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RE-mis
Remis is the Danish word for the drawn game in chess. It means that the match ended in a draw.
Chess is a game of endless possibilities.
As a child I played chess with my father. I also played chess in a club located in a building called ”Home of Youngsters”. I do not recall how I ended up in that place or if I was a member. I went there together with a friend from school but most of the members were grown-ups.
I have also played chess with my son, Thor Emil. He has been playing school chess for a couple of years and he has won several cups. They were quite generous handing out cups 🙂
Not so long ago Thor asked me to play a game of chess with him. He had just found some missing chess pieces – meaning that our chess game had for some time been incomplete.
Somehow, we did not manage to get a game going …
A friend of mine plays chess in a chess club.
One summer’s day at his place – which happens to be close to the five Stella sites of mine – I found a book of games of chess. 1. E4e5 2. Lc4 Sc6 3. Dh5 Sf6 …
The book was lying in his bathroom for the purpose of silent moments in which others might read a crime novel or a newspaper.
Quite impressive …
But it is the same “game-of-chess-reader”-friend who has constructed this bathroom in a way so that one must stride over the toilet to get to the shower. And when you sit on the toilet there is hardly any room for your legs.
I have yet another experience with chess:
When I ran into a depression and was admitted to the hospital, I spent the first couple of days at a scaring ward. The outer doors were locked and the common areas shrouded in heavy smoke. Everything had in an abandoning way come to a standstill and patients as well as staff hung out in a smoky community.
But an English speaking man asked me if I was a chess player.
We played a game. He was not a novice, I simply just managed to draw better and he lost.
He was visibly impressed and urged me at several occasions to play again but we never got that far.
I was totally confused and had no energy. No matter how it had happened, I just did not believe that it was something that could be repeated.
A couple of days later I was transferred to another ward.
Now, the RE-mis series is not literally about chess. It should rather be regarded as metaphorical of some general human conditions.
Who does not recall a situation with a promising beginning that– in spite of a good strategy – developed into something quite different?
Nobody wants things ending up in a draw, unsettled… at least not as a starting-point.
But as history builds on, as time goes by, things may develop in ways that make remis – the draw – turn up as a parameter.
Maybe even as an aim.
In retrospective, remis – the draw – could be something very positive.
Remis could be a victory.
Link to description in Danish: http://www.janskovgard.dk/pdf/Remis.pdf
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