Eakins, “The Chess Players”
Monday
The world chess championship teeters on the edge of something that has never happened before. If Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana draw today, they will go into the lightning rounds with no one having won any of the 12 regular games. While this is a disappointment to many casual chess fans, a John Donne poem helps us see the games as chess aficionados are seeing them.
These people find the games to be chock full of excitement. In a number of them, moves that appear innocent are recognized by the contestants to be mistakes leading to inevitable checkmate. In other words, Carlsen and Caruana are engaged in a high wire act, and neither so far as suffered a fall. At times (to shift analogies) the players have wriggled out of trouble with Houdini-like skill.
True, in one game the monitoring computer showed a path to checkmate for Caruana. That checkmate, however, required 30 more moves. Computers operate at those refined levels but not humans.
Which leads me to Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” where we also see two levels at work. In a love letter to his wife, Donne says that their sublime connection means that, when he travels abroad, they will not exhibit the same signs of grief as other people. Their relationship is so sublime that it doesn’t require mere physical presence.
Other people, by contrast, go into dramatic paroxysms when they encounter death or departure. Think of them as run-of-the-mill chess players who can see only a few moves ahead. They may make loud dramatic moves but miss out on the higher picture.
The refined speaker counsels his love not to break down into tears and heavy sighs:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Such responses would be like earthquakes, which shake everyone up. Earthquakes are child’s play compared to disruptions within heavenly bodies, however. These disruptions (“trepidation of the spheres”), which according to 17th century astrology have a profound effect on human affairs, nevertheless go unnoticed (are “innocent”):
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Donne’s ultimately argues, in multiple ways, that he and his lover are so refined that they don’t operate the way we “dull sublunary lovers” do. So don’t expect any sublunary dramas for them:
Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Carlsen and Caruana see things the rest of us miss. Even certain pawn moves have had chess pros, after some examination, gasping in admiration (and then spending 15 minutes to explain why the move was so brilliant).
Perhaps Carlsen and Caruana can’t see the board like a computer, but they’re still pretty damned refined.