Nov 20 2021 : The Artistic Choice Versus Theory
Nov 20, 2021
I find it peculiar and perhaps pathological that one starts to have a sudden interest in chess. Why now? Why today? What am I trying to avoid? Are some of the first questions I consider when I feel like reproaching myself. I have been thinking a lot about failure recently and why I “feel” like I am failing. Failing at an ambiguous concept called “life”.
Especially, when we approach an age where society again “feels” like you should have your life together. The funny thing is, I think we would all like to “think” we have it together. The term “ambiguous” is key here because that’s exactly what these ideas and statements are when we say them. Yet we also have the tendency to use them as a measuring stick. “Don’t you think, life means more than that?” Or my favorite one, “You’re just wasting your life away!”. Both statements utilize “life” as some sort of unit of measure for what we should or shouldn’t be doing. Yes, the idea that something should “mean more” is a kind of measure.
One of my favorite moments in college, was when my microeconomics professor said “hey, if you want to work at Seven Eleven and smoke weed all day then you should be able to do so.” He wasn’t being sarcastic either, but it goes to show how compulsively obsessed we are with “structure”. If you don’t believe me, then I guess you haven’t been told by Jordan Peterson to “make your bed” yet. But this whole making bed business is just a theory, a theory for structure.
In chess, before opening moves were called “theory” they were actually made and invented by players. But since I’ve been spending an obsessive amount of time watching Grandmaster’s play like Magnus Carlson and Hikaru Nakamura, you start to slowly realize how mundane it is to play the game as “theory”. One of my favorite comments from Nakamura when he comes down to play locals and drink coffee is when people are “wowed” by his moves and all he does is shrug and say, “Nothing crazy, just theory.”
For Grandmasters, theory is just all the responses recorded and memorized as the best lines to your opponent’s moves. However, what I love about chess is when the Grandmasters go for the “artistic choice”. And while this artistic choice is no doubt risky, you can probably bet your opponent did not memorize against such a response. Repetition and memory will not save you here because a new response demands a new one in return.
The psychological significance of a risky move is that your opponent is forced to wonder what exactly he/she will fail to see if they choose to respond in the same manner they typically have. This “poetic move” causes frustration and paranoia to your opponent because they think either you’ve just “blundered” (made a mistake) or there’s a hidden exchange that will cause them to lose. But these are Grandmasters, and for the most part they know what they are doing so it would be a mistake to completely disregard the move as such.
Either way, you must make a move, you must respond to the artistic choice. In chess, these are what we would call the historical moments that “change the game forever”, but in our own lives it is not quite clear. For myself however, the point is not to “capture” life because just like in chess you can never “capture” the King. The real objective is to checkmate which is to reveal to your opponent that their King is trapped and can no longer move.
So, people are right when they “I have no idea what I’m doing with my life” and maybe that is true but this is my poetic move. Another way to translate this haunting line is, “I am showing you another way to live life”, that is beyond all kinds of theory. And like Grandmasters I adore, my aim is not to capture the King ( which you never can) but to do the bizarre unexpected thing, and change the game forever.