Chekhov's Rifle: Going Granular, Exiting The Matrix, Quitting Fear Based Writing, And Keeping The World At Bay

We Need Beauty As Much As We Need "Truth," Maybe More

"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

— Anton Chekhov (From S. Shchukin, Memoirs. 1911.)

This famous Chekhov quote is said to express the principle in story telling of making sure all elements are accounted for, necessary, and purposeful. It’s called “foreshadowing,” in writing.

I have for some reason been thinking about this statement from Chekhov lately. I take a slightly different view than the writing industry does. I feel that Chekhov was saying:

If you are in my care, I’m your pilot and you can trust me. I won’t show you things that I can’t animate, personally.

If I show you a rifle, it will go be because it will eventually go off.

It’s Chekhov’s wall, Chekhov’s rifle, and Chekhov’s narrative.

My father used to quote it like this, though he didn’t attribute it to Chekhov. (Various writers have had this quote wrongly attributed to them:) “If there’s a gun in act one, it will go off in act three.”

I bring it up because I stopped writing, again, (as you may have noticed.)

I’m dislocated, housing wise, and may or may not write about that, but I won’t write about it just because I went through it. Silence is also important—saying nothing if you’re not sure what you can, with authority, say. What you can be sure of. Chekhov could be sure about that rifle because he hung it there in the first place.

The Chekhov quote is about a promise a writer makes: If I tell you something, or show you something, or display an object or a detail of any kind, it will be because you have trusted me to show you what I see and how I see it.

What is a writer?

Oh for heavens’ sake. Nothing much. A lonely person who looks at the world behind a glass partition, and can’t come inside. An observer and a passenger.

What is writing?

It is the alchemical process of one person seeing, sensing, thinking, feeling, collecting, and presenting the composition to readers, once they are sure they know what something means, to them.

In the typhoon of content, clips, voices, commentary, suspicion, theory, revelation, gossip, etc that soaks us daily as soon as we open the Matrix in the morning, we stop “writing” and instead do something more akin to shoveling. None of the images, thoughts, or conclusions are genuinely our own. We’re just careening around the matrix saying, “Look at this and look at this and look at this!” It might mean something. Lord only knows.

I will give you an example of a time when I saw something I was able to render meaningful, though at the time, it went down river and I never wrote it.

It was last summer, and I was in my room, at a small hotel I stayed at after my son’s wedding, called Hotel Arrayanes, in Almuñecar, Spain. I heard a child’s sharp cry, and went to the balcony. On the promenade below, I saw a man in a red T shirt, and two children. The younger one had fallen, and was crying. I saw the man pause for a moment, unsure what to do. Then he did something, that struck me as remarkable. He sat down on the low wall, and pulled the little girl, his daughter, close to him. Then, with his other arm, he pulled his other daughter close. He held them both, until the little one soon after, stopped crying. They stayed like that for a while, then they got up and continued walking.

I took a photo, and tried to process my intense reaction. My reaction was: That man knew what was needed and that’s what he did. It was so simple.

Another scene turned up in my mind of a similar situation somewhere in America, and this may be biased, against America, and I don’t know if it has anything to do with my own father, because I can’t remember much of my childhood. But the scene I saw in America was one of stress. Maybe even panic. The need to holler for a band aid. The need to do something. Maybe even scold the child— or perhaps scold the other one.

But he just made his body into a calming center and chowed the child he was there, he was her father, and she was ok. Within seconds, she stopped crying.

It seemed so Spanish. I think you know I idealize all things Spanish, and it might not be fair. But since I’m the pilot, and I saw what I saw, if I had told you the story at the time, that is what I would have narrated.

I have millions of images I sort through wondering if I might make a story out of it for you, and if so, what story am I telling you, and why?

I want the stories to be human. Just small stories of humans being human.

I found the photo. Perhaps the image undermines the story, makes it photo-journalism. But in any case, here it is.

I felt like a spy when I took the photo. Would anybody else have “noticed” this and what does my “noticing” really say apart from the fact that I’m amazingly good at disassociating into reflections over almost anything. I am a nightmare to travel with. I stop constantly. Everything is the story. I can’t help it.

I waste more time than anybody in the world, but I keep thinking it’s ok, that this is all going to make sense one day.

A strange person who tried to cut loose negative entities from my energy field last summer (never ever let people do this, if they offer) said that my brain gets interested and excited about so many things I observe. “I would be bored,” he said. “But your brain gets excited.” I was not sure how to take that. I only want to describe details I can see or hear now, nothing else.

I take photos all the time, and shoot videos, and imagine a day when all these pieces will be catalogued and it will all cohere.

I want to stop being afraid and miserable and imparting the same on you all. It is all designed to never end, and never be resolved.

We were, it seemed, all happier (I always exaggerate) when I was in Spain, and you all were so kind about pieces I wrote from there, like The Doors of Andalucia. Part 2. And this one, about the shop window with “gender clarity.”

SO. (This is actually going somewhere)…I’ve decided to start a travel magazine with writing by people, meaning not necessarily “writers.” A travel magazine right here, as a new branch of this Substack.

We have so many “great writers” here which means great observers. How to structure it and make it real, this I need to work on. The comments section is a treasure trove of shimmering shells not yet picked up. There is no reason I should be up here and those “comments” (writings, shimmering) should be relegated to the comments section, other than happenstance.

Many of us are growing weary of the big picture, and the Big Story of how they plan to kill us. If we stop looking at that and start looking at things that fascinate us personally, we may find new freedom after the big attack (Covid) that did so much damage, but ultimately failed.

I believe that The Matrix is a dead place where people don’t think their own thoughts— where we willfully terrorize one another, over things that might happen. Or did happen. But we can rarely be sure if they did or didn’t. That’s why we need Chekhov’s intimacy—he made the wall, the rifle, and the gun going off, because he thought it up.

Shop window in Granada: “Sombreros since 1964.” Who made this astonishing painting? (I wondered.) Why don’t I see things like this in America? Look at the window gate. (Second time I publish this photo, I now realize.)

Granada at night. That door!

Almuñecar, festivity “Virgen Del Carmen,” just before the float was pushed into the sea.

I remember feeling happy and astonished.

Never wanting to leave.

https://youtube.com/shorts/kZDR34AOB3Q?si=Eb6vbMDO8EojP2Sv