A Fay-fay-fable-ing
by Bā-Bē-bi-bo-bu
The day The Giggles came abruptly into town
There was evermore little sadness, hardly a frown,
Trailing seismic laughtershocks in their wake,
Causing Earth herself to cachinnate and quake,
Bringing wonder so awash with wassail and weal,
Church bells in steeples would thunder and peal.
They come trailing clouds of glorious intimations
Murmurations that wiggle ears and soft suspirations,
To the townsfolk imparting, à la Jung, and true:
Listen—You don’t have The Giggles, they have you!
Giggles Mère was so angular and Giacometti thin,
Her ambling gait caused people to point and grin.
Whenever her mood grew Hyperborean,
She would turn to the arts Terpsichorean.
She could kick up her heels and dance
In wondrous ways that would entrance
Guys like Guildenstern and Rosencrantz.
When she was really on fire
She could hippo hop, gambol and gyre,
Pirouette round, sounding like a lyre.
And given the chance
To teeter-trotter prance,
“To hell with happenstance,”
She would loudly cry,
And grand jeté so high
As Newton’s gravity to defy.
Dancing a jiggery, girlagiggery,
Sometunes spriggy
Her two logs twiggy
Leaping leafy, laffily, loofy
Her feet humoring and hoofy.
The quintessence of femininity
Or was it, some say, equininity?
More mare than mère
Not a world in the care
Horsey, hersey, and heresy
Hussy, hossy, and Pferdesy.
Spectators would giggle like a guinea,
Bellow like a bull and bray like a jenny,
Or, like horses, nicker, neigh and whinny.
Wise in the ways of the Swiftian Houyhnhnm,
Hers is the new praxis for all men and wenom.
And they would sing, piping with a bugle:
Giggledy-gaggle giggledy-google
With a smile be not frugal
Wiggledy-waggle wiggledy-woogle
With a frown do be frugal.
Giggles père had a vivacious and antic voice,
Making even songbirds on tree branches rejoice.
He was a lifelong learner, an eager autodidact,
He loved philosophy, fiction, and matter of fact,
Reveled in modal logic, and Diagrams Venn,
Pondered Hemingway, Proust, Huckleberry Finn.
He wondered if Shakespeare had the better voice,
Or was it, perhaps, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.
Wittgenstein made him wince, Husserl was worse,
Better by far were James, the pragmatists, and Peirce.
He soured on Sartre but with Camus had a good time,
Leibniz made fine points and the Sozzinis were sublime.
When asked “What is Life?” Père used to say with a :-),
“I haven’t the foggiest, but, you know, it’s all very Zen.
“My curate’s a Harlequin, my chapels are fens!
If you ask me how and why the universe unspins:
In the beginning, God said, Let there be Mirth,
Even before initiating the heavens and the Earth.”
When asked to clarify his views, he stoutly refused,
Saying he could never believe unless deeply amused.
If pressed to clearly state his position,
He would bristle up with opposition,
Saying that his samplings eclectic,
Had left him rather apoplectic.
Even Zen he thought it wise to avoid,
After, maybe, one last visit to the Void.
Then he found the cosmology of Whitehead, Alfred N.
Which caused him to rejoice, be glad and begin again.
His copy of Process and Reality was elaborated
With massive underlines, and studiously annotated,
With marginalia dense, sprawling, and sophisticated.
He found in his writings on “God and the World,”
The idea pivotal from which all else unfurled
The fruits of our speculative flights of Endeavor
Is to know, once and for all, everlastingly, forever,
The truth of those profound words of his—
That what cannot be, yet is.
And though we to the sunlit heights aspire,
We also acknowledge, as polarities require,
Darkness, the depths, deeply down to gyre
(the labourer is worthy of his hire).
We gladly worship and laud the unity of God,
And, at the same time, plurality we applaud,
To the opposites ideal we give final appeal
And enjoy feeling of feelings we newly feel,
Jubilation increasing, in unison, unflawed,
Until we find ourselves into adoration awed.
And they would sing, piping with a bugle:
Giggledy-gaggle giggledy-google
With a smile be not frugal
wiggledy-waggle wiggledy-woogle
with a frown do be frugal.
Their children were twins, and both were contrary,
The firstborn was Barry, and next there was Mary.
On trampolines Barry could bound up and down
In gliding gyrations that would suit only a clown,
And do dizzy iterations of dip, flip, rip, and unzip,
Sometimes in figures uncanny, like a Möbius strip.
Mary could stand high on one toe and twirl like a top,
Spinning faster and faster like she never would stop,
In differentials first equated by Leibniz and Bernoulli,
And in geometry so precise, Euclid’s eyes would pop.
She circumnavigated in spirals that were never unruly,
Weaving fables as truly as brothers Grimm and Aesop,
Under a sky beautiful and bluely as finest lapis lazuli.
People would flock to gape and gaze in rapt astound
To watch with amaze little Mary go round and round.
Ever snickering, The Giggles loved loafing or laughing,
Never bickering, they were always goofing and gaffing.
They are masters of putting bees in bonnets,
Shenanigans that please, and tease in sonnets.
In their presence flowers imbue with a brighter hue,
And their fragrance on winds blew as daffodil’s dew.
They’re the happiest family ever you’ve seen,
Of jolly good humor they are king and queen.
And the twins of such cunning comic sense,
That they are to be sure princess and prince.
And they would sing, piping with a bugle:
Giggledy-gaggle giggledy-google
With a smile be not frugal
Wiggledy-waggle wiggledy-woogle
With a frown do be frugal.
One morning The Giggles awoke to hear whine,
A noise that circled within, dappled with sunshine.
Like a totem to dazzle so exhilarating and big
On their yard they beheld a magnificent Whirligig.
As it rotates, sounds so pleasing that one hears
A soft soughing hum like music of the spheres.
Its whisperings are unfathomable, dark and deep,
But as mesmerizing as dreams in enchanted sleep.
It is, wonder of wonders, a mobile theatre in the round,
A spectacle in sight and, withal, an arabesque in sound.
It can make many sounds, some merry, some sturdy,
Like calliope, bagpipe, tambourine, and hurdy-gurdy.
It is — a whirling perpetual motion Scheherazade,
Spinning tales by the thousand to lift and to laud.
Pilgrims come openly to question it as oracle,
Struck dumb by its answers phantasmagorical.
Time discombobulates, playing loose and fast,
Looking back to the future, forward to the past.
Speaking in accents Barthian that inebriate and souse,
Those who listen are lost forever—in the fun house,
Deep inside, at an infinitesimal locus,
Its fractal abides on Arachne’s loom,
And this falls slowly, fast into focus,
By reveilings of a Mandelbrot Zoom.
Giggles Père felt within a Gargantuan grin
So prankful and djinn it called for a pen,
And he wasted no time in wresting a rhyme
To express his joy at this transcendental toy:
Round and round it goes
Where it starts no one chose
A Jubilee of Jest
A Ziggurat of Zest
Round and round it goes
Where it stops no one knows
A Merry of Mirth
An Eerie of Earth
Round and round it goes
Where it starts no wind blows
Fathoms of Fun
Pantheons to Pun
Round and round it goes
Where it stops no cock crows
A Quorum of Quixotic
An Ecstasy of Exotic
Round and round it goes
Where it starts no high lows
A Kiva of Kaleidoscopics
Sideshow for Psychotropics
Round and round it goes
Where it stops no Oohs Oos
The Holy unHoly of Hilarity
Wholly Rolly of high rarity.
And here ends a varse, “The Wholly Roller”
By Giggles Père of the pen precise and polar.
And they would sing, piping with a bugle:
Giggledy-gaggle giggledy-google
With a smile be not frugal
Wiggledy-waggle wiggledy-woogle
With a frown do be frugal.
A No-No Nse-Nse
(Translated by HyC)