Wednesday, January 09, 2008

mba rara m'eroto ondyoze ... mbe mu munine m'oruroto ayo u n'omuinyo

Bouncing from room to room reading different books: read in Male Fantasies about someone or other's role suppressing the Herero uprising of 1920 or so, hit the parts in Gravity's Rainbow where the "Enzian the Herero vs. his Russian half-brother Tchitcherine" subplot starts to unfold... go into the kitchen where I'm eating that stew (which was lovely, except that the lentils were a bit al dente), and I read in Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail about a thunderstorm haunted by ghost horses, which made the hair on my neck stand up...

"Horses, horses, horses, horses
Coming in in all directions
White shining silver studs with their nose in flames,
He saw horses, horses, horses, horses,
Horses, horses, horses, horses...
Do you know how to pony?
Like bony maroney,
Do you know how to twist?
Well it goes like this, it goes like this..."

-- Patti Smith, "Land"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What language did you create?

Don said...

That's a Pynchon quote; it's in Herero, a real and living language. For a look at what it means go here. (The quote and its meaning can be found on page 38 of this PDF.)