Chess Game

This is Amorella in the thick of things. Orndorff has great affection for this photograph because it shows two former colleagues from Escola Graduada de Sao Paulo (The Graded School) playing five minute chess during their school lunch break back in the early seventies. On the left is Howard Westfield who taught German and on the right is Vladimir Rodionoff, a chess master and head of the math department at the time. Orndorff has a Brazilian board, pieces and a clock just like these in the photo. This adds to his affection.

The Merlyn books display several games played by two of the characters in “The Brothers” segments, Robert and Richard. Orndorff was chess advisor while at Indian Hill High School and for a short time at Wm. Mason High School. He is a bit rusty and was never really much good, but he enjoys chess and hopes others enjoy the game too.

One of my former students and confirmed reader of the posts sent me an article earlier this month knowing I would be interested. The chess board reminds me of Fate and the controlling one’s destiny.

The essay titled, “The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate,” by Dennis Overbye appeared in the New York Times on 13 October 09. The complete article can be found at: > www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html <

Some scientists are concerned about the European CERN collider, thinking that it might become too powerful with too many variables and thus become more uncontrollable than we wish.

Here is a short quotation from Mr. Overbye in the article:

“I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”

Personally, I am all for the experiments at CERN, I’m sure they have been well thought ought in advance. People were concerned before we dropped the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945 but we dropped it. The bomb exploded, but it did not turn our planet into a miniature sun like some thought it might.

Earlier in this post I used a phrase that I have never understood and I hear people using it or writing it from time to time: “controlling one’s destiny”. Merriam-Webster’s says destiny is: “a predetermined course of events often held to be an irresistible power or agency.”

A chess game played by two individual human chess players can rarely be predetermined even if they are both grand masters. Insight and error come into mind’s play. Human beings are susceptible to both even though the board and pieces and rules are predetermined. Free will is shown in the ‘insight’ or chance and accident is sometimes shown in the ‘error’.  That’s how I see it, but Amorella can better explain what I am trying to write here.

In the Merlyn books I goad the reader to challenge my next move in character, plot, and theme, and even in setting when I write of the World of the Dead. Orndorff gave up this challenge early on. I left him unsettled as seen in the example in the post dated 24 October, “Night Lights”.

If one is born one is destined to have a death date. It is a rule shown by physics. If something is preordained, then it is assumed the Pre-Ordainer can change it, that’s how I see it in these books of fiction. Life may be seen as a game, but ultimately the pieces will all be off the board. In the books Merlyn becomes the board from time to time. Accidents happen. When accidents happen the rules are subject to change. Free will, however, in these books, is no accident.