Continuations come from chess, and might also be called possible futures. I’m sure I heard about them once from a book about a chess prodigy who loses her way. Not much of a book, not bad, but a few bits and themes from it have become tropes for me. One was when she decided, in reclusive mood after a catastrophic loss, to really get to know alcohol.

It was the conscious decision that struck me. I’d assumed reclusive alcohol abuse was something that snuck up on people, a state they found themselves in unexpectedly. Like Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses: only able to accept it when confronted with compelling self-awareness. This young woman, though, having lost everything she had lived for (or so she thought, pre-redemptive denouement), actively and consciously chose the gauze, the comforting haze to which a friend of mine once referred, in a room full of empty beer bottles and wine casks in Melbourne. The prodigy deliberately closed the curtains and opened a delivery account with the local booze emporium. This implied that there might be some benefit to such an embrace. At the least, it revealed to me a possible future.

An incidental vignette that has stuck with me was one in which she and her (redemptive, ever-faithful) man played chess without a board, on a road trip. I could almost do this, once. I had a game with Robert Fisher (no, not that one), using salt shakers, peanut bowls and ashtrays on the bar at the Lakeside Hotel. We played the whole thing out, as I recall it. I may have lost, but remember thinking it was a pretty cool thing to be able to do.

But there are whole communities for whom this is normal. The redemptive man was bringing her home by it. When you belong in the elite, you should embrace it. Take your place with aplomb. Don’t apologise for it. Conversely, when you do that, you will find yourself in a community in which you are no longer special: smarter or stronger or more determined or eloquent or fast. Suddenly, you know lots of people who are just as good as you, whatever the game.

These two bits, then, but also this other trope, the continuations, from the game. For every situation, there are more or fewer continuations. If you give your opponent only one, or a few unpleasant options, you have the initiative. Some positions, though, contain within them virtually infinite permutations of possible futures. This, of course, is the essence of Schrödinger’s and Heisenberg’s insights.

So then you have to think. If I move here, it looks okay, and if this continuation followed, why, I’d win in three. But my opponent (Fortune, perhaps) is unlikely to cooperate. So I won’t do that. So the possible future is impossible, really. (Maybe. No-one would be so stupid, right?) Yet, it has a profound effect on present policy. Think Islamic caliphate. Think nuclear holocaust.

That’s a continuation: Armageddon, the last battle, a myth of a possible future. Ironically, the name is derived from Megiddo, the name of the first battle for which we have an account. Chariots played an important but ill-understood role, hundreds of them. They were already, by then, an advanced and ancient technology; a set of interconnected technologies, actually. Well, so some historians have told me. It was in print, from several sources, but still, I don’t know know. I wasn’t there. Lots of different things might have left the same evidence. What happened? What else might have happened, but didn’t? What would I like to have happened? If I make this interpretive knight move here, I can change, by writing, history. History as reverse Continuation, then, if that works.

Or memoir. It’s a possible past. According to Rogers Waters, ‘They flutter behind you, your possible pasts, some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost’. I didn’t quite got this line, but now I think…

Memories adapt themselves to the exigencies of current situations. They are unreliable (sorry, Clive). They are continuations of the present need, and in some situations, infinite memory-sets might fit. I could tell you some stories, some memories, some moments, like when Simon Stanhope sold me my first hat, and fuck me if it wasn’t a Stetson. I was John Wayne then, for a moment, on the fly-wired veranda of the ringers quarters at Wentworth station. At least, I think I was. Makes a good vignette, anyway. Perhaps I’ll tell you a story about it some time.

So, we can relate the personal to the grand-historical, the past to the future, the fictional to the memorial. And all vice versa. Others have done it. Every reference opens up another infinite supply of associations and allegories. Reference entails continued iteration.

There they are, then. History, memoir, cultural referential fractals. Continuations. Then again, they could just stop here. But they don’t.