hey diddle diddle

 

I recently listened to my kid’s plastic toy play a rendition of hey diddle diddle, song with suprising passion by a woman who clearly had different career plans before she got into the tot-crooning gig, belting out her nursery rhyme pathos like a 1980’s heart throb broken heart ballad. And then it dawned on my what hey diddle diddle was all about. Grasp my hands and listen intently:

Hey diddle

The cat and the fiddle

The cow jumped over the moon

The little dog laughed

To see such sport

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

We begin with the diddling of the cat, singing his guts out in the typical caterwail, played on the cat-gut fiddle, presumably of strung of the entrails of his deceased lover. A stark image of making music from tragedy: something significant is afoot. The cow jumps over the lunar horns of cow Goddess moon, maker of the milky way, an image to chill the bones in apacolyptic anticipation: mortal cow oversteps immortal cow – the world goes upside down! The little dog laughs – the dog who is death, little Anibus, jackle god of the desert, son of the cow-goddess Hesat – and how he laughs, like the eternal footman, to see love sung on the entrails of his beloved, to see God leapt over by Man; he is the very wolf who chases the moon over middle earth, a double of Odin’s wolf – wolf means necessity means death, God is swallowed by the wolf in the end – Just as Jesus and all crucified were eaten by desert dogs, or eaten by zealous cultists meaning to make religions from rabbis, eaten like Jezabel, because the dirty guy in the desert hated her, whom Jesus would meet himself, thrusting Jazebel on her bed, and killing off her previous children to make room for children of his own: yes the dog is loyal, loyal as death. Why this fiersome imagery? Because: the dish ran away with the spoon. Let the world end, let the moon bleed, for the plate has upset the world and way by taking from the fork his one beloved, the spoon, leaving behind is darling bowl and their three saucers, the plate – and the man the plate represents, upset the order of life and order – love is none – the cat sings her guts out.