Check Mating

A relatively brief post this time. I just wanted to quickly revisit disagreements with an analogy that may help to illuminate, and hopefully contribute towards unifying, what has already been said.

Games are a form of expression that operates on a radically different level to others such as music, film and literature. These other mediums of art are good at representing the world to us – generally speaking - how it ‘objectively’ appears in the case of film, what we think of it in the case of literature, how it makes us feel in the case of music. In all cases they direct our passive attention to what the creator feels is important. Games also direct what we see and hear but their defining feature is that they direct our ability to make decisions, our agency. While the language of film is written in our preconscious senses, the language of games is written in the active, decision making human consciousness – a games pace and resonance is dependant on the way in which we make decisions and the way in which we choose to act. Games makers are closer to gods than any other artists because they are not only the makers of worlds but they are also mind-makers. They make what there is to be seen in their world, how those things are seen and even the kinds of thoughts that players can have about them within their game-world. When playing chess, while I am free to make decisions I can only make decisions about the game in terms of the finite number of legal moves. If I were to play a game where I let pieces move as it was convenient for me to move them then I would no longer be playing chess or thinking in the ways that chess demands. In the same way I can only justly judge a movie in terms of the images and sounds that it presents me with – it is not a bad movie if my popcorn is sweet when I asked for salted. The designers of games are creating a world and a common language for players to engage within with each other, sometimes the opponent is another player sometimes it is the designers themselves.

Chess is a particularly pure environment for two consciousnesses to engage with one another. It is relatively unfiltered because the board and pieces obey rigid, unchanging rules, player’s start on equal footing and there is no chance. On the chessboard it is the decisions the players make, their consciousnesses alone that determine the outcome. Two minds are locked together in an abstract but easily grasped fashion. The board and the pieces are pure order and in their predictability their significance fades away; they are nothing but a medium for two minds to connect.

Chess is so enduring, in part, for this reason – the mediated connection of minds that the game requires promotes moments of love. These moments of love tend to manifest themselves as a deeper respect for the mind of the opponent to see in advance and predict our own decisions. The intense and almost primal struggle that the game abstractly represents by leaving nothing to chance can create be life-affirming in the same way camping in the wilderness can be: even just holding ones own can be satisfying.

The moments of love that chess creates are not the only reason for it’s enduring popularity as a game. Chess is a game of great elegance and beauty. The logical predictability, the law-abiding world that it creates is beautiful. We know that there is a logical limit to the number of games of chess that are playable. We know that theoretically two ‘perfect’ players should always draw – it is, after all, essentially just a more complex version of noughts and crosses. We know that given the nature of the game, there ought to be ‘right’ moves so long as you plan far enough ahead. In spite of this, there are more different possible games of chess than there are atoms in the galaxy. Even some of the best players will not see every possible outcome because although the core game is very simple, there is a cumulative complexity that builds over several moves and several games.

This is where the true beauty in chess lies – knowing that there is a right move but that we will never fully see it. It is the beauty of knowing that a thing is theoretically knowable but also knowing that you will never fully know it. It is the sublime of an incomprehensibly massive mountain range or of looking at the stars. It is also the sublime of falling in love – of trying to understand an other, to catch glimpses of the whole but know that you will likely never quite piece it all together.

In the game of chess players are set up in adversarial roles. Both players are trying to win against the other by using only their natural wits – no chance; no quantative differences in knowledge make a difference. Games including chance may simulate the external factors of the real world better than chess, providing a better representative simulation of concerns that affect real life decisions i.e. they simulate the randomness of life in the world. In stripping away chance, chess challenges the players to ‘beat’ each other in an ‘all things are equal’ environment.

I am not, however, trying to suggest that winning at chess makes you more intelligent than the loser – more likely you have just played more chess – you see the connections between moves more quickly, allowing you to plan further ahead. You may not even be better at that, it may just be that you are more consistent – you do not make ‘silly’ mistakes like accidentally giving away your queen. In situations where I have won a game of chess because my opponent accidentally threw away the game by making a silly mistake it is a hollow victory – I have not won because of my ingenuity, skill or even deception. They have not lost because they have been outsmarted. They just made a mistake. By chance. Most players take this frustration as a part of the game – we’re only human and it’s just a game. They don’t mind losing or they are confident I too will make a similar mistake – I often do, so there is usually everything left to play for.

At university, I was lucky enough to live in a chess-playing house. For a period of two or three months I would play at least two games a day. These games would always start out as a normal chess game: two players trying to win. After a while though, we started playing with a different mindset. Silly mistakes ruined the game for both the winning player and the losing player. We began to stop allowing them, with an ‘are you sure?’ to begin with, and later on we would spend time, the two of us (or more if there were spectators) going over several moves, forward and back, to prevent checkmates from happening, 6 or 7 moves in the future. Often, I would play games where I would be checkmated early on and we would take the game back to the point where I would be able to get out of it. Then, later on I would checkmate my opponent and we would do the same. Some games began to include three or more checkmates at different stages of the game, from either player.

In some ways this way of playing sucks the fun out of the game. It did, to some extent suck the fun out of the competition. It was an interesting phenomenon playing like this because although we were still playing and planning our own moves, we would also have and share awareness for the other’s possible moves. I was not exactly playing against myself but I was making up a little for my opponent’s deficiencies and vica versa. We were playing against each other because that is how the game must be played but we were working together towards a more perfect game. When mistakes crept in, or we feel events had not done our opponent’s mind justice, we put our player personas on hold and let the game play itself for a while. This style of play, while not for everyone certainly made me a far better chess player and I learned an awful lot about the game during this period. When we played where neither player had made a mistake both of us would feel a sense of satisfaction of something achieved and an affirmation of our respect for each other as good decision making minds.

What I mean then is this: a disagreement or discussion, like a game of chess, inherently sets us up against one another. In an adversarial scenario it is only natural to try to ‘win’ as we do in arguments. What I was trying to convey in my disagreements post and again here is that both parties, the relationship and the abstract goal of ‘truth’ (like our ‘perfect’ game of chess) are better served by arguing towards unity, by letting the ideas guide you rather than your desire to display dominance. The suppression of that drive can be difficult, particularly if the person we are arguing with makes a ‘mistake’ and stumbles into a contradiction. If we allow them to ‘go back’ and explore the nature of that contradiction rather than jump on it as an example of faulty logic we can probably find some value in their ideas in spite of their mistakes. Providing us with a better ‘game of chess’ to play and a far more satisfying result.

Of course in some of our games of chess, just as in arguments with the best of intentions, ego can get in the way and there will come a point where we tire or see that no matter how well we play or even work together going forward we may have lost too much too early on in the game. Sometimes we will have to resign, often to the annoyance of the person who is winning. People will always need to be able to sometimes say ‘enough of this argument’ – they have lost control and equal input so they want it at an end. This can be frustrating but there is no point in going on if nothing can be added just as sometimes a checkmate is not needed to prove who won the game.

As long as we keep in mind that the goal of the game of chess is the exploration of the near infinite possibilities of the chessboard and that winning does not mean greater intelligence, we will always enjoy a game of chess. I think we would be better off in out disagreements if we made that attitude our guide in them. If we did, it would be easier for us to achieve a greater understanding of the world and of each other. Even if fully realising that aim is impossible, it is what moments of love are made of.

Understanding Between the Sheets

Raw desire consists of a subtle combination of factors. If I fully understood those factors then I would almost certainly not be sitting in front of a screen right now, I’d be having sex. Desire for sex is a drive as basic as eating and sleeping. The specific desire for sex with a particular person is more sophisticated and is caused by countless factors that vary from instance to instance as well as from person to person. Science, psychology and common sense tell us that sexual desire, along with desires in general, are driven by such things as pheromones, genetics, social norms, developmental environment and immediate circumstance. Personally, though, as a single male, there are very few women that I would not have sex with. And from experience I know that the closer I feel that I am to the act, the more I desire it. Of course, that doesn’t mean I actively pursue sex with most women I encounter. In many respects the fact that so many women are, in my eyes, sexual eligible reduces the need to pursue on that basis alone. But this fact, that I tend to be pickier with who I would fall in love with than who I would have sex with, makes me think that sexual desire is not to do with love. Or rather, sexual desire is not a signifier that I love someone.

The act of sex itself is not love either. I can live a relatively normal life abstinent from sexual stimulation but I can not do the same deprived from love (in the broader sense). The experience of love, of reciprocal recognition and understanding, on some level is a crucial part of the development of a consciousness. A child without parents or friends who love them, who grows up without ever feeling a moment of love, is probably going to have quite a twisted mind – it’s a recipe for super-villainy. But just because sex is not love and does not represent love that is not to say that the two are unconnected. Sex may not be love but it is also not inherently not love. All action has the potential to trigger moments of love. The act of sex is like any action that is shared. It can be, but is not always, a medium for communication, a medium for sharing experience, a medium for a moment of love. Love can be sex but love can also be walks in the park, laughter, the playing of games, sharing a glance or a good conversation. Just like all of these actions sex can be an affirmation-type moment of love, a realisation-type moment of love or it can be neither or it can be the opposite, like a destructive disagreement that causes a separation.

However, sex does have unique relationship to love owing to the nature of the act as well as societal and personal expectations from the act. We do place a special importance on it in the context of romantic love, and for good reason. But at all times I wish to resist entangling sex with love as I have thus far defined it. To do so would commit an error of the kind that says a game of football is only such if it is played in Wembley Stadium. Wembley is a place where football can be played and arguably it is played to its highest levels of quality and/or significance there. But to say that ‘Football = Wembley Stadium’ is to diminish the game and to radically misrepresent the role of the stadium in the whole affair. As a consequence of this, while sex as a topic is fascinating on a number of levels, it is far too vast and my own experience too narrow for me to cover wholly in a single post, if at all. I would like to discuss sex and love – how love can enhance sex and the some of the effects sex has on a relationship of connection and understanding. For the remainder of this post I will talk about sex as love, as opposed to sex as hedonism, sex as procreation or sex as power – although all deserve their own posts at a later stage. That is not to say any given act is one or the other; just that I should like to examine the component of sex that is driven by and a driver of love.

Traditional sex in the context of a romantic relationship of love is a shared act between two people. (Of course more may be involved in sex as the act, and can still be loving but for the sake of argument I’m going to put such complications aside for now). It involves the revelation of our physicality – not just intimate exploration of the shape and consistency of the other’s body but also a revelation of our internal physicality – how our bodies relates to our minds to give us pleasure and fulfil desire. The act is private, and with privacy comes an intimacy. Very few people have seen me completely naked and I choose to share this with you; I trust you not to tell people about any abnormalities in my penis, for example. In turn, you trust that I will not verbally expose you similarly. I also trust that in spite of any parts of my body that I am self-conscious about and do not like, you will still find me desirable and attractive by virtue of our mental closeness. As well as all this (and more) the act itself does a good job of representing the closeness of consciousness’ – an attempt to become, however briefly, as physically one as we feel? Perhaps this is mere poetry.

John Berger

John Berger wrote a very illuminating piece on sexuality in ‘Ways of Seeing’, specifically regarding the nude and the moment of seeing the other naked. I think it will help explore the act of sex as it relates to moments of love quite well (my bolding) –

“Their nakedness acts as a confirmation and provokes a strong sense of relief. She is a woman like any other: or he is a man like any other: we are overwhelmed by the marvellous simplicity of the familiar sexual mechanism…
…We did not expect them to be otherwise, but the urgency and complexity of our feelings bred a sense of uniqueness which the sight of the other, as she is or he is, now dispels. They are more like the rest of their sex than they are different. In this revelation lies the warm and friendly – as opposed to the cold and impersonal – anonymity of nakedness.
One could express this differently: at the moment of nakedness first perceived, an element of banality enters: an element that exists only because we need it.
Up to that instant the other was more or less mysterious. Etiquettes of modesty are not merely puritan or sentimental: it is reasonable to recognize a loss of mystery. And the explanation of this loss of mystery may be largely visual. The focus of perception shifts from eyes, mouth, shoulders, hands – all of which are capable of subtleties of expression that the personality expressed by them is manifold – it shifts from these to the sexual parts, whose formation suggests an utterly compelling but single process. The other is reduced or elevated – whichever you prefer – to their primary sexual category: male or female. Our relief is the relief of finding an unquestionable reality to whose direct demands our earlier highly complex awareness must now yield.
We need the banality which we find in the first instant of disclosure because it grounds us in reality. But it is more than that. This reality, by promising the familiar, proverbial mechanism of sex, offers at the same time , the possibility of the shared subjectivity of sex.
The loss of mystery occurs simultaneously with the offering of the means for creating a shared mystery. The sequence is: subjective - objective - subjective to the power of two."
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin 1977, Page 59)

One thing that is initially striking about this passage, and why it appealed to me in particular for this purpose, is that it is distinctly gender neutral. The essay from which this passage is taken is clearly influenced heavily by feminism and therefore keenly focussed on gender issues – the way the woman is seen as a subject in representative art. This particular passage, though describes nakedness (as opposed to nudity) in the context of lived human experience – that is to say in the context of two consenting adults revealing themselves to one another as (I assume) a precursor to sex. In describing our lived human experience of nakedness with another, Berger takes a notably gender neutral tone. He seems to be indicating that in the context of our primary lived experience of nakedness the principles he describes above are true regardless of gender or sexual preference.

Of course, I would certainly concede that men and women differ wildly in their approaches and reactions to sex – in the ways in which we seek it, in what we desire from it, in how we physically experience it and how the act itself impinges on our public and social lives. However the areas of difference that I have just listed relate primarily to components of sex relating to the pleasure, the power and the biological functions of sex and not to the moments in the act that relate to love. If sex were just this then it would indeed be essentially an issue of gender relations but it would also not be to do with love. When we are talking about the love component of sex, I would argue that gender differences are not as pronounced as culture may tempt us to think. If there are differences in propensities to experience the act of sex as connection that are gender based then they are so marginal when compared to our differences as individuals regardless of gender as to render them invisible.

Berger’s mention of the loss of mystery giving way to the possibility of creating a shared mystery resonates well with what I have already said about moments of love. All experiences get imprinted into memory, conscious or otherwise. It is in those memory-worlds that the dreamers and the melancholy live. The collective memory-worlds of wars and other major events are where a national public character is born. A personal experience creates a mental space for us to assess things, a shared experience creates a world for us to share and inhabit. Whether it is sex or not there is a special bond, a special world, created between people who share a private experience or secret. The private, shared world between the sheets is a space in which a couple can allow a kind of ‘third other’, or an ‘us’, to really develop. The act itself is a cooperative sport with near instantaneous feedback. When it is going well there is a oneness of purpose by virtue of that “utterly compelling but single process”. Afterwards, thinking about the act and anticipating the next time all promote thought about yourself and the other – together. The pleasure of having a partner subtly refer to when you last had sex or making eyes as if to say ‘let’s go again’ stems from more than just the sating of desire for more sex or satisfaction that they enjoyed it enough to want more. The joy of a partner referencing your private act together is also the joy of recognising and reaffirming that they too have been living in (or at least visiting) the exclusive shared world that the two of you created. In this way, you could think of sex like an in-joke – a moment of love that gains more intimacy and power by virtue of it’s exclusivity. It is rude to make in-jokes around those not in on the joke, just as it’s rude to be overtly sexual with a partner around friends – that is not prudishness, it is simply an acknowledgement that it makes you feel unloved and unconnected to a couple or group of people that you care about to be reminded that they share a connection that they don’t see fit to share with you, even as they indulge in it.

Berger’s talk of the move of “subjective - objective - subjective to the power of two” is also quite compelling and reinforces what I have said about sex being a medium through which we can feel love. When we get to know a potential love as a prelude to sex we tend to get to know more and more of the particular uniqueness of them, of their consciousness. Berger’s notion of ‘relief’ at seeing the sight of the familiar form of a naked body relates to what I discussed in ‘moments of love’ regarding communication through a medium – how the reliance on the common language of the medium acts as a comforter, a source of relief and safety from the pitfalls of unrestrained conversation. Setting aside arguments and particulars regarding technique – we all know how to ‘do’ sex – it is a language through which with some basic empathy and anatomical awareness we can all communicate in. An objective ground for two people to share no matter where the come from or what they think. Once the act is complete and this new ‘subjective to the power of two’ exists for the pair to co-inhabit, communicate about or through, arguably the two gain greater capacity for closeness. At the very least if they find their consciousness’ asynchronous and are not able to or do not feel like exploring the reasons in a rational productive argument fashion, they can stop disagreeing and have sex. Sex is very effective at ending rows because it is a full body experience, it is arresting and takes over other thoughts allowing a couple to ‘move on’ from whatever issues they were having.

Sally and Sex

Sometimes we use sex as a means of finding love, by using it as a relatively predictable way to trigger that key realisation-type moment of love from which we may build a stronger relationship. Take Sally for example. Sally is going out to a club tonight. She has been single for a few months. She misses sex for the sheer joy of it but societal norms and some bad experiences have taught her that sex is safer, more controllable and easier to reliably obtain in the context of a relationship. Sally would like to be in a relationship so she can have sex with a single partner and so she can fall in love. But Sally is not naïve and she does expect to fall in love at first sight when she goes out tonight but her hedonistic desire for a shag means that she’s fairly sure she’ll be going home with someone tonight – she’ll have a good time and she won’t expect anything from them afterwards. Of course, just as Sally is not naïve she’s also not some hussy. She’s not going to sleep with just anybody who buys her a drink and even though she won’t expect a boyfriend from the evening, she wants to find a guy is fairly likeable – just in case they ended up talking afterwards. Come to think of it, Sally got together with her last boyfriend after a one-night stand – so stranger things have happened!
Sally is not consciously using sex as a tool to find love with – she’s fulfilling a desire for basic pleasure (that probably stems from an evolutionary biological urge). However, she knows that sex can bring people together and this knowledge is displayed in her behaviour – if she just wanted a man she could have walked out with one and saved herself some time and money – she wanted a man she could potentially fall in love with because on some level she was aware that sex is a catalyst for love. The intimate nature of the act helps, but does not guarantee, moments of love arise.

Sometimes we use the act as an easy means comfortable common ground to retreat to. For the last three months of Sally’s last relationship it felt like all they did was argue and then have sex. The arguments occurred over trivial things; a late phone call, what music they should listen to, where to go out. Her boyfriend also suspected her of cheating which put them both on edge – her not wanting to give him reason to feel insecure, him constantly looking over his shoulder. They would get in and talk for half an hour. By that point an argument about something would flare up and one of them would end up in tears the other storm out. At three in the morning there would be a return, perhaps few minutes of screaming and then passionate sex. The sex was all the more passionate for the passion of the preceding argument; cathartic. But it also reminded the both of them how much the loved each other, how much they did share or at least how much they had shared (see ‘A disagreement’). It reminded them of how they had gotten together and how their love had grown in the first place:
Her - how he had been powerful and so irresistibly forceful when he pulled her to him in the park on their third date.
Him - how she had turned up at his house naked, save for a trench coat, on his last birthday. She had been eager to please and so sexy in her confidence that she would. And she had.
After they would finish, closer to 5am now, bodies trembling from exhaustion and a lingering cocktail of stress, anger, affection and fear they would lie in each other’s steadying arms and love each other until morning. But morning came too early, for they both had jobs and would have to leave the house by 8. Although they felt love for each other the rhythms of their love had become destructive – depriving them of sleep and so making them more irritable the next day and so more prone to petty arguments. Their lives had become a cycle of argument, frustration and reconciliation. The act of sex, not the pleasure but the moment of love that came with it, was a sole comfort to them both and had sustained not just their love but themselves as individuals. Sally began to realise this, and although she would certainly not say their relationship had been based on sex, it’s power to remind them of their love had been the driving force that had extended their relationship months beyond it’s natural end. Painful as it was, she decided to finish it. Although agonising at first, within six weeks she was sure she had made the right decision.
About a year later, Sally bumped into her ex boyfriend at a bar. They ended up sleeping together again. Although the sex was still physically as good as it had ever been, Sally had moved on – time had robbed the act of its power to remind her so vividly of the connections the two had shared.

By virtue of the power of sex to provide moments of love, sex can be both a catalyst for moments of love but it can also be a crutch. Healthy relationships can use sex as means of reconnecting after any kind of rupture to their synchronicity to prevent a greater distance from forming but the power of sex, like any other power can be over or misused as a temporary ‘fix’ can just be putting off problems or facing up to real and important differences. Equally though, a couple can stop having sex because one or both parties realises this phenomenon of potentially disproportionately reconnecting when a reconnection may not actually be desired. As such sex lives can be barometers for the ‘health’ of a romantic relationship but perhaps only retrospectively. After all there are so many drives to perform the act we are at great risk of misinterpreting other’s desires or lack of desires for sex or misunderstanding reasons behind the other’s under or over-‘performance’.

Some closing comments

Society places a special significance on the act of sex in regards to relationships and with good reason. Leaving aside the reproductive components to the act, sex is uniquely configured to produce moments of love – it in itself is a relationship creator and sustainer. Sex and the desire for sex I have deliberately kept separate from reproduction and the desire for reproduction because I believe they are two separate drives that we, in our infinite fallability, sometimes confuse. I will discuss reproduction in a later post.

Sex as the act of giving and receiving pleasure has been broadly covered here – I can give myself nearly equivalent raw pleasure – it is love that I can not give myself. A hedonistic desire for sex is not something I can rule out but I don’t think it really affects our meaningful relationships too significantly. I am aware of people who stay in or out of relationships because they coldly calculate which setup of their life will get them more sex and more pleasurable sex. Those people would confess that they are not looking for love, don’t want it or don’t really know what it is.

What I have not touched on at all is a broader topic for this blog to cover, which is power. All relationships are themselves to some extent relationships of power, this is not more so in the act of sex but it is more noticeable. Discussions on this will come later.

I have mostly been talking about sex with one partner. I am not ruling out the possibility that a moment of love can occur from experimental group sex. I would say that as far as I can see it’s not quite as naturally set out to produce them though.

An objection I have encountered at this juncture before runs something along these lines “All this talk of love, moments of love shared mystery etc. is overcomplicating and nothing more than Sophistry – Sex is an evolutionary urge, it is controlled by chemicals. The ‘effects of the act’ of which you speak are not subtle realisations of mental connection they’re chemicals released in the brain immediately after sex that make you feel good. You associate the feeling good with your partner so you think you’re in love – it’s an evolutionary trick. All this stuff would be very interesting two hundred years ago but science has proved that you’re talking nonsense already.”
Well, that is sort of fair. But science hasn’t proven why chemicals appear in the brain – we have observed that they do appear after certain stimuli, we haven’t proven anything apart from that. What we have proved by living though is that the same stimuli on the same subject can produce different results and the same sequence of stimuli on different subjects can produce different results still – I can not be predicted even if I do have happy chemicals pumped into my brain when I have sex. Love is a component of our consciousnesses – it affects what we think about, how we think and how we act from that. Our consciousnesses exist within our brain, body and nervous system some effects of which are commonly observable, while others are scientifically observable. The evolution argument is basically to observe one correlation between chemical happiness and sex, another between love and sex and another between sex and children and then conclude that the chemical happiness is because of the children - ignoring the actual variety of conscious processes at work to get us there. Yes, love might be an evolutionary quirk – it may have arisen as something that benefits the species. There seem to be a lot of quirks of behaviour relating to love and sex that harm the species but there you go, nobody fully understands the process by which evolution happens. To explain every decision in my life in terms of survival of the species involves ignoring my experience of making many decisions that do more harm to ‘the species’ than good. But more importantly it ignores my consciousness and my agency and is to ignore the vastest body of evidence that we have in front of us – that is our own selves.
Issues about the consciousness can only be thought of with any subtlety when considered through the lense of consciousness itself.