(This Tuesday, Jupiter will be exactly opposite the sun and visible all night.)

Solar’s game

Xul Solar lived more or less permanently in the future. “I am the world champion of a game that no one knows about as yet,” he wrote in 1950. “I am the creator of a technique, of musical scoring, which would allow the piano to be studied in a third of the time that it takes at present. I am the director of a theater that is not yet functioning. I am the creator of a universal language, pan lengua, based on numbers and astrological signs, that will help peoples to know each other better.” Borges, who was his close friend in Buenos Aires, wrote of him: “Xul lived by re-forming and re-creating everything. … He had also invented Panplay, a kind of complex duodecimal chess which took place on a board boasting one hundred and forty-four squares. Every time he explained it to me he would decide it was too elementary, and would proceed to enrich it with new ramifications, with the result that I never learned it.”

Panplay, also known as panchess, pangame, or “Neocriollo Chess,” which Solar started working on in the 1930s, was a version of chess that could double as the universe. It was a game that was also a dictionary, a musical engine, a school of painting, a historical and biographical record, and an astrological ephemeris. In different versions, it was played on 12x12, 13x12, or 13x13 boards, with most of the traditional pieces plus new ones, called bi-rooks and bi-bishops – and Solar made all the pieces himself, painting them with signs and figures and designing them so they could be stacked, increasing the combinatorial possibilities. Each piece corresponds to a consonant (“except for the pawns that equal numbers”) and all the positions on the board are combinations of vowels, so play produces chains of new words: “This means that the foundation of this game is a dictionary of a philosophical, a priori language, written with basic signs that correspond to sounds – a kind of triple-leveled shorthand of lines, forms and gestures described elsewhere – that forms all kinds of abstract drawings and musical combinations, implicit in the differing positions as the game advances.” Because of course the pieces, squares and moves also correspond to musical sounds and rhythms, and to systems of shapes and colors – and to a duodecimal counting system for engaging in a strange, playful calculations. “As each major piece also represents a planet where the board gives its positions in the sky” – with each square corresponding to diurnal and nocturnal movements – “one can follow anniversaries over the years, that is, the influence or character, leaping across the board, as part of the march through historical time or through anything imaginary.”

Here is one of Solar’s panplay boards in mid-game, kept at his museum in Buenos Aires: from the top and from the side. Millions of new words and combinations, enough to fill countless shelves with as-yet-unwritten books; new paintings and drawings to fill every museum; centuries of new music, the history of the past and the future and every human drama, waiting to be combinatorially unlocked in play. (No wonder he and Borges got along so well: they both lived in the libraries-to-come, in all the stories that could be written.) I like to think of him at his kitchen table by the window, smoking a cigarette and laying out the board that is also his life, all our lives, and the cosmos.

“only sick music makes money these days”

Organ Mood, “Soyez Visible.” Looping, spacious, sunlit music for moving continuously forward through an open landscape. (Used to memorable effect in Tu Dors, Nicole, a sweet, sad/funny, dreamy movie about going in circles in the short pale nights of a northern summer.)

and finally

The perfect opening paragraph for the start of a physics textbook

Anish Kapoor and the story of Vantablack, the blackest black ever produced (developed out of research projects to make spy satellites impossible to visually spot); DuPont and the tale of trade secrets, espionage, and the production of the whitest white

For good measure, the rules of Monochess, a monochromatic version of chess inspired by Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey

(On a personal note: I have two pieces in the latest issue of the wonderful journal Limn, whose issue theme (the whole issue is amazing) is the Total Archive – “The Entropy Archives” and “Keeping the Books”. Also, had a lovely podcast conversation about spam with John Balz)

(Thanks for reading, as ever.)