With my
birthday imminent I am reminded of the time when, as a self-obsessed youth, I discovered
my personal Sign of the Zodiac. I thought it a neat way of defining my personality
- and of gauging the suitability of potential girlfriends. Identifying my sign
relieved me of the anguish of identifying myself: it substituted fate for
responsibility, karma for chaos and lulled me, briefly, into believing that the
world was an ordered, harmonious place and that my part in it was pre-ordained.
The reality
check came along soon enough - at around chapter 7 of Linda Goodman's Sun Signs - when I read that my nose is typically
aquiline, which it isn't. And neither, I argued, were the noses of all the Eskimos
born under the same sign as me. Thus I discovered the flaw in Linda's theory which
brought down the whole house of cards and left me with an abiding cynicism for
the "logical" part of “astrological”.
This week, coincidentally,
I was invited to a gala show of traditional Chinese performance arts to
celebrate the start of the Year of the Snake and, being ignorant of its
significance, I did some research - nothing intense or time-consuming, just a
little light googling to enable some polite conversation with my host. To my
dismay I learned that there is a Chinese Zodiac which, like ours, is based on nonsense
and to which, like ours, I was irresistibly drawn to check out my personal
profile. The charts show that I was born in the year of the pig - an animal
which, contrary to widespread prejudices elsewhere, in China is attributed with
aesthetic sensibility and a philosophical, intellectual approach to life. I found myself basking in the warm glow of
this agreeable résumé of my character, having momentarily lost sight of my rational faculties.
Subsequently
I sat in the front row of a two-hour show featuring the folksy performance arts
of Sichuan Province comprising an assemblage of colourfully dressed dancers,
fearsome acrobats, highly-pitched singers and scratchy-sounding instruments.
Without a map to consult I was baffled by the place names quoted, especially
when it came to the turn of the Tibetan tap-dance troupe. From what little I
know of the region, Tibet is a province in its own right but I thought better
of raising the question since I am aware of the sensitivities stirred up there
in recent years. Whether the show authentically represented the various ethnic
traditions I am not qualified to judge but I have to say that the diversity and
intricacy of costumes and dances made our own equivalent - Morris dancing –
look like a hastily improvised charade. A suspicion lingers, however: are these
entertaining, colourful distractions deliberately promoted as propaganda to
disguise the dominating intent of the Han people?
It was a
question I could not raise with my host, whom I know to be dedicated to the
official line, so we engaged instead in talk about the Chinese preoccupation
with symbols of good luck - although even this became tricky when I introduced
a touch of English irony by suggesting that the mass of Chinese people seem to have
had very little of it in modern history. Nor did I voice my opinion that zodiacal
systems, like moribund folk-art, seem to lead us into a cul-de-sac of fatalism and that, by
encouraging people to identikit themselves, they limit personal
ambition: the more you are defined the less you grow.
The exhortation
to “be yourself" may sound like good advice -if you are sure of who you
are - but I have come to prefer the more aspirational "Don't be yourself:
be someone a little nicer".
No comments:
Post a Comment