Chess

Maybe chess really is good exercise for the brain. I had a dream that was more engineer-like and technologic. It actually involved a living animal, but it was about how an animal adopted another animal to become part of it (the mechanics of it), seeming more like the dream that a science-nerd might have.

I know I swore off chess a few years ago, believing that I finally accepted that I just do not have that kind of brain. I’m not very strategic or analytical. I have a little knack for free association and can turn the occasional phrase, but that is it. However, chess has come up from a couple of different directions. Sugar has been tweeting about playing chess, and one would think, going by those tweets, that she is pretty good, though I am skeptical, because it seemed pretty clear that she is as lacking in these hard-logic brain functions as I am - not mathematical in the least. And chess has also been a theme in my bedtime novel, “By Reason of Insanity”.

Very importantly, our computers offer us a free chess game, “Chess Titans”. I wouldn’t have dared to pay for another program. Titans is plain and simple, but it gives you a fair chess game, and it has ‘fun’ levels, or beginner levels, so that playing a game is not always a deflating ego-crush. And I was feeling a little disenchanted about streaming TV shows.

Watching TV has long seemed like a brain-dead kind of way to pass the time. I still like streaming shows, but I am now being much more selective, sticking only to those shows that really hit a chord with me: “Cheers”, “The Tudors”, “The Shield”, and a series that I never watched on TV, but which is sold as being as aggressive and provocative as “The Shield”, namely, “The Sons of Anarchy”. It is about a motorcycle gang, and I clicked on the first episode with a heavy dose of skepticism, ready to click it off, but it hooked me and looks like it will keep me interested.

As for chess, it remains to be seen whether I will still be pushing around bishops and knights and pawns on the chessboard when summer comes back around. I hope so. I am practically convinced that it is good for the brain. I am not saying that it will give you another ten IQ points, but I think it wakes up what you have, as you strain to imagine what the next few moves might be, conjuring up alternative scenarios, looking for an answer to a question that you are not even entirely sure of.

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Plato

In “Gorgias”, in his sometimes caustic debate with the fierce Callicles, Socrates ostensibly foreshadows his own trial and execution. A major theme of the discussion is what a good leader should be telling his people, and Socrates argues against the way that power-hungry leaders pander to the people’s basic appetites, while a good leader must often say and do things that may offend and anger them. Callicles challenges him about how such a strategy would poorly serve him if he, Socrates, were ever brought up on charges before a jury, and Socrates agrees that he would fare poorly indeed.

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My trial will be equivalent to a doctor being prosecuted by a cook before a jury of young children. How do you think a doctor would defend himself if he were up before that kind of court? The prosecutor would argue, “Children, the defendant has committed numerous crimes against your honored selves. He has ruined the youngest among you with his surgery and cautery and baffled them with compresses and nauseants; he gives them harsh potions and forces them to go without food and drink. He’s not like me: I’m constantly giving you all kinds of delicious treats.” In these dire straits, what do you think a doctor could find to say? What do you suppose would happen if he told the truth and said, “All my actions, children, have been prompted by a concern for health.” Can you imagine the hue and cry our jurors would raise at that?

-- Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias (Tr. Robin Waterfield)

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