Iceland: The End of the Road for Robert James Fischer

Chess, like the IQ test, is a highly problematic yet mysteriously attractive measure of intelligence. It's well known that with training, you can defeat opponents who would otherwise best you. Yet nothing beats its cerebral allure; the word 'chess' can barely be uttered without 'genius' nearby. For me, sitting across the board from a skilled chess player is terrifying, and it has nothing to do with my sense of impending doom. It's the feeling of being predictable that scares me, the awareness that originality is impossible, and that to my opponent––who can see ten steps ahead––I'm no freer or smarter than a train on a track. 'Why does my opponent get to be above this depressing reality?' I would think angrily, 'Why should I sit here while he plays God with me?'

To many, Bobby Fischer demonstrated the limits of 'chess-smarts'. In the last fifteen years of his life he was increasingly called crazy, though I've found no evidence that he was actually insane. True, he denied the holocaust and regularly made anti-Semitic rants––famously in a 1999 interview on Hungarian radio (to complicate the matter, both his biological parents were probably Jewish). True, he may have had his fillings removed because he feared the CIA had tampered with them. True, he denied treatment at the very end of his struggle with kidney disease (though he may have chosen to do this only when doctors deemed his condition terminal––not such a crazy thing). When Fischer arrived in Iceland in 2005, Charles Krauthammer wrote a piece for Time Magazine on the connection between chess and insanity. A trained psychiatrist, chess enthusiast, and currently a conservative-leaning op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, Krauthammer speculated that while chess doesn't make you crazy (he holds up Vladimir Nabokov and Natan Sharansky as examples of 'sane' chess wizards, which might cause a snicker among those who've read Lolita or considered the consequences of neo-conservatism. Garry Kasparov is a third, and its Russian government policy to snicker at him), it might encourage paranoid and delusional thoughts as a monomaniacal and self-referential (that is to say a world completely separate from the real one) game. It isn't hard to imagine furthermore, how someone locked in reality filled with, to quote Krauthammer, "adversar[ies] who, by whatever means of deception and disguise, [are] entirely, relentlessly, unfailingly dedicated to your destruction" might take a piece of work home with him. Then again, anybody who locks himself it such a place, willingly or not, is probably asking for it.

The reason I'm writing about all this is because I visited Bobby Fischer's grave in Hraungerdi, Iceland (30 miles east of Reykjavic) exactly one week after he was buried in front yard of the Laugardælir Church (see photo). The town itself in a ring of modest houses and a cattle pen nestled in the shadow of one large cliff that runs east west. Looking south, you can see the ocean as well as the arch of the little highway that runs beside it around the entire island. Fischer's grave had already been covered in the intervening week. Lacking a proper headstone it was barely noticeable––just a small mound with fern stems and other miscellaneous objects poking out of the snow. In the photographs I took there are footprints surrounding it, but now I suspect they're my own.

How Fischer ended up in Iceland stems from a chess match he played in Yugoslavia in 1992. The story goes that he was lured out of retirement to play multi-million dollar rematch against Boris Spassky, whom he defeated in 1972 at the age of twenty-nine to become the eleventh World Chess Champion ending thirty years of Soviet dominance. The problem was that Fischer was a US citizen, and the US government had recently enacted sanctions on travel to Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Fischer knew this and went anyways. Questionable move. Unable to return home he moved to the Philippines where in 2000 he fathered the daughter who may end up receiving his entire estimated fortune of more than £1.5 million (happy eighth birthday sweetie!). In 2003 Fischer's US passport was revoked after he again went on record to praise the 9/11 hijackers. In 2004 he was detained in Japan and spent eight months fighting extradition until Fischer's friends in Iceland, the site of the '72 match, convinced the Icelandic government to grant him asylum.

My Icelandic guide didn't have much to say about Bobby Fischer. He repeated the old fodder about how Fischer was a peculiar old man with a big beard who used to sit in a seat reserved for him in his favorite bookstore and read all day. He said, with pride, that Icelanders never bothered him. When I asked him why Iceland had given asylum to a man who had willfully broken US law, he said roughly, 'I know what he did was illegal. It's hard to explain. We thought your punishment was too harsh.'

Links:

Krauthammer article:
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/krauthammer/article/0,9565,1054411,00.html

Interesting article by Dick Cavett with a video clip of a interview Cavett did with Fischer in the summer of 1971. The chess player, in his youthful good-naturedness, bears little resemblance to the man we are told he became:
http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/was-it-only-a-game/

Oxford: A Serendipitous Return

This has got to be significant, I'm thinking to myself as look down from Saxon Tower on Cornmarket Street and over the spires of Oxford town. When I was sixteen, I stood at this very spot on the last day of the summer when I’d realized I wasn’t a genius or a filmmaker. I’d come to this conclusion in the process of making my short-film masterpiece, which I called “Boris” at the last minute for no logical reason. It was the story of a man haunted by the death of his beloved (the murder takes place in a dream; I copied it from the shower scene in Psycho). He gets a message from somebody who claims to know the name of the assassin. He meets the guy, kills the “assassin”, but it turns out he wasn’t the real assassin, just some guy the informant wanted dead. Then the informant shoots the grieving man to death in an alleyway and the story ends, and we all learn a valuable lesson about vengeance. Anyways it’s a great film and I hope you all never see it.

Back then I was on the frontier of my world, tucked in a little corner I thought I’d never find my way back to. I stood on Saxon Tower for almost an hour, unable to tear myself from the view. A voice in my head said I was missing the most important thing.

I couldn't have anticipated the path that brought me back to Oxford in only five years. I’d finished high school, gone to college, gone to Russia and suddenly I was back visiting friends. I slept on a blue IKEA mattress on the floor of Jeff and Mac’s room for the first three nights. I barely left the Williams compound (I’m still not comfortable calling it that) during the day, where I lounged around in the common room watching movies (including Richard III starring Ian MacKellen––one of the best villains in movie history). I took evil satisfaction in being so lazy in the midst of so many high-powered Williams-Exeter students. I deliberately wore pajamas and slippers until three in the afternoon, and whenever somebody mentioned crew-practice or choir rehearsal, I’d give an exaggerated yawn and stretch backwards, revealing as much of my hairy belly as possible.

Jeff and Mac joked that I ruined their academic lives, but for the record, both of them freely chose to begin Casino Royale at 10pm the day before their papers were due. Just think if N64 had worked (Mac, why the HELL did you keep the busted Mario Kart!). As it was, we spent a good portion of every day watching and re-watching the YouTube clip in which this British kid gets unexpectedly punched in the head, and all he can say to his friend is, “Ah, I can’t believe you’ve done this!”

The next three nights I slept on a blow-up mattress on the floor of my high school friend’s room at Pembroke. We had fish and chips at a bar called The Turf, which is famous for being the place where Bill Clinton did not inhale when he was a Rhodes Scholar. Another night we attended formal hall in the medieval dining hall (they all look like Hogwarts). Everybody except guests were required to wear a gown which many students just threw over their street-clothes like half-assed Halloween costumes. When we were all seated, they recited something (grace, I believe) in Latin.

I got to the Saxon Tower about ten minutes before the custodian locked it up for the night. I was glad to have the time constraint; it kept me focused. I didn’t know where to turn my thoughts at first. I thought it was appropriate to reflect on who I am compared to who I was, but I couldn’t create an accurate picture of either. When nothing interesting came to me I started talking aloud. I told the unhearing pedestrians below that I was grateful and then I went home.

Dublin: 100% Irish

Wild Wicklow Tour guides are "100% Irish", according to their brochure. This had nothing to do with my choice to choose them, but in hindsight perhaps it should have been enough to turn me away. In doing so I could have made a principled stand against discrimination (non-Irish need not apply) and against pandering to the childish expectations of adults. Instead I booked one of their bus tours through the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin. Figured it would be stupid to a let little thing like that keep me from the Irish countryside.

I got an Irishman as promised, only my Irishman didn't tell charming stories or dance jigs. My Irishman was a tired, weathered, old man who'd been doing this way too long. I kinda felt bad for the guy (He wasn't well either; he kept on turning his microphone off to protect our ears from his hacking cough.) The real problem was that he was a lousy, uninspired guide. His schpiel sounded like the summary of the summary of somebody else's vague sparknotes. "These are the Wicklow Mountains. If you look out your left you'll see the rolling hills of Ireland, where Irish people have lived for generations. Generations have farmed here, raised their families here and been buried here. My own pa' (he laid it on when he wanted to) was born in the town right there in the valley, which is also where Braveheart was filmed." I did not know this, but apparently Braveheart was filmed in every valley in south-eastern Ireland.

Snaking through the peat bogs, our Irishman got to talking about the Irish potato famine. "They were hard times for Irishmen and women because there wasn't any food. Some survived, but many didn't. Some found work, but many withered away from hunger. Some left, but many were stuck here. Over 50 million Irishmen left. Another 50 million stayed. Of those, almost 60 million died or left, but many didn't. And all along the English did nothing, nothing at all to help the starving, leaving, multiplying Irishman. And Braveheart was filmed in the valley to your left."

Here's the thing. Wicklow Tours only boasts about the 100% Irish thing because they think tourists will be disappointed if they go to Ireland and get a Polish tourguide who's been living in Ireland for four years, no matter how knowledgeable and energetic he or she is. The problem is Ireland, and especially Dublin, is not the "Irish" country tourists are expecting; I'd say half the people I interacted with--shopkeepers, waiters, museum guides, etc.--where foreign born. I stayed at a hostel in the Chinese section of town, ate Chinese every night, read Irish-Russian papers. So who's gotta give? The tourism industry (by tearing down fanciful images) or the tourists? It's got to be the latter, right (tourism has to make money), but then what do you do about the discrimination of a thing like '100% Irish?' How do you try to integrate foreigners into a culture, then sell the country to tourists as though you were ashamed of them? (Come to think of it, as far as the US is imagined as a nation of immigrants it may avoid this more than any other country.)

It looks like this question is going to be even more relevant when the Republic of Ireland rolls out its new publicity campaign "Ireland: an island of unique character and characters" (visitors were reported let down by the old promise of pristine natural environments). An "Irish character" is the guy I thought my tour guide would be, right? Red hair, freckles, Guinness in one hand, pot of gold in the other? So the problem persists.