Program Description: David Shenk talks about The Immortal Game
In his wide-ranging and ever-fascinating examination of chess, Shenk gleefully
unearths the hidden history of a game that seems so simple yet contains infinite
possibilities. From its invention somewhere in India around 500 A.D., to its
use as a teaching tool in inner-city America, chess has been a remarkably omnipresent
factor in the development of civilization. Host: Book Passage, Corte Madera,
CA, Sep 22 2006
Here is an excerpt from Shenk's "The Immortal Game", which he
reads to the audience in the above lecture:
Large rocks, severed heads, and flaming pots of oil rained down on Baghdad,
capital of the vast Islamic Empire, as its weary defenders scrambled to reinforce
gates, ditches, and the massive stone walls surrounding the fortress city's
many brick and teak palaces. Giant wooden manjaniq catapults bombarded distant
structures while the smaller, more precise arradah catapult guns pelted individuals
with grapefruit-sized rocks. Arrows flew thickly and elite horsemen assaulted
footmen with swords and spears. "The horses … trample the livers
of courageous young men," lamented the poet al-Khuraymi, "and their
hooves split their skulls." Outside the circular city's main wall—100
feet high, 145 feet thick, and six miles in circumference—soldiers pressed
forward with battering rams while other squads choked off supply lines of food
and reinforcements. Amid sinking boats and burning rafts, bodies drifted down
the Tigris River.
The impenetrable "City of Peace" was crumbling. In the fifty years
since its creation in A.D. 762, young Baghdad had rivaled Constantinople and
Rome in its prestige and influence. It was a wildly fertile axis of art, science,
and religion, and a bustling commercial hub for trade routes reaching deep
into Central Asia, Africa, and Europe. But by the late summer of A.D. 813,
after nearly two years of civil war (between brothers, no less), the enlightened
Islamic capital was a smoldering, starving, bloody heap.
In the face of disorder, any human being desperately needs order—some
way to manage, if not the material world, at least one's understanding of the
world. In that light, perhaps it's no real surprise that, as the stones and
arrows and horses' hooves thundered down on Baghdad, the protected core of
the city hosted a different sort of battle. Within the round city's imperial
inner sanctum, secure behind three thick, circular walls and many layers of
gate and guard, under the luminescent green dome of the Golden Gate Palace,
Muhammad al-Amin, the sixth caliph of the Abbasid Empire, spiritual descendant
of (and distant blood relation to) the Prophet Muhammad, sovereign of one of
the largest dominions in the history of the world, was playing chess against
his favorite eunuch Kauthar.
A trusted messenger burst into the royal apartment with urgently bad news.
More inglorious defeats in and around the city were to be reported to the caliph.
In fact, his own safety was now in jeopardy.
But al-Amin would not hear of it. He waved off his panicked emissary.
"O Commander of the faithful," implored the messenger, according
to the medieval Islamic historian Jirjis al-Makin. "This is not the time
to play. Pray arise and attend to matters of more serious moment."
It was no use. The caliph was absorbed in the board. A chess game in progress
is—as every chess spouse quickly learns—a cosmos unto itself, fully
insulated from an infant's cry, an erotic invitation, or war. The board may
have only thirty-two pieces and sixty-four squares, but within that confined
space the game has near-infinite depth and possibility. An outsider looking
on casually might find the intensity incomprehensible. But anyone who has played
the game a few times understands how it can be engrossing in the extreme. Quite
often, in the middle of an interesting game, it's almost as if reality has
been flipped inside out: the chess game in motion seems to be the only matter
of substance, while any hint of the outside world feels like an annoying irrelevance.
The
messier the external world, the more powerful this inverted dynamic can be.
Perhaps that is why Caliph al-Amin, who sensed that his hours were numbered,
preferred to soak in the details of his chess battlefield rather than reports
of the calamitous siege of his city. On the board he could see the whole action.
On the board he could neatly make sense of significant past events and carefully
plan his future. On the board he still might win.
"Patience my friend," the caliph calmly replied to his messenger
standing only a few feet away and yet a world apart. "I see that in a
few moves I shall give Kauthar checkmate."
David Shenk: The Immortal Game: A History of Chess,
or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art,
Science and the Human Brain
Doubleday, September 5, 2006. List Price: $26.00 (Hardcover, 352 pages).
