I've been goosed!

I don't know why I've had this rather inane nursery rhyme repeating in my head lately. I don't know how it got started. I'm aware that most of these childish things have dark or even sinister origins, buried in antiquity somewhere.

I wondered if this one wasn't just a piece of nonsense, incongruous, like the wacky poems of Edward Lear or even Lewis Carroll. But no. The merest probing into Wikipedia brought up this:

Most historians believe that this rhyme refers to priest holes—hiding places for itinerant Catholic priests during the persecutions under King Henry VIII and later under Oliver Cromwell. Once discovered the priest would be forcibly taken from the house ('thrown down the stairs') and treated badly. Amateur historian Chris Roberts suggests further that the rhyme is linked to the propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII.

Other interpretations exist. Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey note in Birds Britannica that the greylag goose has for millennia been associated with fertility, that "goose" still has a sexual meaning in British culture, and that the nursery rhyme preserves these sexual overtones ("In my lady's chamber").

Priest holes! Sexual connotations! It doesn't quite hang together for me, but these things can evolve over time, or exist in layers. The original version didn't even have the throwing-down-the-stairs bit:

Goose-a goose-a gander,
Where shall I wander?
Up stairs and down stairs,
In my lady's chamber;
There you'll find a cup of sack
And a race of ginger.

We won't even ask what a "race of ginger" is. It's just one of these obscure things. Some older versions include these even-sillier lines:

The stairs went crack,
He nearly broke his back.
And all the little ducks went,
'Quack, quack, quack'.

All that strange left-leg stuff ("so I took him by his left leg and threw him down the stairs") didn't seem to add up for me, until I suddenly remembered hearing the expression, "He kicks with his left foot." Just recalling that phrase jarred awake a synapse that hadn't fired since I was six and listening to my Grandmother quietly, politely eviscerate every Catholic in the neighborhood. The left foot is like the left leg or the left hand - sinister, half a bubble off plumb, "not the thing". In other words, to an observant Protestant - Catholic.

You have to ask yourself, however, why anyone would invent a children's rhyme about priest holes and the persecution of Catholics, those nasty old left-foot-kickers. Why would anyone throw in references to geese (ladies of the night) and ladies' chambers (implying high-status quarters not normally open to the goose trade)? There is Mother Goose, of course, just to complicate things. But if you really look at the structure of the rhyme, which absolutely no one does, you see that it can be interpreted entirely another way.

The narrator, the "I" who is reciting the rhyme, is actually addressing it to the goose character - asking it, in essence, "where should I go? It's kind of like "hey, you over there - yes, I mean YOU, Goosey Goosey Gander - what's a-happenin'?" But it's definitely not "Here I am, Goosey Goosey Gander, Esquire, and let me tell you all about my lady's chamber." This is in spite of the fact that every illustration I've ever seen for this thing includes a big, nasty goose, usually throwing a man down the stairs.

 In fact, "Goosey Goosey Gander" might just be a collection of nonsense syllables, a blithery-blathery-tra-la-lee sort of thing.

If you take the goose right out of the equation (and that's no fun, because I love these depictions of savage geese throwing terrified men down the stairs), then you have something like this:

Dinder, dander, donder
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs, downstairs,
In my lady's chamber.

When you look at it this way, it can and does have erotic possibilities. Hmmm, let's see, where am I going to wander? (wandering being a sort of aimless idling, or even a poking-around-in-none-of-your-business thing). Maybe up here, maybe down there (whew - now that has some sexual meaning behind it!), or maybe in my lady's chamber, where I certainly do NOT belong. It has a sort of subtext of invaded intimacy.

The old man who wouldn't say his prayers kind of reminds me of the old rhyme about "I met a man who wasn't there". In any case, is it really the goose who does the "throwing down the stairs" bit? Of course not; it's the narrator of the poem. So maybe it's really by that notorious old Catholic-hater, Henry VIII. Who knows, he wrote a lot of songs, such as Greensleeves. Or maybe Anne Boleyn wrote it for something to do in the Tower before she got chopped.

Fallout

When I flipped my calendar today, I noticed that this isn't just any old Tuesday. Y'all know what Mardi Gras is, right? Those folks in Nawlins sure know how to put on a party.

Most of us have some vague idea that it's tied to Easter, but are not sure how.

Well, they'd be right. But more than that, it's tied to the cycles of the moon.

Ever wonder why Easter's on a different Sunday every year? Why doesn't it settle on one particular date, like Christmas or Ground Hog Day?

Because it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon, that's why, and cuz the moon's on a four-week cycle, sometimes it's earlier, and sometimes it's later. Ask the Chinese, who celebrate the Lunar New Year in a similar way.

You may ask: what does this have to do with Christianity? Nothing. What does it have to do with paganism and goddess-worship and Druids all that moon-related stuff? Plenty. The early Christians were smart enough to graft their big event of the year on a very old tree.

Before Mardi Gras even came along, it was called Shrove Tuesday. Most Christians don't have any idea what Shrove Tuesday actually means, except that there's always a pancake supper in the church basement, that damp place that always smells like the inside of a pumpkin, with undercooked pancakes on paper plates and kids spilling syrup and running around on a sugar high.

OK then, Shrove Tuesday is the beginning of six weeks of Lent. So what's Lent? Some people have some idea that it has to do with fasting and/or self-abnegation of some kind. Then comes Good Friday (the day Our Lord was nailed to a post to die: so why is it called Good?), and Easter Sunday, the miraculous day of Resurrection.

But it all has to be carefully timed to the cycles of the moon.

My bit of research into Shrove Tuesday was strange indeed. "Shrove" is the past tense of "shrive", which means to confess one's sins, to be penitent and grovel for forgiveness, and hopefully be absolved ("hey, I had a bad childhood"). If one is so absolved, they are described as "shriven". An unattractive word, if you ask me, resembling "shrivel", "shrine", and "shorn".

So what does this have to do with all those pancakes? Plenty. Before Lent, the traditional time of fasting, you had to use up every bit of fat in the house so the next six weeks would be a culinary disaster, everything sticking to the pan cuzzathefact they didn't have them-all Teflon thingy-dings then.

So yuz gorged yourself on sweet carbs on Fat Tuesday (which is a reference to the cooking fat, though in Nawlins it can have other meanings), then go into a long stretch of dire austerity. But I have a problem with all this. If you've been shriven already, why fast? Haven't you suffered enough?

It's hard to square stacks of oozing pancakes, Dixieland bands and drunken riots with the dreary plainsong of Gregorian chant. But after praying and fasting for seven or eight months, I think I've found a common point here.
Sex.
Illicit sex.

Can you guess what I mean?

Can you?

Can you guess why the Catholic Church is scrabbling so hard to apologize for all the horrendous abuse that has gone unchecked among their most valued clergymen for generations?

When you wake up from Mardi Gras, perhaps stuck to the floor with your own vomit, you may not be able to remember just who you were with last night. Isn't this something like those sweet little 8-year-old altar boys who try to push out of their minds a memory so horrific that they know no one will believe them?

I've got nothing against sex, folks, but it's too bad it's so often associated with drunken revelry, things you'd rather forget, and little boys and little girls trying not to scream because this kind of love is "special". So special that they dare not mention it to anyone at all.

There is a certain culling. The ones who can't make it. We don't know what's the matter with those people, why they can't get it together! Some of them even leave the church because entering the sanctuary makes them feel unaccountably sick. These are the ones that kind of sift down, doing horrible things like sticking needles in their arm, and eventually die.

Fallout.

I used to eat the bloody pancakes, pray out the bitter, penitent six weeks (never quite sure what I had done that was so wrong), and make sure I suffered terribly on Good Friday, until I realized one day that I had goddamn well suffered enough.
And that I wasn't going to be fallout. Not for anyone.