The eye of Chekhov

The thing about one’s own innate inner holiness is that it always comes into effect. It lets us run our experiments, accepting our inquisitive nature, and comes round to teach us. So, let’s take a bar gathering as a place for one kind of experiential experiment, let’s say Russia House not far away from the end of the street, which gets quite a crowd on three or so levels on a Saturday night. Bars are, yes, bad, but good is present in bad just as bad is present in good. As we all know, I like a drink now and again, and yes, sometimes I get a little silly, as we all know. A few calm the nerves, bring a relaxed pleasure, and the problem is one leads to two, two leads to three, and so on. Anyway, that’s another topic…

There are some acts of kindness in bars. There is generosity, and sharing of life and stories. People meet, catch up, etc. And in a way, there is a latent underlying cultural kindness where art is discussed, and where a chorus of Ode To Joy were about to break out but never does.

I am a quiet person. A wall flower, often alone, who talks to people at edges. Maybe it’s people with musical natures, and why instruments are strummed and bowed and blown into in bars, but there is never a collection of instruments lying about, and it would be hard in multi-cultural society to get more than a few on the same page, so… A bar leaves me feeling, well, a little sad. As it should, because I am foolishly trying to break free of my own problems, which end up staring me in the face anyway quite plainly. But, art is a way of expressing the fallen nature, the Job kind of experience, the trench quality of lives less successful than the economic norm.

The night takes its course and I end up developing a late crush on the Slovakian coat check young woman, and it’s just stupid going through the pain of wanting to talk to a stranger, but knowing you’d just be bothering her, etc. So, I share one more story, receive rather, from an old neighbor who is now maitre d’, about a robbery at the old cheap Greek restaurant down the street where he used to work summers. I walk down the steps away into the night, up the cold quiet street. My holiness drags me home, microwaves some turkey meatloaf I made earlier after a bike ride, puts me to bed, and I wake up feeling like groggy dehydrated crap.

I am glad I went out, to run the experiment, to see some pretty girls, pretending, as people do in bars, that one is interesting, but knowing “I don’t think so,” to the context of the pretty young women. I always end up like the shepherd dog with a beer in his hand who watches with infinite patience over the self-attracted flock of sheep going about their business, something they don’t need to notice as they chew the grass. Maybe it’s the stamp of ‘holiness’ upon my enterprises.

Tonight I go back to my Jesus job of waiting on publicans and sinners, something I’m more comfortable with, and maybe about all I’m good for. I’m not allowed, it seems, a more useful job that proudly fits into the world’s order, economist, professor, lobbyist, etc., and this is, if you will, holiness’ joke upon me.

Scheming and conniving, or wanting something that isn’t really quite out there, we are always found out, exposed, humbled into honesty. Try to take a short cut, nope! Not to the sun will you fly.


I take Chekhov to be an enlightened writer. His works are admissions of all this tender stuff in humanity, and he writes very personally, though of course he had a great broad range of people he could really identify with. Stories of runaway dogs who’ve joined humble circuses, a schoolboy sent off across the steppe to go to school, a flunky who hangs out at the edge of a provincial theater, a shy soldier who receives in the dark a mysterious kiss that obsesses him, a waiter who injures his leg and is left to poverty’s whims, the tender people who attempt an affair in Yalta, all wonderful people discovering through some lesson a bit of holiness within, sad, gentle, flawed, wonderful, a token of the humble tender love each of us brings to the world.