Horror Scopes

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This week, I have been conducting an experiment. And now I have re-proved to myself something that I know already; that all this horoscope business is pure nonsense. Why did I experiment with something I already know, you ask? Because at 8 am on the Piccadilly line, the only thing you get to read is bits and pieces over someone else’s shoulder. I have not fallen in love, quarrelled with my work colleagues, made a ton of money, or had an argument with my family; all of which a varied cacophony of myopic gypsies insisted I would encounter. Perhaps it has something to do with the quality of the viziers I experimented with; mass market visions reproduced a million times over in the free daily papers that colour the mornings blue and the evenings purple. But I know better than that really – I mean, you can’t blame the blandness of the food on the bluntness of the kitchen knife, but I was trying out this new thing where you give people the benefit of the doubt for ooh let’s see…one two three…benefit of doubt time over. Horoscope hocus pocus is all crap, and coming to an even stronger conclusion than before my little experiment, I now understand why the lives of certain people I know are messed up. It’s simple really – they live according to what those things say. How long are these things anyway? Max 300 words (and that’s being very generous and givey the benefit of the doubty) mind you; yet they cleave to it as though it’s the quiddity of life itself.

I think those things are dangerous and should be banned. Sometimes, we under estimate the potency of words, and under value our minds ability to reorganise our lives into either confirming our fears or exaggerating unrealistic notions. I feel about horoscopes the way some people feel about prosperity/doom and gloom preachers; both prevaricate from one extreme to the other. All of a sudden, your life is expected to lift off and become perfect, or your demise is waiting round the corner for you, sniggering at your expense. The brain is powerful. When we read, the words don’t just evaporate off the page and turn into some sort of silent language that our eyes receive. They go and take up residence in our SELVES. So when the stupid witch says to you, oh watch our for love today because there’s a fairy in your venus, or whatever, you smile coyly back at the guy on the train who’s smiling at you. You then think that ‘something happened’, that you ‘met someone’, when in fact, nothing happened, you didn’t meet anyone, and his smile was just the auto-programmed grimace that city people have adopted as a contingency plan for when the avoidance of eye contact with other commuters mistakenly occurs. What you can’t possibly know, the possibilities that your brain can’t then access (he might be psychotic, he might in fact be married with three kids, he might not have registered that he grimaced at you) are blocked, because the viziers words have formed a disconnect between what’s really happening and what you’re expecting to happen. Hence you see things off centre.

You trip on the pavement because you weren’t looking and all of a sudden, you knew it, you just knew something bad was going to happen today. You have a stomach ache because you chose to eat prawns in a dodgy restaurant, and wham, finally, here’s proof that someone at work wants your job, someone is trying to poison you, someone mixed printer ink with your balsamic dressing when you went to the loo. By reading these things, you sacrifice a part of your brain where objective appreciation would have resided, and fill it with paranoia in all directions, both for good and for woe. Especially in the morning. People cut veritable slices of their consciousnesses and hand them over to words which carry forces which don’t know anything. They accept that this generalisation of themselves, propounded by the astrologist or whatever, is superior to their own common sense, to their own in-built sensibility.

If these horoscope things are sooooooo fantastic, why don’t people turn to them when their relatives lie dying in hospital, when they are cash strapped and hiding under the kitchen table from debt collectors, when bombs go off? If you’re going to pray when things are bad, then you might as well ask the person you pray to for direction and guidance in the things that puzzle you. If when we pray in desperate situations, we see the radical difference it makes, why short change ourselves in the Everyday with the astigmatism of guessing? It’s all a question of perspective, really.

What say you? Feel free to agree or disagree – this is not a communist blog.