Every position has a mood before it has an evaluation.

I've been trying to explain this to people who don't play, and the closest I can get is faces. You see a face across a room and before you have registered a single feature, before you could tell anyone the color of the eyes or the shape of the mouth, you know something. Tired. Amused. About to say something. The reading comes first and the details arrive later to justify it. A chess position is like that. You look at the board and before you have counted anything there's a feeling, cramped, or loose, or nervous, or serene, and the counting comes after, and usually confirms it.

The ugly move

The thing that made me believe the mood was real, and not just laziness dressed up, was the first time I found a move that was right and looked wrong.

I was playing somebody better than me. I had a position that felt bad, not losing, bad, the way a room feels bad when the furniture is wrong. And I saw a move that put my knight on the edge of the board, on a square every book tells you never to put a knight, and it was ugly, and it was clearly right. Not because I calculated it. Because the mood of the position changed when I imagined it there. The room stopped feeling wrong.

I played it. He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at me, which was the first time he had looked at me in an hour, and I understood that the board had been staring at him too, and that whatever it had been saying, the knight had just changed it.

I lost that game anyway. But not for a while.

Playing my father

My father taught me, the way most people are taught, at a kitchen table, badly. He played the way he did everything, which was fast and with total confidence and no particular attention to whether it was working. He beat me for years. Then one summer he stopped beating me and neither of us said anything about it.

There's a thing that happens across a board that doesn't happen anywhere else in a relationship. You're both looking at the same object. You aren't looking at each other, which is a relief, and you aren't talking, which is a bigger relief, and the object is honest in a way that neither of you can be. The board says what it says. If you're losing, you're losing, and there's no version of the conversation where you're not. I learned things about my father across that board that I never learned across a dinner table, and I think he learned some about me, and none of it was in words, and all of it was true.

I still have the set. Plastic. One of the pawns is a substitute from a different set and is slightly the wrong shade of white. It has been the wrong shade for thirty years and I'd notice immediately if someone fixed it.

Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp gave up art for chess, more or less, in his thirties, and people have been trying to explain that for a century. He said the board was more beautiful than anything he could paint. He said chess had all the beauty of art and more, because it was art without the audience, art that happened only between two people and left no object behind.

I think he was onto something and I also think he was hiding. Chess is a place where you can be completely absorbed and completely alone at the same time, and for a certain kind of person that's not a retreat from life, it's the only tolerable version of it. The board doesn't need you to be anything. It just needs you to look at it. And it looks back, and what it sees is exactly what you're doing and nothing else, and there's a kind of peace in that which I've not found in many other places.

The engine

Now there's an engine, and the engine knows.

You can play a game and afterward ask a machine what the truth was, move by move, and it'll tell you, with a number, and it's never wrong. I resisted this for a long time. It felt like being told the ending of every book. If the board has a correct answer, and the answer is available, then what was the mood for? What was the ugly knight? Just an approximation of a number I could have looked up.

But I've come around, mostly. Because the engine doesn't have the mood. It has the number and the number is right, but it can't tell you why the position feels cramped, it can only tell you that the cramped side is losing by half a pawn. It has the answer and no experience of the question. And the experience of the question, the face across the room, the knight going to the edge while your chest tells you it's right, that isn't an approximation of the number. It's a different thing, a human thing, and the engine has made it clearer by subtraction. Here's the truth. Everything left over is you.

What it is staring at

So the board is staring back, and what's it looking at.

I used to think it was looking at my play. My mistakes. The things I didn't see. That's what it felt like, losing, that the board had watched me miss it and was faintly disappointed.

I think now it's simpler. It's looking at attention. The board is a thing that shows you, precisely, how much of you is in the room. When you're all there, the moods are vivid and the ugly moves show up. When you're half there, thinking about an email, the board goes flat and you push wood. It isn't judging you. It's a mirror for one quality, and the quality is presence, and most of us don't have another mirror for that.

That's why the kitchen table mattered. My father was fully there, in a way he wasn't always fully there, and I could see it, and he could see me. That's why Duchamp stayed. That is why I still set up the plastic pieces, with the wrong pawn, alone, some evenings, and look at a position from a game I lost twenty years ago, and feel it look back, and feel it say: well. Here you are.