. You won’t find many poems printed in modern literary journals that are sustained addresses to abstract entities, but from “Dear Basketball” onward, Bryant’s poem is exactly that. It turns out that addressing an abstraction is in fact the most sincere expression of the lived reality of being Kobe Bryant. “I knew one thing was real: / I fell in love with you.” One thing was real. Is the one real thing basketball or the love of basketball? It would be beyond my expertise to dabble in metaphysics and argue about what kind of real existence the abstract basketball has, but it’s clear that Bryant’s experience of relationship with this thing called basketball is real and rich and essential to his existence.

We can learn from this poem quite a bit about that relationship. We know, for instance, that he could encounter basketball—the selfsame basketball he would experience later on NBA courts—as a six-year-old taking shots into a garbage can. We know he sees not just continuity but complete identity between this basketball and the one he remained in relationship with as a professional player. So why does he play? “Not because challenge called me”; so, not to overcome arbitrary obstacles—so far Papineau is pleased— “But because YOU called me. / I did everything for YOU.” Oh. Well then. Do I need to say that this is not about “the exercise of physical skills”? There is something about the game of basketball that allows Bryant (if I may be Buberian) to encounter it as a You—as a YOU, even.

Doubtless Kobe Bryant cares about and values the exercise of his physical skills; perhaps he even recognizes and values the fact that he can manifest for others the particular “human” and “kinetic beauty” sung by DFW. But this is not the focus of the relationship his poem depicts. Allow me to quote Thomas Nagle’s essay on “Sexual Perversions”:

We approach the sexual attitude toward the person through the features that we find attractive, but these features are not the objects of that attitude.
This is very different from the case of an omelet. Various people may desire it for different reasons, one for its fluffiness, another for its mushrooms, another for its unique combination of aroma and visual aspect; yet we do not enshrine the transcendental omelet as the true common object of their affections. (Nagle, 43)

While I believe Nagle’s relationships with omelets have been significantly deficient, he still lays out the salient distinction between attraction to attributes vs. attraction to the thing itself through its attributes. My conviction, simply, is that when Bryant writes “because YOU called me” he is addressing a lover and not an omelet. When he encounters basketball, he does not care centrally about some of its features (such as exercising physical skills) but apprehends the beauty and comes under the total aesthetic presence of the game itself.

Bibliography

The Significance of Chess

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What follows is essentially the ravings of a lunatic. I considered constructing a fictional crackpot persona to express these theories in a novel or other shell, but eventually decided to be the crackpot I wanted to see in the world, and present the ideas as my own. If the underlying historical argument seems farfetched to you, you can take it as the fictional premise of an interpretive fancy.

Chess cannot be said, really, to have been created by any singular person, or even by a singular human culture. It arose, at least a form of it, in India, and traveled into Persia and through the Islamic world to Europe, pieces and rules changing along the way and undergoing many more variations within Europe over centuries, before a definitive standard emerged. As such it would be absurd to claim that anyone had intentionally laden its rules, its pieces and their movements, with heavy meanings, moral, political, or spiritual; the supposed architect of these meanings would be impossible to define. Yet it is possible to view chess, and its particular beauty, as a poetic system of evocative movements, declaring nothing but resonating with—not everything, but a great deal. A treasure trove, in other words, of connotative and not denotative significance.

The idea of such a system of significance in chess does not require positing some kind of conspiracy to put it there, nor the tinkering of an intelligent designer in the game’s evolution. Rather, I believe it arose from the very nature of that evolution. In the game’s migrations and its centuries of further development in Europe, untold numbers of chess variants and chess-like games arose and fell out of favor. Subjection to the best attempts of thousands upon thousands of intelligent persons to master the game sheared away strategically less-deep versions, leading to a version of the game emerging as standard that has remained unsolved (and apparently unsolvable) to this day. But I believe these centuries of selective pressure pushed the game not only towards the strategically deepest form, but towards the form that resonated most with the worldviews of late-medieval Europeans, and with the lives and feelings and beliefs of its players. It has continued to resonate across centuries and across the world, because the pieces speak to more than a medieval European worldview, but to deeper truths beyond that.

QueenThe central relationship among all the pieces is that of the Queen and the King. Put gnomically: the Queen is the expression of the King. The King can move one square in any direction—he exists in all the dimensions the game-universe has to offer, but acts upon none of them with force. But the Queen acts upon all these dimensions with the full force of movement, a bodying-forth of glory into power. Like an earthly king to the heavenly one, she is his agent, his image, the mode and the medium of his action. The nature of this action, and the “dimensions” in which she operates, are best understood through looking at the pieces into which her light is refracted—the Bishop and the Rook, whose movements combine to form hers.

BishopThe Bishop began life as an elephant, which had, in the Indian versions of chess, a rather weaker version of the Bishop’s diagonal movement. It was passage through the Islamic world and its proscriptions on representational art that led to the abstract appearance of the Elephant, which reminded Christians of a Bishop’s miter and led to the piece’s new name. (It is this movement from the simply representational, through the abstract, to the obliquely representational that allows the whole shift in the game from a straightforward representation of a battle to an evocation of the whole cosmic and social order.) Under the evolutionary stress that made chess more strategically dynamic and (if we grant my premise) more meaning-laden, the Bishop came to have total power over the diagonal dimension of the game.

The Bishop is the Church, especially from the medieval perspective, but also all academics, scholars, intellectuals; whoever and whatever moves at an offset angle to the main secular and material thrust of life. By the nature of diagonal movement on a chessboard, the Bishop always remains on the same color, committed to intellectual principles that may seem effête or perverse to more pragmatic forces. To those of Rookish and Knightish dispositions, it’s often confusing why say, the Church has to take time to consider the theological implications of a change, or deliberate on the most sound wording, when to act quickly would immediately relieve suffering. The Supreme Court of the United States, similarly, is subjected to (and sometimes yields to) pressure to follow partisan interests or enact changes—but instead the more abstract principles of jurisprudence are (generally) the real concern of the justices. If the point is to move forward, why move diagonally? If the point is to attack or defend a white square, why adhere to a commitment to the black? If power can be achieved or suffering relieved by meddling in a less-developed alien civilization, why adhere to the Prime Directive? Those acting under the Bishop can have difficulty being understood not only by the Rooks and Knights of life, but also by the Bishops bound to a different color; watch a theologian try to talk to an economist, or even a theologian of a different sect, and attempt to communicate from contrasting fundamental premises.

RookThe Rook, too, bears the marks of chess’s multi-continental history, still carrying as it does its Persian name, rukh, meaning chariot. But after the alchemical shifts of the crossing into Europe, it is also known as the Castle, and appears as a crenellated tower. As with the Elephant-Bishop, the literal retreats or is transfigured; the idea of a chariot moving very quickly in a straight line becomes pure military might manifesting in castles and expressing itself over the orthogonal dimensions. The battlefield becomes the social order, becomes the world. It is fitting that Rook, unlike Queen, Bishop, Knight, and even ultimately King, does not denote a person. It is strength expressed as an impersonal force, too great and too implacable to greet and name in familiar English.

Metaphysically, the Rook is the material; spiritually, the secular or temporal; politically, the military; personally, the pragmatic. At its best, the Rookish outlook is straight-shooting, levelheadedness, the necessary shift in discussion from the abstract ends to the practicable means. At its worst, it is the disdain for any moral or intellectual ends that would place limits on the efficient means, and a contempt for the human frailty of the Pawn, the ineffectuality of the Bishop, the flightiness of the Knight—even for the even-handedness and multidimensional perspective of the Queen. The greatest actors-out of the Rook in history are probably consummate military men such as Patton; one of the clearest in literature is Coriolanus, from Shakespeare’s tragedy of the same name. The Roman general Coriolanus, after tremendous performance on the battlefield, is encouraged to become a Consul of Rome and step into the function of the Queen. But it soon comes to light that Coriolanus, a pure Rook, has only contempt for Pawns, and has no interest in the institutions of the City for which he claimed to fight. Soon, after being exiled for his conduct, he fights against Rome as easily as for it, showing he never had a commitment to any ideals or institutions, but only the exercise of power itself.

QueenSo we find in the Queen the union of the Bishop and Rook, more than the sum of her parts, at least in eminence. If we wish to make an analogy, let us say that the King is the Queen of England, exercising no direct power, even though nominally Head of State and of the Church, so all the authorities of the social order serve at her will; the (chess) Queen, then, is like a fusion of the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the actual acting expressions of her Headship in both the temporal-orthogonal and spiritual-diagonal realms. The (chess) King’s authority further ramifies into the Bishops and Rooks, manifesting as clergy and scholars on the one hand, and the apparatus of military and commercial power on the other.

KnightWhat, then, is the Knight? It is unusual among pieces in that its movement is not a subset of the Queen’s, and it does not move orthogonally or diagonally, or at least not one without the other. Its ability to leap is radically unlike other pieces. All this is sufficiently mystifying. However, the Knight has one property, initially less obvious, perhaps, but familiar to those who’ve at least dabbled in chess personally, which may give us a starting point: the Knight, whenever it makes its odd L-shaped leap, always changes color, from a black square to a white or vice versa. This sets it in clear contrast (though not necessarily opposition) to the Bishop’s absolute constancy.

The Knight is the force in the social order that attempts to provide a corrective to the social order. Its movements are short but overleap obstacles, protecting the defenseless or attacking a danger, an advocate and intercessor, a kind of white blood cell in the social body. Leaping past other pieces, ignoring both obstacles and abstract commitments, the Knight disdains both bureaucratic red tape and (even legitimate) qualms regarding means; the Knight seeks to respond to the most urgent need. As far as medieval society goes, real knights in the sense of armored horsemen were principally features of the Rook, aspects of the king’s or lord’s military force; but the Knight’s protective nature and rather gallant and impetuous movement align him with the chivalric ideal, in contradistinction to that vulgar reality.

Many lawyers can act under the Knight whether they defend or prosecute, though in the abstract contemplation of the law they find themselves under the Bishop. Activists and teachers may similarly act in the Knight’s mode as they address urgent needs in society, yet have a Bishoply side that comes out when they discuss the principles that inform their vocation. The supreme Knight-Bishop vacillator in literature is Percy Shelley, whose poetry comes to show a clear division between his Knightly “exoteric” poems—urgent, radical, political verse written towards a mass audience—and his Bishoply “esoteric” meditations, more labyrinthine and lofty in style, that contemplate the deeper ideals of beauty and justice which enflesh themselves in his radical politics.

PawnA vacillation between two or more of the higher pieces is common in part because of the last fundamental truth of the chess pieces: we are all Pawns. This is shown in chess’s rules by the miracle of promotion, whereby a Pawn can transform into any of the other material pieces, even the Queen. It is shown obliquely in the resemblance of the Pawn’s movements with all other pieces, achieving as it does plodding Rook movements when it advances, tiny strokes of Bishophood when it captures, and thus both aspects of the Queen and King in miniature; it even can enact the Knight’s leap in pedestrian style, with one move and one capture. The mystery of the promotion reconciles aspects of the medieval worldview, mediating between Christianity’s insistence on the radical (spiritual) equality of human individuals with the belief in well-defined social roles such as priesthood and the divine right of kings (or rather, of the Queen.) We human beings are not Rooks, Bishops, and so on, but Pawns variably and inconstantly assuming those roles; even Richard the Lionheart or Barack Obama are not Queens, but Pawns elected to the role of supreme images.

The Pawn means different things seen through the gaze of each of other pieces. To the Rook, the Pawn is simply a terrible Rook, moving with a fraction of the force and striking only with perverse indirection, as the mere human individual can seem paltry to the larger forces of military and economic power, and the concerns of daily life can seem petty to those who assume by day a Rookish role, such as generals and some CEOs. To the Bishop, the Pawn is largely uninteresting in its daily movements and only seems relevant to the Bishop’s interests in its rare captures; as in periodic flashes of intellectual insight or spiritual depth, any ordinary person may trouble the knowledge of nations. The Knight sees in the Pawn someone worth defending, but whose more gradual movement shows a baffling lack of urgency; it sees the Pawn’s capture as a small Knight’s move: as acts of kindness, bursts of rebellion, and the like. But to the Queen, the Pawn is a Queen in potential and in vague actuality, a material and spiritual agent of limitless significance; and if the Pawn does not express massive powers in either sphere, well neither does the King. In the eyes of the Queen, each Pawn is an expression of the King no less perfect than the Queen herself.

Chess piece icons are by Wikimedia Commons user Colin M. L. Burnett, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.