XX: Pleiadic Diacaustic

Chess Morality XX: Pleiadic Diacaustic

The Number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur.  --Edmund Burke, "On the Sublime and the Beautiful" 1757

Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menshenwerk. --Leopold Kronecker 1886

The greatest seeming security is only a temporary disguise of the abysmal. We are all skating on thin ice. --Charles Fort, 'Lo' 1931

Sooner let Earth, air, sea to Chaos fall
Men, monkeys, lap-dogs, parrots, perish all! --Alexander Pope, 'Rape of the Lock' 1717

If you were to be transported by a bold flight into the loftiest regions of the sky, you would see the Sun itself grow gradually smaller and be finally plunged into the darkness of night.  --Ruggiero Guiseppe Boscovich, 'The Eclipses' 1779

It ended on the beach It ended with a hulk of serpents turned into a Boat on the rim of some great sea with his face reflected in the mirror of its waves/ The beauty of his face returned to him & and he was dressed in garments like the Sun
It ended with a bonfire on the beach where he would hurl himself
& burn, his ashes rising & the cries of Birds/ The colour of wild sunflowers, red & blue birds
Birds of yellow feathers in a riot of bright gold Circling til the fire had died out
Circling while his heart rose through the sky./ It ended with his heart transformed into a Star. 
It ended with the morning star with dawn & evening
With Seven days of darkness with his body changed to Light
A star that burns forever in that sky. --Aztec, 'The Flight of Quetzlcoatl'

One of those forms which flit by us when we
Are young, and fix our eyes on every face
Whose course and home we know not, nor shall know,
Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below.  --Lord George Byron, 'Beppo xiv' 1818

Sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi; sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. [Even here are reward for high merit, tears for a world's distress, and sympathy for pervasive mortality.] --Vergil, 'Aeneid 1:461-462' 20BCE

Electra(F): Four-space, as if some great horn of plenty, 
Spirals with time dimension in command.
Number systems based on ten or twenty
Befitting counts performed by foot and hand.
As 'twere end to periodic table,
Fully seven chess pieces are stable.

Merope(P): Known palindrome "never odd or even"
Is read just the same backward or forward,
Fourteen letters being two times seven.
Someone out-does, "Are we not drawn onward,
we Few, drawn onward to new era?" How 
Strange to reverse six times seven now!

Sterope(N): Should rivers run uphill or rain would rise, 
Base metals turn to Gold or chalk to Cheese,
If light flows into stars across the skies,
The wayward universe do as she please,
Whenever Chance have fail to follow Laws,
Then never Chess avails you hollow Draws.

Maia(B): Beauty in the logic of key poem
Means no violation of parity.
Formal proof of numeric theorem
Must summon some established verity.
'e to the (pi, i) equals minus one'
Like to the four Rook, Bishop, Knight, Falcon.

Taygete(K): The most evil ideas you can find
Take Life to be just game of zero sum.
The role of 'King of beasts' to humankind
For goose-stepping to their false heroes' drums.
In their wake the mounting toll of corpses'
Picture of extinctions as time lapses.

Alcyone(Q): The changing Climate face on planet Earth:
Though blood run red, who may be good as dead?
Their narrow vision shown things can get worse.
What's heroism known they're so mis-led?
Favourite ax to grind, in view of powers,
Cover slight facts to mind, in lieu of flowers.

Calaeno(R): This leitmotif a full-blown dress rehearsal.
In theoretic terms, mixed strategy
May help square up any chess reversal
Or tangle with some rogue Game prodigy.
More the merrier or fewer the better
Depends on who's living by the Letter.

--George William Duke 2007