Chess Morality XVIII: The Falcon Heresies

Chess Morality XVIII: The Falcon Heresies

With my foot in my stirrup I mounted again
And on my ten toes rode over the plain.
I met a King and Queen and a company more,
All riding on Horseback, all walking before,
With a stark naked drummer a-beating the drum,
With his heels in his pockets before them did run.
I sat myself down on a hot frozen stone,
Ten thousand around me, and me all alone.
--"Nottingham Fair" 16th C.

It was the Boxing-day after the last Christmas before the End of the World..... I don't know whether you've ever played surrealist Chess. It is played with additional pieces, human Kings, Queens, Bishops, Knights and Pawns, with genuine old machiolated castles for Rooks, all on a board of positively cosmic dimensions. The screams of hapless Pawns being dragged away to captivity with all its nameless horrors, the wheezy death rattle of Knights, the whining supplications of crafty Bishops, the sadistic frenzy of Queens, resounded on all sides.
--Maurice Richardson, "A Quiet Game of Chess" 1948

To kill with no pain like a dog on a chain/ He ain't got no name But it ain't him to blame/ He's only a Pawn in their game.
--Bob Dylan (1963)

Consider anything of a sociologic nature that has ever grown: that there never has been an art, science, religion, invention that was not at first out of accord with established environment, visionary, presposterous in the light of later standards, useless in its incipiency, and resisted by established forces. Embryonic heavens that have dreamed -- and that their mirages will be realized some day. Sounds and an interval; sounds and the same interval; sounds again -- that there is one integrating organism and that we have heard its pulse.
--Charles Fort, 'New Lands' 1923

The master principle of the cosmos is thus not something that can be analyzed or measured. It is a subtle, hidden principle of correspondence that is somehow inherent in the patterning of the world.
--Ira Progoff

Falcon: How valid is the axiom of choice?
What's the specific gravity of thought?
Should variant themes even have a voice?
These questions deep with convolutions fraught.
As four colours suffice any planar map
So Chess Bishop, Rook, Knight, Falcon fill the gap.

Pawn: In mass formation Pawns can best display
The principle of least time and least action.
Promotion chances are wont to convey
That threats alone will provide good traction.
Our strength in numbers must be reckoned with
Where one's not always playing second shift.

Knight: The theory of games lies in a different plane
Than the practice of actually playing.
Over the board is the proper domain--
"In the real world" by popular saying--
To try diverting premature attack
Whilst winning Pawn or exchange in its track.

Bishop: How fully complete are the natural laws?
Theories in Science being consistent
Exclude intentions and a final Cause,
Build on numeric records of events
Complex models re-arrange a factor
Or more than cope with Chaos' strange attractor.

King: A million times a Crime they call a war
And 'progress' the abuse of planet Earth--
Killing for no reason particular
And worshipping what all they can get's worth.
Whoso would live by Rule of slash and burn
Will end as one reduced to ash and urn.

Queen: At sixes and sevens, at variance,
With the mediaeval mad Queen Chess at odds,
Pure dissenters out for noncompliance
To appease never the false chessic gods--
For shift to new center of gravity
To uplift a level of quality.

Rook: As square shooter not being sardonic:
If a prophesy's sufficiently vague,
A bad outcome will never be chronic,
The less detail the better to presage.
So concluding, let us hazard a guess
No other struggle looks as hard as Chess.

--George William Duke 2006