nursery_rhymes_and_children's_games perfectly_chaotic And there it was; it hit me in the gut like a bag full of bricks. The lump lodged itself deep in the well of my throat and settled in. However briefly it may have been I was looking into the depths of my heart and they were fathomless. Sitting there I could not help but want to look away, to run as fast and as far as possible, but there would be no escaping it. That sadness, that empty feeling I felt, leaving me with a lack of any thought which could be composed with any symphony of words. It was as if all the blood was trickling out of my very soul and onto the floor in what seemed like an endless beautiful coda. That is when it happened. The fear hit me. Much like a child playing a game of tag I came to realize that my fear and I will be chasing each other in an eternal game. I try to play hide and seek with Sadness and it always manages to find me. When it is my turn to seek out Sadness I close my eyes and begin to count to twenty one. When I open my eyes I cannot always find my playmate right away and it worries me. Once that is over and it becomes my turn to hide again I run off to my little corner where I can hear a soft voice sweetly singing me a melody. “Ring around the Rosie. A pocket full of posies. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” Then I recall that this children’s song is all about the incomprehensible amount of death which has been caused by tiny little winged insects. It seems I have been found. 101114 ... re_alisma nice. my little nephew and niece play these games. they are both scared and laughing. one and a half year old Maeve can barely talk but she can manage a little "Rosie" and a little "posie" and "fall down." 101115 ... perfectly_chaotic That is beautiful. Thank you for sharing. I do not have any children of my own, all though I love kids, and I love to hear about other people's children. Today a woman I know told me how her 7 month old used to think she was actually gone when they played peek-a-boo. Now when she goes around the house to get things done the little girl thinks it is a game as long as she peeks into the room on occasion. How do you feel about "Three Blind Mice"? 101116 ... re_alisma I don't think I ever really heard the words to "Three Blind Mice" the tune, yes. as children i don't think we ever got to the end of it. here it is: Three blind mice. Three blind mice. See how they run. See how they run. They all ran after the farmer's wife, Who cut off their tails with a carving knife, Did you ever see such a sight in your life, As three blind mice? Going after the poor handicapped mice with a carving knife seems rather vicious of that farmer's wife. it seems to have to do with our natural aggression towards unwanted and inferior elements. it also seems to remind the children that they are much more privileged (in sight) then the little animals, something we don't normally discuss as adults. very interesting..... Hickory_Dickory_Dock? 101118 ... perfectly_chaotic In regards to "Three Blind Mice," I enjoy the way that Billy Collins writes about it iun his collection "Picnic, Lightning (1998)": "I Chop Some Parsley While LIstening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice"" And I start wondering how they came to be blind./ If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,/ and I think of the poor mother/ brooding over her sightless young triplets. Or was it a common accident, all three caught/ in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?/ If not,/ if each came to his or her blindness separately, how did they ever manage to find one another?/ Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse/ to locate even one fellow mouse with vision/ let alone two other blind ones? And how, in their tiny darkness,/ could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife/ or anyone else's wife for that matter?/ Not to mention why. Just so she could cut off their tails/ with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,/ but the thought of them without eyes/ and now without tails to trail through the moist grass or slip around the corner of a baseboard/ has the cynic who always lounges within me/ up off his couch and at the window/ trying to hide the rising softness that he feels. By now I am on to dicing an onion/ which might account for the wet stinging/ in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's/ mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon," which happens to be the next cut,/ cannot be said to be making matters any better. 101118 ... perfectly_chaotic In regards to Hickory Dickory Dock: At first glance this poem appears rather light hearted... The mouse runs up a clock only to become scared of the unfamiliar striking of a bell announcing to all present the passing of either the 1st or 13th hour of the day. I wonder just what it is that the mouse was seeking. For the mouse to run up the clock, it could not run up a clock hanging on the wall after all, perhaps it is an old grandfather clock. Maybe even of the sort in which, every day, one must manually start its time-keeping with an adjustment to the weights. Maybe the mouse was frightened by some farmer's wife and went to hide from the reach of her broom. It seems doubtful that this mouse was one of a group of blind triplets if it was to be lucky enough to find such a clock. Also, I am a bit perplexed as to how the mouse would ascend to the peak of a vertical slope such as a clock. Regardless of what the mouse was seeking or how it made it there, it was terrified by something it could not understand; it was scared of the unfamiliar... 101118 ... re_alisma oh, man. i totally missed that the blind mice were chasing the farmer's wife (somehow) before she got to their tails. for some reason, i read it the opposite, that she chased them, then cut off their tails. now these mice are seeming pretty stealth, but what blind mice can beat a farmer's wife? about the mouse and the clock in Hickory Dickory Dock: would it be to accustom the child to relying on the time-keeping technology. and thus the first story of how a human (mouse) becomes cyborg (mouse keeping time along with the clock). stretching a little with "cyborg" in the 1700s or whatever, but cyborgs happened to be in my Jungian reading today. how that's scary: it's always scary to control the passing of time too much, to micromanage life until it is nothing but a bunch of minutes, kept track of.... and then death (time, aging...) is nothing but another of these minutes that has passed by. so of course the mouse gets scared and runs back down. into chronos, out to kairos, and probably back up the clock again. the mouse finds its own way to keep the time... wrestles a little control back from the clock. the child must also learn to do it. such a brave little mouse. so far, all the mice are pretty bold. it seems they always are... 101118 ... perfectly_chaotic And what of Sing a Song of Six Pence 101118 ... re_alisma here it is. not making heads or tails of it just yet... Sing a song of sixpence, A pocket full of rye. Four and twenty blackbirds, Baked in a pie. When the pie was opened, The birds began to sing; Wasn't that a dainty dish, To set before the king? The king was in his counting house, Counting out his money; The queen was in the parlour, Eating bread and honey. The maid was in the garden, Hanging out the clothes; When down came a blackbird And pecked off her nose. 101119 ... re_alisma my best guess is this is about a sovereign's insularity and ingratitude for the singer's generosity. sixpence plus magic blackbirds are impressive, relatively, but the king probably doesn't see it that way. so his daughter, the conscientious part of him, gets the karma. 101120 ... perfectly_chaotic As a child, my parent’s actually used to read me a version of this which ended at the end of the second stanza. I like your take on the poem. Allow me to present another possible interpretation: Perhaps this poem is a political statement. This may seem like a stretch, but maybe not so much when you consider that you could have lost your head for speaking out against a king (and I agree that a king could easily live a very insular existence). The blackbirds singing the song of sixpence could have represented peasants paying their taxes. Naturally, sixpence would be a very dainty dish when set before the fortunes of a king as he counts his money. When they blackbird gets upset it pecks off the nose of the king’s maid who is hanging out the king and queen’s dirty laundry. In the end of the poem the king never gets punished. The only ones who suffer are the blackbirds and the people who do the king’s dirty work. Granted, this ignores the part about the magical singing blackbirds as well as that of the queen eating bread and honey. It is both fortunate and unfortunate we cannot ask the author about the meaning of the poem. It is unfortunate because we will never know; unfortunate because if we knew we could not surmise our own possible interpretations. If we could ask such questions of such people I would have to think of something else to blathe about besides nursery rhymes and children’s games. Speaking of children’s games we used to play this game called “Ghost in the Graveyard”. The “ghost” would close their eyes and count to a number, I cannot recall a specific number and it may have changed based on a whim, while everybody would run off and hide. Then the ghost would go roam the graveyard, we never actually played the game in a graveyard we simply trespassing on nearby properties and calling them one, looking for a victim. If you made it back home, which would be wherever the ghost had been counting, you would get to go hide for another round. If the ghost caught you then you became the next ghost. Have you ever played this game? 101120 what's it to you? who go blather from