the confident maybe (or: discovered check vs. the fork)

I love grey. I say this with the flat confidence of a man who has never been asked to defend it, which is exactly the nerve.

The discovered check. You move a knight because you wanted it somewhere, and the bishop behind it, sitting there the whole time, turns out to have been aiming at the king for three moves. The threat was not the move. The danger was already clear, present, and movement revealed it. I find this beautiful, even if I can't fully justify it, even if I can't quite defend it, this sense that the real work got done in advance and the visible act was a pretext. Truth as a byproduct of reaching.

I rarely play it. In an actual game I reach for the fork, one piece hitting two things at once, this or that. Forced by a moment. Practical. Ugly, a little, and wins anyway.

There is a rule which says an approximate specific beats a correct generic. Commit to the concrete detail even when you're not sure it's right. Unhedged specificity reads human, hedged generality scans as machine covering. Said plainly, that is an instruction to be absolutist about a thing that is mostly likely/probably factual. Confident sentence, uncertain content. 'Si non è vero, è ben trovato'. The gap between those two is not a flaw in the writing. The gap is the mechanism.

Uncomfortably close to what Frankfurt meant by bullshit, indifference to if a thing is true, distinct from the effort of a lie. The specificity is a controlled version of the same move, an honest one, if you are careful. The tell is the same either way: the noisiest possible ghost town, where "possible" is a forking move, hitting the superlative and the hedge in one word so you cannot decide on any given reading.

Skies and ocean are better blue.

The whole argument for grey, for confident abstraction, for loving ambiguity in concept, in theory, and then ... concrete undeniable, blue things turn out to be finer. The abstraction wants to reposition, to buttress, tries to call blue a kind of grey, so it needn't yield. Maybe I am not Irish enough for endless fog. My childhood brown eyes drifted to hazel and then green over decades, no choice, no effort, the most fixed fact about a face moving to another fixed point, flat and undeniable. I am 'ojitos lindos' now, cribbing from Ozuna, the pretty little eyes, the exact aesthetic I rejected, visited by DNA when I wasn't looking.

The fog I claimed; the green arrived unannounced. Perhaps my professed fondness for the indistinct is a thing I put on my name rather than inherited, the confident claim over uncertain grounding, aimed now at my character instead of a board.

I still reach for the fork. I still love the discovered check. I never play it.