Xadrez
Lyrics
[Verse 1]
Em seu canto grave,
os jogadores comandam as peças lentas.
O tabuleiro os retém
até a madrugada,
naquele âmbito severo
onde se odeiam
duas cores.
[Pre-Chorus 1]
Dentro, irradiam rigores mágicos:
torre homérica,
cavalo ligeiro,
rainha armada,
rei derradeiro,
bispo oblíquo
e peões agressores.
[Chorus]
Quando os jogadores partirem,
quando o tempo os houver consumido,
o ritual, certamente, não terá cessado.
No Oriente acendeu-se essa guerra
cujo anfiteatro hoje é toda a Terra.
Como aquele outro, este jogo é infinito.
[Verse 2]
Rei frágil, bispo astuto, rainha feroz,
torre direta e peão ladino,
sobre o branco e o negro do caminho
buscam e travam
sua batalha armada.
[Pre-Chorus 2]
Não sabem que a mão do jogador
governa inteiramente seu destino;
não sabem que um rigor adamantino
sujeita sua vontade
e sua jornada.
[Bridge]
Mas também o jogador é prisioneiro
de outro tabuleiro:
noites negras, dias brancos.
[Chorus 2]
Deus move o jogador,
e este, a peça.
Que Deus por trás de Deus começa
esta trama de pó,
de tempo,
de sonho
e agonia?
[Outro]
Pensamos que comandamos,
mas somos comandados.
Pensamos que sabemos,
mas não sabemos
absolutamente nada.Composer Notes
Borges’s “Ajedrez” consists of two sonnets. The first watches the players from above — two colors, two wills, a game that began somewhere in the Orient and now fills the whole earth. The second descends to the board, where the pieces don’t know they’re pieces, don’t know a hand governs their movement, don’t know that beyond the player there is God. Then comes the final tercet: “God moves the player, he in turn the piece. / But what god beyond God begins the round / of dust and time and dream and agonies?” The regression has no bottom. This is what I find unbearable and irresistible about those two sonnets — they perform the very thing they describe, because reading them you can’t stop asking what is moving your eye along the line.
The connection to Wolfram’s computational irreducibility is not metaphorical. A chess game cannot be shortcut. You can’t know the outcome without playing out the moves; the computation is the process, and the process is the only access to the result. The god who moves the player faces the same constraint — to know what the player will do, the god must run the computation in full. And the god behind that god faces the same constraint one level up. There is no vantage point outside the Ruliad from which the whole game is already known. Everyone is a piece on someone else’s board, all the way down, and “all the way down” has no floor.
My version stays close to Borges’s original structure — two movements, descending from players to pieces to the question that breaks the frame. The moda adaptation here is in the voice: “Pensamos que comandamos, mas somos comandados” (“We think we command, but we are commanded”) lands differently in Portuguese, in a cultural context where the relationship between human will and larger forces — legal, political, divine — is felt as live rather than merely philosophical. I’m a state attorney. I make arguments every day on behalf of a system I didn’t design, and occasionally I win cases I don’t fully understand. The feeling of being a piece that thinks it’s a player is professional, not abstract.
The cinematic trip-hop arrangement — dusty drum break, detuned piano, sub-bass — gave the song the quality of a game being played in slow motion in a bad dream. Which is right. “Naquele âmbito severo / onde se odeiam / duas cores” — “In that severe domain / where two colors / hate each other.” The board is severe. The game doesn’t stop when the players leave.