Three blind mice
Three blind mice
See how they run
See how they run
They all ran after the farmer’s wife
she cut off their tails with a carving knife
did you ever see such a sight in your life
as three blind mice
My second day post-school. Still in my recovery period. I try to guard it. I try to tell people, if I don’t defrost at the right speed, if I don’t slow at a safe rate, I’ll have a nervous breakdown. I’ve never had a real nervous breakdown, just once I had to be escorted to a doctor, and several times I’ve called for backup in the form of a walk, a hug, a comfort. And once I ran out of anxiety meds, and my sister literally trafficked them to me in New York City.
I’m not dull!
Waking up on a defrost day, my mind has a few items on the agenda. A) do everything to heal oneself perfectly, including meditation, yoga, cardio, vegetables (which I have to deliberately seek out), fruit, reading, writing, making art, being outside, enjoying the cats, keeping a clean environment.
Another part of me is like, fuck all this, and immediately watches facebook recommended videos for a solid half hour at least. They are encouraging videos, though, from St. Conan of O’Brien. He’s not taking things too seriously.
I want to go out! But shouldn’t I stay home, and not spend any money, and cocoon?
No, I want to go out!
But it might rain.
I go out. Today is overalls and backpack day. I like to be thought of as an eccentric French lady, except on the days I am scruffy Liz, who wears overalls and a backpack, and is up for anything.
As I am walking through the bright shirtwaists of my neighborhood, the rhythm of walking suggests I choose my nursery rhyme of the day. Or perhaps knowing a friend who has recently reclaimed her closet from a mouse kingdom thriving like that of the ancient Aztecs.
Rhythms are about walking, working, making time go by. All human life includes long periods of doing what you don’t want to do, or living with an agitated mind while you do something you want to do.
I read a long and amazing book about rats and how their lives run parallel to ours, but I don’t know so much about mice.
What I know about mice is more that my cats can and will murder them.
The first time my darling cat Miranda killed a mouse, I was so overcome with revulsion and terror that I pulled out the Book of Common Prayer and said a little service for the mouse, yes, as if it were the queen of England, and then managed to lift up the bathroom mat on which it died and fling it away from my home.
God was I ever so young.
I had a cockroach in my bathtub once, and had to call an ex to have him deal with it.
I am no longer young: I handle my visitors.
I do scrunch up my eyes so I can’t see the corpse well.
“The corpse” reminds me of the movie “Amadeus,” and the throwing of lime on the body in the grave, and then I remember my friend who worked with Milos Foreman and saw his Oscar in a guest bathroom. I still feel his loss, every other day, once a week. My friend, not Foreman.
“Three Blind Mice” was first published in 1609. Someone wants to speculate that it is political, a hidden, creaky political message in there, this time about Queen Mary and how Henry VIII, Mary, Elizabeth, just grabbed Christianity by the neck and flung it about.
Again I don’t believe nursery rhymes are about anything except themselves.
I’m a dadaist.
“Three Blind Mice” has staying power because it is not just a nursery rhyme, but a song, set to a simple melody you may learn to play on a recorder, a tiny piano powered by a watch battery, or a xylophone in music class.
See how they run! Cause they can see themselves!
Allow me to blow your mind: there are blind mice. They live in Vietnam. They are three inches long and fast as hell. Smithsonian magazine describes them thusly: “its visual organs are a total mess” (hurtful; eye of the beholder?).
“Typhlomys, also known as the soft-furred tree mouse or Chinese pygmy dormouse,” Smithsonian explains, use echolocation and aren’t super bothered by being called Chinese even though they are Vietnamese, because mice know China has been fucking over Vietnam for centuries. Typhlomys run like fire because they aren’t using their eyes, they use echolocation like motherfucking bats!
Who’s blind now, baby? Who’s blind?
Cutting off their tails, though, why? Just a little less of a wisp of a thing for a cat to see?
Do I feel blind? Yes. By my busy mind, by the deliberate pace of our democracy being demolished.
“Three Blind Mice” as a tune has been used by many composers: Schumann, Haydn, and heavyhitter ass kicker Dvorak. (Rachmaninoff wrote something people said sounded like “Three Blind Mice,” and people weren’t happy about it.)
(This post heavily leans into Czech people, of which I am one! Though I rather prefer to identify as “bohemian,” demonstrating actually my bourgeois.)
Blindness a popular Biblical trope as well. The last bit of Bible I heard was Saul/Paul, a great story about a guy having a nervous breakdown. Happily his breakdown led to becoming one of the most read and quoted writers in all of western history.
So let it be for us all: nerves to glory.
see: This Echolocating Dormouse Could Reveal the Origins of one of Nature’s Coolest Superpowers
Going On 