Ayyam-i-Ha Interlude

Ayyam-i-Ha Interlude

By John Taylor; 24 February, 2006



It is migraine weather, hooray! So let us kick our feet off and take a break from the essential reality for a day or two and speak together of ephemeral illusions.


My friend Stu is a retired public school teacher who for decades coached his school's chess team. When I met him and heard that he was still teaching a combined introductory course and ongoing chess club for children at the Welland Public Library, I wanted to have one here in hopes that Thomas and Silvie might become involved. Unexpectedly, the powers that be in our library picked up on the idea and this winter Stu is teaching his second course in the Garfield Disher Room every Wednesday.


This time around several experienced adult players wandered in along with the dozen odd boys -- so far not one girl or woman has turned out-- and now there is talk of starting a permanent chess club in Dunnville. The most enthusiastic new player is Gord. This week Gord staged a simultaneous match against the entire club. He took white for every game and walked around the room playing about fourteen games in succession. He drew his game with me and won every other, including his confrontations with six-year-old Thomas and his grandfather, my father.

To nobody's surprise, the oldest member, my father lost in a few minutes but to the surprise of all concerned, Thomas refused to resign and was the last player left. Many older boys had lost interest long ago and forfeited their games in order to leave or play games with one another but as I pointed out to all who were gathered around, our Taylor motto is "A Taylor Never Quits," and Thomas lived up to the family name. Nor did he cry afterwards or make a fuss for losing a hopeless king versus rook and king endgame; he was looking forward too avidly to the trans-fatty acid-packed treat his grandfather always buys for him at Tim Horton's on the way home after the chess club. Still, Thomas's interest in chess is growing fast; it is even beginning to compete with Pokemon and Yugi-oh, which is saying a lot. I am glad because chess helps spatial reasoning abilities and fends off dementia, which admittedly will not be a problem for him for a while yet.


I had played Gord once the week before and beat him handily, but it was his first game for many years and he seems to be a strong but very rusty player. We exchanged reminiscences during spare moments the evening of his simultaneous exhibition about our early chess playing years and it turned out that we were both on the Hamilton Chess Club back in the Seventies; it is a very large club and we do not recall ever meeting personally, though it turned out that we were both involved in a simultaneous match of about thirty members with the Canadian champion at the time, Lawrence Day. I recorded my game and I recall that he beat me in 17 moves, which is, for those who do not play, lickedy-split. He lost his game on that day with Day as well.


In my time I only had the gumption to enter two chess tournaments -- stress does not help migraines -- but Gord told a story about one of his games in a tournament in Toronto that tops anything that ever happened to me. It seems that in an early round of this event he was matched against a player whose position fell apart quickly and when he became agitated and went to extend his arm. Gord thought he was about to resign and naturally he extended his hand to shake hands with the fellow, as is traditionally done. Instead the guy was actually winding up; he took a swing at Gord and the sucker punch laid him out on the ground and gave him a shiner for a week afterwards. "I was stunned, both literally and figuratively." The pugilistic chess player was escorted from the venue and not allowed to participate for two years. It seems that chess is like hockey, you can commit assault and break the law all you want as long as it is part of a legitimate sporting contest.


My main enthusiasm now is not chess but table tennis. I am very fortunate to have Stu to go up against twice a week. As a left hander, he is much more difficult than your usual player. His forehand is on my right instead of my left, so everything I do has to be the opposite. When I play a right hander I always lose several games until I get back in the habit of serving to my right instead of the left side of the table. The challenge of Stu keeps up my interest in exercising like nothing else can; I train all week in hopes that I will figure out some new serve, shot or other technique to crush him. He is not a hard hitter on the ping pong field of battle but he is extremely wily. He is the smartest opponent I have met. It does not take him very long at all to find a way around my best-laid traps.


Take this week. I had developed five or ten completely new shots. When I applied them in game conditions only about three worked, the others Stu easily figured out. Three successful shots, including an improved rocket serve were still enough to win the first three games quite handily. But then I tired; my rocket serve went erratic and he beat me four times in a row, winning the match by a hair. It was down to the last serve, and, as he would put it, his Karma favored him. You may say, all you have to do now John is practice your rocket serves until every smash is a winner and even do that when you are in a state of collapse due to fatigue. Simple enough. Sure, but you forget, the fast starts next week. Since we play in the late afternoon I will be lucky to get through without fainting and smashing my head on the table, going down to a defeat that is stunning, both literally and metaphorically.


Your usual writer delves into a subject and makes a contribution to knowledge, but an essayist, at least this essayist, delves into his own ignorance and comes away with a sick, confused feeling of utter inadequacy. I dread even looking at the pile research tatters I have amassed for each and all of the Baha'i principles. There is more there than one person could ever do justice to. I dread most of all the time after I die when somebody will have to throw all of these filing cabinets out.

I will be in a better place and may not care then, but now I care. I read with clammy hands how Jules Verne spent his life carefully filling in little three by five cards with research information and then after he died his son junked that huge database, much to the chagrin of every Jules Verne scholar to this day. The horror! For doing that his son gained the eternal opprobrium of Verne scholars, caused them endless cursing and gnashing of teeth. I do not flatter myself that I will be famous like Verne, but I know that these principles must take on increasing importance in coming years, and I would like my life's work in some way to contribute to the advance of what may come to be known as "principle studies." But mostly, I do not want anybody cursing my heirs.

The most dark and depressing section of this database by far is the place where I store my own essays. Masses of diamonds in the rough, but if you try to pick one out you discover that its beauty was mostly in its setting, how it related to my life at the time. But then as soon as you decide to leave it where it was it ceases to be about the principle in question and you come away with empty hands. Is it all a mirage? Then as the years mount up the utter mass of the material grows to the point where by pure inertia it drags me into despair. I see immediately how going over it will take longer and burn more emotional energy in lost turns and abortive brainstorms written at incompatible stages of my life, in varying styles, than my constitution will take. Just reading it would take longer than my feeble attention span will endure.


The only exception to this rule was the eleventh principle, the oneness of God. This was pristine, fresh, unencumbered, mostly because -- I now realize -- I had long ago teased out several separate topic categories like "Nature of the Manifestation," Progressive Revelation," "Progress and Evolution," and "Role of the Learned;" these sucked away most of the material that would otherwise have come in here. Now that I have spent almost a month writing about the oneness of God I can say with pride that already I am starting to get that sick, confused feeling as I look over this string of essays. But the feeling of being overwhelmed is not yet total, so there has to be much more to come, perhaps another complete month, or at least through the fast into Naw Ruz.


Now that I think of it, Ayyam-i-Ha is the only religious holiday I know of that is dedicated exclusively to the Godhead, so for me to be writing about the Oneness of God around now is as seasonal for a Baha'i as it would for a Christian to be writing about the birth of Jesus at Christmas-time. So my friends, happy Ayyam-i-Ha, and may your fast be fast – no, I do not mean quick, I mean may its spiritual benefit stick fast. That is what I mean, really. May you learn steadfastness, get grit from your fast, for grit will be your only grits for quite a while.

John Taylor
badijet@gmail.com