Three Games and isn't that the point of a metaphor?

Last week I started working with Abi in Eastwood.  We are hoping to make my work on this project an active part of my PhD - a site of practice or residency.  As I have not done my ethics or RD1 yet, I'm working with Abi as a freelance artist, working within and through her ethical procedures.  This feels a funny thing to say as it suggests the work has a different form if it is within the PhD, it sits within a different category as if I can or would think about it differently.  We had a few quick chats between the bits that is the chaos of a good playgroup.  It reminded me of a thousand fragmented conversations I had as a Dad at home, the swinging between the deaths of parents, the choice of school, the tips on what to feed a baby or if sleep training was a useful tool or emotionally destructive.  As is always likely to happen in a conversation with me and Abi we got onto Deleuze,  Abi told me that Deleuze didn't like metaphor he would ask, 'Why not use the real thing?'  I always think through visual metaphors, I can write, but my thinking is not based in texts or images.  As text it is founded in deep and rich stories that speak of a disjointed and broken set of experiences.  My most overused words are 'it's like when' followed by a story where nobody can really connect to what I'm talking about.

For example it's like when I was a child and I was on holiday in Greece and I bought a tacky souvenir toy sword and asked my Dad if it was possible it had ever been used in Ancient Greece in a battle, perhaps by a Spartan.  My Dad is very pragmatic and said that there was no possibility it had ever been used in Ancient Greece, that it was certainly new and a souvenir.  I didn't know what that word meant.  'Souvenir' sounded potent and full of memories.  As was my way, I asked again about the possibility that the sword could, by some vast and tangled chance, have been used by a Spartan soldier in combat.  My dad was also stubborn but after the 10th or probably 40th time of asking he did confirm that there was a possibility that the sword could have been mixed up with a genuine sword within a museum and indeed there did exist a  possibility that it had been used in combat, probably by a Spartan at the battle of Thermopyae by one of the 300.

The image of the mousetrap above is from when I caught a real mouse in the game mousetrap when we left it set up overnight on the front room floor. This is not a metaphor for the PhD, its the real thing.  So reflecting on my conversation with Abi and, given the two stories above, surely a becoming in a way is a true metaphor where a thing becomes something else, rather than appears to be like something, a simile or perhaps semblance.  Keeping this in mind and also considering a need to track how I am feeling here rather than what I am doing I want to compare my PhD to two games but to honour Deleuze and Abi I will present them as becomings.  

I am not a great Chess player although I do have a good middle game. To play chess with anyone who is any good you need to learn a good number of openings; for most of us that is about the first  seven moves.  If you don't know your openings and you are playing someone good then you lose the game very quickly as there are certain openings that require a certain response.  The game or the number of possible combinations of the game at this stage are known, there is little chance of deviation although you do have many different versions of classic openings.  I often go for some kind of aggressive Queen's pawn to D4  with a slightly cockeyed two Knights. If I'm feeling less confident I may fianchetto one or both my Bishops, not because it's good play rather because it slows me down and makes it impossible for me to launch an early attack. This is my Achilles' heal in playing even a poor standard pub chess player.  My opening game is very poor and as I get further away from the lonely twelve year old who used to save up his money to buy chess books that my dyslexia meant I could barely read, my opening gets more lazy and more pedestrian.  Bobby Fisher, one of Chess' Cold War legends, devised a version of the game where the back rank (the major pieces) would be set up more randomly based on the shaking of a dice. For a chess player with a weak opening then this degree of uncertainty is very attractive. Yet, if you are to take chess seriously, learning a few openings is a rites of passage and possibly the least difficult requirement of becoming a player.

Dyslexia brings with it, for some, a number of gifts. These are both because of and in spite of the divergence and very difficult to put a finger on.  Tom, my son, plays chess like me; I suppose I taught him to play, not the rules but the game.  We both have good middle games, an uneducated and untrained flare for seeing the board as a single thing.  We feel the multiplicity of possibilities, in the middle game you have to feel the board, you have to see the pathways and the potential.  On many levels you can explain this through a set of principles, control the centre squares, protect the king, try and get small advantages, such as doubled pawns.  There is also some simple maths such as twice attacked triple defended pieces, and the threats always in the background such as disclosed checks or nasty Knight forks.  You learn to see these but you probably feel them.  I like the middle game, I even like it if I'm losing because the potential of getting out of a very nasty situation is always there especially if you can keep some major pieces.

Then there is the end game.  I am rubbish at this bit and have lost many a game just because my dogged often-teenage opponent fails to resign or I make stupid mistakes.  If I have held my three supervisor's attention this far then within this becoming of writing and chess, there is probably a caution that will manifest itself in three years time.  Luckily for me though, I am still within an opening of simple learnt moves.

Snakes and ladders is an altogether more simple game and a more simple becoming. At the moment the snakes feel far more useful than the ladders.  I'm enjoying landing on the snakes as I have spent most of the last ten years looking for ladders; shortcuts to the end of the game so I can look for and start a new one.  The privilege of my current position is that I don't seem to mind landing on snakes and this seems to make the game more fun.