Carnival : Sound & Fury

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players:
they have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts,
his acts being seven [st]ages [from cradle to the grave].

– Shakespeare (As You Like It)

Once a year, during the lunar new year season in Singapore, there’s the Chingay Parade, dubbed nowadays as ‘Asia’s grandest street and float parade’. This year , according to an ad in the papers, the ‘exhilarating parade highlights’ are ‘4000 performers, 40 local performing groups, 7 international troupes, 13 glittering floats, a grand opening and finale’. You can buy tickets for seats where the parade passes through. Now, brace yourself as I enter ‘worldly-joy-killjoy’ mode… Since I was little, I always wondered what’s the big deal about Chingay. I tried to get excited about it, just as the masses did, but I failed miserably. Sitting before the TV, watching the hullabaloo created by performers and the cheering audience, I remained largely unmoved. (Okay, there’s some amusement.)

Till today, the parade to me is an occasion where ordinary folks dress up as fancy as possible, do crazy dances to loud music, and kick up a colourful fuss as they parade by. The impression I have is that the ra-ra celebration of a million bling-blings and ‘ching-chings’ is an elaborate and extravagant excuse for the performers try to make as big an impression as they can before passing by the audience’s eyes, be it on the streets or screen. To create and leave memorable impressions for ourselves and others for life – is this the story of our lives? Is that all there is to it? What impressions are truly impressive? How do they make the world a substantially better (kinder and wiser) place? I’m not sure (though I can imagine the performers learning more about themselves when they go through countless rehearsals).

It disturbs me a little that tourists are expected to experience the parade as one of the highest worldly highs in terms of sight and sound possible fascinating (without sex or drugs!). Of course, genuine spiritual ‘highs’ are much more subtle and sublime, though they are usually neglected by those who have not tasted it. Chingay, though still a huge contrast in many ways, reminds me of the famous annual Rio Carvival in Rio de Janeiro, which is the biggest of its kind in the world, attracting some 500,000 every year. It is so huge a celebration that from memory, it makes it to the news on TV annually – even in Singapore.

I read something ironical about the carnival online – ‘Rio Carnival is a wild 4 day celebration, 40 days before Easter. It officially starts on Saturday and finishes on Fat Tuesday with the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday after which one is supposed to abstain from all bodily pleasures. Carnival with all its excesses, celebrated as a profane event, can thus be considered an act of farewell to the pleasures of the flesh. It usually happens in February, the hottest month in the Southern Hemisphere, when the Rio summer is at its peak.’

So it seems, the carnival is supposed to be a ‘spiritually legitimate’ extreme of indulgence (oxymoronic as it seems), that swings thereafter to the other extreme of sensual deprivation. (Is it extreme asceticism?) No wonder I find most carnivals somewhat unnerving – because they are designed specifically with thrills to deviate from the Middle Path of moderate living, as recommended by the Buddha – who realised that living with indulgence in sense pleasures and living in self-mortification are equally non-productive (in fact, possibly destructive) for advancement on the spiritual path.

A friend’s junior once remarked this of the Rio Carnival – ‘Well, at least they have some fun – which is better than none!’ Is this really so? Should we then not lose ourselves in occasional carnivals? Sounds reasonable to seize the day in this way, before we delve deeper into serious spirituality? My answer to junior’s remark is this – ‘What if one dies in the midst of celebration, from being intoxicated with excitement and pleasure? What if one gets hooked? What talk of spirituality later is there? Would it not be too late?’ What a killjoy I am? Come on! Can’t everyone have some fun once in a while? Of course! Party on if you wish, but time’s always a’tickin away. Remember to come back in time… if you can tell the time!

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.*
[* Let’s make it signify something worthy!]

– Shakespeare (Macbeth)

Related Article:
The Middle Way of Celebration
https://moonpointer.com/new/2009/01/celebration-middle-way