My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is by Paul Stanbridge

Author:Paul Stanbridge
Format: epub

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One day last autumn my father came to visit and brought with him two panniers filled with the last of Mark’s possessions. My first instinct was that I must update my list of his things – perhaps this would make looking at them bearable. Within were numerous books of mathematics, a volume containing the lyrics to every song Bob Dylan ever wrote, several popular science books examining consciousness and neuroscience, and a chessboard. After my father left, I emptied both panniers out on to the floor but found no pieces to go with this last item. Can one play chess without the pieces? Which is more important, these or the board? I felt a strange sensation that terrestrial life is a chessboard and we are the figures. (Which, in particular, then, are we?)

In one of the very few photographs he allowed to be taken of him, my brother sits beside Paolozzi’s Newton statue at the British Library, curiously echoing, in variation, that giant’s pose, though playing chess instead of making a circle with compasses: legs crossed, elbow folded, hand crooked across his thinking mouth – he appears to be some manner of chess-playing machine which has been folded into its correct shape for working, perhaps by the metal god looming above. Living in Nottingham, he survived on a tin of tomatoes every few days, perhaps the occasional egg, bingeing on pasties whenever it happened that he clawed a little money together. He wrote equations which look beautiful and mean nothing to almost everyone. He played chess all night. One of his two or three regular opponents was a fellow mathematician, a gentle and serious young man whose name I cannot recall, but whom I met only once, at a memorial gathering six months or so after Mark’s death. This gentle and serious man who I did not know in the slightest spoke movingly about my brother, and it was a comfort to know that it was still possible to like him. Inside one of the panniers there was a wedding invitation which, with a leap of excitement I thought for an instance was to this gentle and serious man’s wedding, but it was not. Nevertheless, this was sufficient to recall to me the time when this man did marry and asked Mark to be his best man – the very idea of it makes me wince: responsibility. This pleasant, clean and polite young groom might as well have asked a Baudelaire or a bear. He soon discovered – though surely he knew already – that he would be compelled by the condition of Mark’s clothes to buy him a suit and shoes for the event. This he did, and when it came to the special day, Mark of course could not be found. He had simply disappeared, along with the ring too. No one knows where he had gone or what he was doing, but it was predictable enough.

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