Re: Cultural Keywords Revisited.

On Sat, 27 Nov 1999, Barry Garcia wrote:

>Lat night I was working on ways to express the ways to say likes,
>dislikes, and I got into how to express love and hate. Well, i found one
>cultural keyword for Saalangal.
>
>In Saalangal, =E1nlal is one of the words to express love. However, the
>meaning is a deep, sexual love, as well as a deep spiritual love. It would
>only be used between close lovers and married couples, as well as in
>prayers to gods and ancestors. I didn't really think about making it that,
>it just seemed to come to me as I wrote out the definition. The other word
>for love, which is tal, is more like the love between family members and
>friends.
>
I've always relished that sort of parallelism; and it has cropped up
in a couple of concultures of mine, as well. Take the following (alas
not written by me):

=09For you are my true Love -
=09=09for you I long!
=09For you my body yearns! -
=09=09for you my soul thirsts! -
=09like a land parched, lifeless,
=09=09and without water.

Who was it written for?  A God or a babe?

The first line was altered a wee bit, to make the point.  Either way
you answer it, it is a pretty damned good love song. (In this case, it
does happen to be a part of a psalm.)  I think there's just something
charged and electric about this kind of language - the kind of
language that on the one hand is intimately human-to-human and on the
other is equally intimately human-to-god. God is really someone you
can fall in love with and talk dirty to!

Well, enough rambling.

Padraic.

>_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
>
>'The beginning calls for courage; the end demands care'
>