From time to time a poem

This is not the only Game in which these pieces are present, nor is it the only one to which they present themselves. It is however the only one into which they can be present in others at the same time as in Your time. The playing field extends before you, and for you. For you and for the Other.

You take a long, deep breath – the fresh air fills your lungs and all of your being with courage. The Game will begin soon. You recognise at least the novelty of the match. They are frequent; they blend into one another in such a way as that sometimes you have the impression that one Game has only ended from the moment you find that another has certainly already been in progress for an uncertain time. The time of the Game is never agreed upon beforehand. It lasts as long as it lasts …

The pieces are light and dark. Sometimes they change tones. A light piece becomes dark without you seeing it darken. Sometimes a dark piece lightens, but this seems to happen much more rarely. The change in tone is, in all cases, an effect of its movement – the piece well or badly played finds itself surrounded by other pieces, friendly or adverse, all equal (more or less), they are also in apparently random mutation. There are several thousand rules; one can only respect them by fair trangressions of them. When you hardly think about it, the Game is complicated. If you think about it, it is even more so.

Over time, you have become accustomed to its enigmas. The happenstance events of the Game almost never shock you anymore. Or rather, the shock has become habit. What motivates the Game is its dynamic. You place your pieces, they move by themselves. You watch the Game unfold not only as player, but also in the role of a spectator. You are a player, and you are played by the Game. You are played by your strategy and by that of the Other. You are played by the Other, and he by you.

He is the only constant, he is the Other. You have been playing against and with him for Eternity. You have been played by him for as long. You know one intimately, so much so that you are strangers to one another. You cannot resist one another; your mutual resemblance proves to be a gravity well in which you both orbit perpetually around the barycentre of the Game. You play to pass the time, in order to not annihilate yourselves, so much you love each the other. So much you both love the Game. You love the Game because it lets you hate one another, and you love to hate one another. The Game becomes your only value. The Game becomes existence …

So, you find yourself, again and for always, facing him, the Other. You ask yourself to what deceptions will he resort to meet his objectives. You try in vain to know what his objectives in fact are. His only goal which is certain is your defeat. His pieces darken and darken yours. His Game is cruel, you feel, and his only ideal, and that since the dawn of time, is to win.

Therein lies the difference. There are two players: the one who want to win, and the other who wants only for the Game to be good.

It is ironic, you believe, that the Game can be good beyond victory, beyond loss. Win or lose, insomuch as you have played well, you could be satisfied. The Game satisfies its own needs. All you have to do is place the pieces. As always, they move by themselves. But they all desire advancement and to stay in the Game, whether or not they know they have been placed, whether or not they know they are being played.

The Game is precious, as is every playing piece. You love your pieces; each of them exceptionally beautiful. You desire above all to take care of them. You talk to them. You tell them sometimes about the Game, but never about the Other. They cannot know against nor with whom do you play. That, they would never understand. But that understanding is hardly essential to their well-being. It is really better that they do not know.

While placing your pieces, you do not recognise them as pawn or Queen. You cannot know if they are stones, bones or other tokens. Nor if they are Spades, Diamonds or Hearts. You never know if it is a Jack or a Joker. You cannot tell, at first whether they are light or dark. This knowledge comes during the course of the Game. But when they change colour, they can change their roles as well. A light Hearted Jack can become a dark Joker. The bright and shining Queen can make herself a pawn, right before becoming rubbish. The Joker stays a Joker, light and dark alike, yet the lighter he is, the less important the risk of darkening. Herein is yet another beautiful irony …

The Game starts. You smile as a calm anxiety possesses you –

“I know only how to Love, and Love is the desire to do good.” asserted Socrates they say. This is how the Game is played. What is “good” ? What is “to do good” ? What is the best way of knowing ? It all comes back to the same thing: the Game. Love is much easier in a good Game because victory does not matter so much. Neither does losing …

Yet on the side of the Other, who desires to win, nothing less than victory is acceptable. He places his pieces insidiously. He appreciates them because they are useful to his hidden agendas, but does he love them ? It is a good question … To him, the Game board, with its light and dark regions, is but a battlefield. For him, to lose is unthinkable.

He has certainly already suffered much loss. You know him better than anyone and everyone. His losses have filled him with hatred, and just as it is your Love that guides your Game, it is his Hate from which comes all his strength and ability. And you deal with it. You love him in order to hate him, and by hating him, you love him all the more deeply. On the contrary, he loves you because you hate him, for he cannot accept anyone's Love any more than he can accept loss.

One must reserve pity for the pathetic. As such, you cannot feel pity for him. He creates it for himself according to the rules of the Game, but you cannot. You hate him with your understanding, with your compassion and with your patience. You hate him with your tolerance for his hatred and his thirst for victory. You hate him with your respect for the Game, and given that when the Game is good, sometimes you win. And when you win, he hates you so very much more.

His Game then becomes more deceitful, more manipulative and evermore brutal. He plays his pieces as were they only tokens or stones and not the marvellously human hand-crafted works of art, worn only by time and multiple Games. He places them, he removes them. He manipulates his pieces, and if they do not win for him, he tortures them with guilt. It is difficult for you to watch as he does this, so very beautiful are each of the pieces. His pieces change colour often under his hand, certainly in tone, from light to dark, lighting again as yours darken – though they are always somewhat more tarnished than at the beginning.

Turn after turn, your grand manoeuvres are accomplished with your delicate pieces. The wear from the multiplicity of challenges is seen from day to day, from second to century. All they would need to shine again is a little warmth and to be caressed with a soft, clean cloth, a little maintenance during a period of rest. You find it difficult to recover the pieces he has taken, and he doesn't even bother to try to recover his. At any rate, the pieces taken in the Game never leave the board, except when they are broken. For as old and damaged as they become, they can only cover themselves during a short time-out …

You ask yourself from time to time why do you play the Game ? The answer doesn't come easily. The answer may not even exist. One knows his leisure, just as one knows his duty, but one cannot see what is instinct. Instinct is like culture. Try explaining what is water to a fish, it's impossible. You play the Game because it is your element. Outside of the Game, you are nothing. It is vital to you. It forms you now as much as it created you in the beginning. Your beginning. You cannot remember the first time you played. There was no ceremony, no rite of passage, no access in particular. You started playing because that is simply what you do. You remember quite clearly the opponent, the Other, young, fresh, naïve, almost innocent …

The pieces stay innocent, no matter the Game, and whether or not the Game is good or not. It could be a King, gone wild for his placement near a Castle majestically malicious, or a clear Joker brightened by an already light pawn, the pieces move themselves in reference to the competencies of the players. The pieces create and enlarge this reference. It otherwise doesn't exist, except by and for them. You love your pieces and you devote yourself to their good placement. You then expect nothing from them but that they move themselves as well as they can given the role, the colour and tone which they will have at the moment of their turn. You recognise the limits of your pieces. You only expect them to be such as they truly are.

The Other is not so clement. He modifies the behaviour of his pieces to conform to his desires. He already expects that their weaknesses will change them from one role to another, below or beyond their abilities. He counts on their suffering to drive them into power plays where otherwise tenderness would suffice. It is not enough for him to recognise the limits of his pieces, he exploits them. His pieces do not know innocence, they only know the shame and guilt of all their prior losses, those of the Other, but perceived as their own personal failures. They do not even know the player behind the Game. They do not see the Game in which they move. For them, the reference closes in on them. They change not only role and colour, but also composition with the passage of time. They get heavier, and when the Other can no longer manipulate them as he wishes, he throws them away.

And so marches on the Game, play after play, counter-move after move. The honesty of deception gets confused with the effect of success or failure in deceit. Such is the Game … As the pieces change colour, form and most certainly location, you confront the perversity of the Other, always facing you, the look and the mind sharp as those of an eagle and ready to strike you down if you allow him to notice, through inattention or some lack of candour, the most minor imperfection.

And imperfections, you have them, more than you know …

… especially the Love you feel for your pieces. They call out to you, you answer. You must answer, not knowing how long they will appear by their current, very temporary colour, form or placement. You hesitate, you trip over a sensitivity, over a memory or over a fortuitous intuition. The Other sees it. The Game, good or not, takes a bad turn. In seconds which each last a lifetime, you witness the taking of a piece which you particularly admire. You try to save whatever remains by a more philanthropic strategy, but the principal actor is no more – or is at least no longer of your colour, your form. The Other took him.

The Game, good or not, is over. The pieces, moving themselves, move themselves away. Your defeat surprises you; you had not seen the precision of the Other's calculations, but he had surely seen his chance. With one quite graceless, merciless manoeuvre, he seized his victory so coveted. Smiling at you from the depths of his conceit, he mocks you and your fatal error.

Fair player, you only wanted a good Game, not necessarily victory. As it were, you had neither. Your sorrow, born in the most secret chamber of your entrails, ignites. Your beautiful pieces having been deformed, discoloured and so very, very disgraced before your eyes, accuse you of vehement treachery, voluntary or not. All the Love that you had given them before the shock of an incontestable defeat transforms you, in one severely savage moment, into the thing the most miserable in their confused and consternated esteem.

They lament. Their tears erupt from festering wounds as the Other laughs beguilingly and savours all the misery he found the force to inflict. He not only won the Game, but humiliated you to the highest level. You leave from where you were, from where you had played, from where you were beaten. You leave your pieces behind – those you had loved so much – injured, broken and full of bitterness. You leave all that behind in order to cover another field, another arena. You abandon all that was for another fare elsewhere, somewhere good. You depart from your Game and exit.

Outside, it is raining buckets, if not barrels. Inside also. The sky, as dark as your abandoned pieces, as dark as the contrast between your soul of midnight blue against the sky-blue covering of your placement, ruptures and evacuates itself of all its humid heaviness. The steel and concrete coloured sky presses down on you with its illuminating reflections and thunderous explanations. The train in which you are travelling passes near the edge of a wood. You find yourself alone in the car. The trees proudly stand in attention all along this stretch of railway, their foliage undulating as a sea of shadow and stone, pious before the rain and wind. By and in the window at the other side of the car, you perceive, outside and in, a fatal image too familiar to not notice. A solitary weeping willow, weeping alone, bending under the blasts of the storm, bowing before Life. Its tears cleanse your eyes, and you clearly visualise across blood and sweat the mocking face that laughs, that taunts you, that has never left you for a single instant. Your reflection upon vision of the weeping willow, all comes together as One and in the voice of the Other, you speak to yourself again the first words since your failure : a round of Game ?you suggest …

One piece, almost forgotten, you possess still and for always. It is in good form, yet beautiful and even more polished from excessive use. It never leaves you either. As is your nature, you take this piece and place it on a black space. It is neither a Queen nor a Jack nor a Joker. It assures a good Game. Its name is Hope.

The Other smiles to you again from both sides of the window. The weeping willow is behind and in the rain of another landscape; you project an elsewhere – a good elsewhere – upon the horizon. Looking ahead, the Other places his first piece in front of your Hope. He waits ...

“Tell me what you can remember ...”

“Tell me what you can remember ...”

Alexandre Orion
janvier 2012

Beware the Love that shines
Too brightly in the Eye,
Casting shadows 'round one finds
Sometimes Error,
Sometimes a Lie …