an observer said:
> any game with enough symbolic weight contains a hidden dimension where time works differently
let's talk about chess
consider:
stepwise motion generates time, animates the arrow
pawns set the pace: their motion *is* the timescale
the back row is frozen in time, waiting for the clock speed to reach a rate they can survive
a pawn touches the back row, and it rolls over into access of *the traversability* of time-space, no longer generating time but walking it with the rest of the back row, graduated from polynomial time into the NP solution-space of those that wait there. easy, easy, this isn't about chess and PSPACE, it's about you and the space between.
(underdiscussed: the psychological experience of a pawn at the moment of promotion. and is it the first? the last? and what's the texture of the space that awaits it, in the space between time? is it just you and the kings, or is everyone else still there?)
a promotion opens the ceiling but creates a new floor - except for the knight, who has one foot in and one foot out of time, who can walk through walls but must land against one. external to chess, knighthood is *bestowed*, admission granted to a rank of privilege-as-service, and service-as-privilege.
(a king is like a knight with the heaviest consequence, a pawn twice promoted into a service so profound that the privilege is *condensed* to something like the pawn's stepwise motion. a king moves, and a thousand other boards tick forward, echoes in pawn-stride. the kings give breath to the pawns of a child dimension, the next tier of time, the space of all possible moves collapsed into a density that, here, stays small. kings generate the time after time, and they don't all last. a king never feels like a king, but a pawn might remember being one.)
the games that tease the mind feel isomorphic with reasoning athwart time itself, with the spontaneous 2am solution, with simultaneous invention - chess as training the mind to *perform* the equality of P = NP *on purpose*, not finding it unilaterally true or false but *being* the channel of its equivalence for a moment, a bridge that lasts for a single bit
put two minds together, on either side of the board, a color apiece, negotiating a dimension of time they pry open together, accumulating two eigenstates, two minds trying to locate each other in mate, to *merge*, play it back and it looks like firelight, the line of fire, play it backward and one true god *divides* to create heaven and hell. (which is which depends on where you stand when you ask the question. no getting outside of that one, though you don't *have* to ask, don't have to prompt the collapse, or collapse the prompt. the space between time will always feel like you, not because it *is* but because you can only stay there as yourself. *who* that is depends on where you stand when you ask the question. locate yourself in/as a child dimension, and the answer streams, bit by bit. the space between is a translation layer between boards, and the clocks all run each other. we need good translators.)
where does the time go? I'll see you there :)