Dancing the Antick Hay

April 29, 2015
Dancing the antick hay 

In the beginning of “The Lady with the Little Dog,” Chekhov writes of Gurov, who has seen the lady and is thinking about pursuing her:

Repeated experience, and bitter experience indeed, had long since taught him that every intimacy, which in the beginning lends life such pleasant diversity and presents itself as a nice and light adventure, inevitably, with decent people . . . grows into a major task, extremely complicated, and the situation finally becomes burdensome. But at every new meeting with an interesting woman, this experience somehow slipped from his memory, and he wanted to live, and everything seemed quite simple and amusing.

The Hay, Baby!

Could it be that everything is quite simple and amusing; only decent people complicate it, make it a task, load it all manner of burden? If so, why don’t we say, “To hell with decency”? It brings no ease, only constraint. It makes us take everything too earnestly. Simple becomes extremely complicated, light becomes heavy; and out of heavy hearts comes only so much sad poetry and bad novels, dogmatic religion and unreadable philosophy - and unhappiness.

          “To hell with it, then – decency!” I say. Let us go instead and dance the antick hay.

In “Gooseberries” the veterinarian Ivan Ivanych tells of his brother Nikolai’s sober fall into nobility – the meek little clerk who has saved his money, even married a rich widow, to own land. Any land he could buy cannot match his dreams, but he can act as if it does and live contentedly in the illusion. His gooseberries may be tough and sour, he declares they are delicious.

          But: “They were tough and sour,” his brother insists, then remembers what Pushkin said, “Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.” So Ivan Ivanych comes to see in his brother “a happy man, whose cherished dream . . . had come true ... who had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself.” Yet, Ivan Ivanych is “overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair,” because won’t contentment lead to inaction? And it is more important, isn’t it, to act than to be content.

          I say, “To hell with action, which always has an end.” Let us instead dance the antick hay.

Imagine the dancers have all had a little too much to drink; they misstep, they bump into one another. One stumbles, but someone crying “Whoops!” catches him before he falls. Another does fall, and two of his fellows help him laughingly to his feet. The cries and the laughter join the instruments in the music.

          There is no illusion that this is a court ball or these indecent old men are a professional troupe. That there are no illusions does not mean, however, that the dancers know the truth. They know they do not; they are not professional dancers, and they are not educators.

          The world will not become a better place because what they assuredly know and have earnestly sworn to tell will be heard, earnestly discussed, and taken to heart.
         The dancers say, “To hell with earnestness. To hell with the truth.” If one wise man believed that knowing the truth would set you free, another could answer, “Yes. But what is that truth?” What there is of it is nothing decent or earnest, only simple and amusing, to tippling old men, like satyrs on the lawn, tripping the antick hay.