Is also an abbreviation of a proverb ‘yen wis mlatar kudu eling” literally means “if you   go somewhere for enjoyment and pleasure, then keep in your mind to repent”. Most Tarling lyrics are telling daily life in West Java North Coast communities. Theme of Pegat-Balen (married divorced), wayuan (polygamy), demenan (love), problems of  Mabok (alcoholism), Maen (gambling), and Madon (Adultery) , became popular lyrics.

Tarling began around the 1931 in Kepandean village, Indramayu district. There was a Dutch commissioner who asked Mang Sakim, a local gamelan expert to fix his guitar. After Mang Sakim repairing the guitar, the Dutch commissioner was not taking back his guitar. That was an opportunity for Mang Sakim to learn the guitar tones, and compare it with gamelan pentatonic tones.

At that time, Sugra, his son made an experiment by moving pentatonic tones of gamelan to guitar strings are pitched diatonic. Sugra and his tarling complete performances with drama performances. With the creativity of their perpetrators, Tarling and then transformed into musical art form of theater. The show resembles the opera stage, which most of the characters sing the dialogue in the form of singing.  Beside its flexibility to collaborate with difference genre of music, the lyrics use Cirebon Javanese dialect, and it strongly influences the existence and popularity of Tarling songs. Fans of Tarling are not people from Cirebon, Indramayu, and surrounding, but expanded to Brebes, Tegal, and Pemalang which incidentally included the region of Central Java. Tarling beat the popularity of Javanese popular music.

Themes of love between male and female, parent and children, Bitter of domestic life is also issues raised are quite varied, from polygamy, left cheating, ignorance (domestic violence), and divorce to economic problems. Most of the bitterness was experienced by the women. There are rejection and acceptance, and it is quite interesting, because probably it relates to local social background where polygamy is socially accepted:

Asal Sing Kuat/ As far as you are strong

Lamun bener kakang pengen wayuan / If you want to marry again
Asal adil ning waktu lan giliran / Since you are just on time and make a fair turn
Arep relu arep diwayuh papat / You may have three or four wives
Mung syarate asal kakang sing kuat / Since you are strong enough

Aja watir kula akeh jalukan / Don’t worry I am not demanding
Ora pengen emas karo berlian / Don’t worry I do not want jewelries  
Kula nerima bagen digawa mlarat / I am willing to be poor and desperate
Mung syarate asal kakang sing kuat / As far as you are strong enough

Asal kuat duh kakang luruh duite / As far as you are strong to seek money
Asal kuat duh kakang luruh pangane / As far as you are strong to make bread
Asal kuat duh kakang ning gilirane /  As far as you strong fair in my turn
Asal kuat ning segala-galane / As you are strong in doing everything

The story of migrant workers also infiltrated in Tarling lines. Most telling separate couples where the spouse  must go to work abroad in order to support the family economy, although she have to work as a house maid abroad.

The advent of Dangdut forces Tarling troupe use Dangdut elements in their performances. In further development, Tarling songs mixed with electronic music devices to form a single organ groups Tarling organs. At this time, classical Tarling is rarely performed and is no longer popular

Like other stage performances, audiences often give gifts such Sawer money to the singers who accompanied the audience dancing on stage. Uniquely, the prize was not only in money but also crabs. They have fun  forgetting the burden of daily life with enjoying lyrics of songs that sound  quite dirty and nasty things such as Bokong Gatel Itchy Butt. This song is not really telling dirty story, but telling a girl who always dress up in front of the mirror, and is imagining her handsome boyfriend.   It is also interesting, because such titles does not commonly found, probably not even there, in Javanese popular songs in Central Java and Yogyakarta.

This symbolism of the eagle was already clearly established in the ancient Mesopotamian poem about Etana, possibly the first ruler ever to have his story written down. The epic of Etana begins with an eagle and a serpent swearing an oath of friendship to each other before Shamash, the god of the sun. The eagle lived in the top of a tree and the serpent at its base, and for a time they and their young shared every kill. One day the eagle ate the young of the serpent, who then burrowed in the carcass of a bull. As soon as the eagle approached to eat, the serpent bit it, cut its wings, and threw the bird into a pit to die of hunger and thirst. Shamash sent the hero Etana to rescue and nurse the eagle, which became his guide. Etana mounted on the back of the eagle to fly up to the heavens to ask Ishtar, a goddess of fertility, for the plant of birth so that he might have a son. The last sections of the manuscript are fragmentary, but Etana apparently did attain his goal and founded the first Sumerian dynasty.

The ascent of Etana is depicted on many seals, and the story seems to have had a wide influence. The Greeks later retold the episode of the two quarreling animals as an Aesopian fable called “The Eagle and the Fox.” The eagle violated a friendship by eating the young of the fox, which then set fire to the eagle’s tree in revenge. The motif of a tree with an eagle at the top and a hostile serpent at the base, however, has often been found in myth and legend, and an example is Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life. The story of Etana may well have influenced the Greek myth of Ganymede, a young man who was abducted by Zeus, in the form of an eagle, so that he might serve on Olympus as cupbearer of the gods. Eagles are, however, entirely capable of carrying off an infant or small child, and perhaps the story goes back to such a tragic incident.

The eagle was sacred to Zeus, and the god of thunder sent an eagle to eat the liver of the disobedient titan Prometheus each day, as he lay chained to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains. The liver would grow back during the night, and the cycle continued until the eagle was finally slain with an arrow by Hercules. The Roman standard was an eagle, and conquered peoples often adopted the symbol. The eagle is the initial inspiration for a huge range of mythological figures. The double-headed eagle first appears on Hittite reliefs in Mesopotamia. From there it spread to the Byzantine Empire, and today it is a symbol of Russia. The Assyro-Babylonian epic poem “Anzu” told of a lion-headed eagle so powerful that it could cause whirlwinds simply by flapping its wings. It once stole the Tablets of Destiny from Enlil, the god of the sky, and briefly ruled the world. Mysterious figures, sometimes known as “demon-griffins,” were carved on palace walls of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. They had the bodies of men but the heads and wings of eagles, and they held up a pinecone in one hand, perhaps to enact a fertility rite. The lion shared a solar association with the eagle, and their features were often blended. Perhaps related to the lion-headed eagle, or Imdugud, is the first griffin, which had the face of an eagle, the body of a lion, and, sometimes at least, wings. The griffin first appeared in the art of Mesopotamia but quickly spread to Greece and beyond. Herodotus believed a griffin lived in the mountains of India, where it made a nest of gold. Dante placed a griffin in Paradise, where it drew the chariot of the church.

Closely related to the griffin was the Hindu Garuda, the king of birds and the mount of the god Vishnu. Garuda had the wings and beak of an eagle, and the rest of his body was human, but his vast form could darken the sky. Also inspired largely by the eagle were several other huge birds of legend such as the Arabian Roc and the Persian Simorgh.

In Christianity, the eagle became the symbol of Saint John the Evangelist and is always depicted on the ground by his side. According to The Golden Legend, written by Jacobus de Voragine in the late thirteenth century, this is because John once said, “The eagle . . . flies higher than any other bird and looks straight into the sun, yet by its nature must come down again; and the human spirit, after it rests awhile from contemplation, is refreshed and returns more ardently to heavenly thoughts” (vol. 1, p. 54). But like an eagle, John soars straight to the mystical heights at the start of his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word . . .”

Medieval bestiaries reported that when an eagle grew old it would first find a fountain. Then it would fly directly into the sun until its wings were singed and it fell into the waters. After repeating this three times, the eagle would once again be filled with youthful vigor, much like Christ, who rose from the dead on the third day after his burial.

One of the very few literary works in which eagles are viewed not with awe but with tenderness is “The Parliament of Fowles” by Geoffrey Chaucer, written in the late fourteenth century. On Saint Valentine’s Day, the birds gathered at the temple of Venus to choose their mates. Several birds paid court to the lovely female eagle that sat in the hand of the goddess. When they had all set forth their claims, Nature ruled that the female eagle herself should make the choice, thus upholding love over politics. Lords and princesses, after all, are still human beings, just as even eagles are birds. In many ways the Native American view of the eagle was surprisingly similar to that of Europeans. The Plains Indians, most especially, admired the strength of the eagle and associated the bird with the sun. Eagle feathers represented solar rays, and they were used on headdresses and shields to indicate skill in war or hunting. The Indians also stylized the eagle into a mythical creature-the thunderbird. The beating of its wings causes thunder, while its beak is like lightning. The eagle is a bit like singers and actors who, after achieving great popular success, find themselves dominated by their public image. People have trouble comprehending that the eagle, so mighty in legend, can be very vulnerable in fact. This creature has been so prominent in symbolism over millennia that people even have trouble thinking of it as a genuine animal, and the cultural significance of the eagle seems to provide it with little protection. In countries such as the United States and Germany, eagles remain endangered despite being national emblems.

In the ancient world, doves were often associated with prophecy. In The Voyages of the Argo, Apollonius of Rhodes told how the Greek heroes in search of the Golden Fleece found their way through a sea barred by the Clashing Rocks, which would continually open and close. They released a dove. It passed between the rocks, so the heroes knew they could navigate unscathed. In Virgil’s Aeneid, doves guided Aeneas through a forest to a golden bough, which he needed to enter the world of the dead. Even Christianity, which often took a dim view of pagan oracles, was full of stories in which doves assist in divination, perhaps because doves seemed above every suspicion of evil. One apocryphal gospel had a dove from heaven alighting on the staff of Joseph and anointing him as the husband of Mary. Of course, whatever pleased the gods would be offered up to them in the ancient world. For the Hebrews, doves and pigeons were the only birds that might be offered for sacrifice (Lev. 1:14), and they were the favorite sacrifice of people who could not afford sheep or oxen.

The biblical book of Genesis states that “God’s spirit hovered over the water” (1:2). This image certainly suggests a bird, and it has usually been depicted as a dove. During the Flood, Noah sent out a dove. When it returned with an olive branch, he knew that the waters had begun to subside. In Christianity, the dove represents the Holy Spirit. A dove descended on Jesus at his baptism. In pictures of the Annunciation, the dove has traditionally been portrayed descending to Mary from God the Father as she becomes pregnant with the infant Jesus. The scene recalls the amorous adventures of Zeus, for example, when the god assumed the form of a swan to impregnate the maiden Leda. The dove, usually painted directly between Mary and God the Father, seemed to shield Mary with its purity. The dove was sacred to many goddesses of the ancient world.

Doves drew the chariot of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Though sometimes thought promiscuous, Aphrodite became a guardian of chastity when the hunter Orion attempted to break into the home of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. She changed the girls into doves so they might escape by flight, and Zeus later transformed them into stars.

Doves fed the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis, daughter of the goddess Derceto, when she was abandoned as an infant in the desert. They were also closely associated with the Roman Venus, the Babylonian Ishtar, and the Semitic Astarte. The following amorous symbolism enters the Judeo-Christian tradition through the biblical “Song of Songs,” which probably referred to turtledoves Jews and Christians have interpreted this song of love as an allegory of the longing of the soul for God. The image of the dove has always served to spiritualize erotic desire. It is also a symbol of conjugal fidelity. According to the medieval German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach in his epic Parzifal, a dove that has lost its mate would always perch on a withered branch.

The Holy Spirit is traditionally spoken of with a masculine pronoun. Nevertheless, it is hard to think of it in that way. The Trinity and the very concept of God seem unbalanced without some feminine element. Several heretical groups have identified the dove with the feminine concept of “Sophia,” or divine wisdom, as well as with Mary herself. The wings of a dove, spread out and pointing downward, are sometimes stylized in Christian art to form an M for Mary.

When Christianity was introduced into Russia, people were forbidden to eat the flesh of doves. The dove is also important in the Grail romances. In Eschenbach’s Parzifal, written in Germany around 1200, a dove visited the Castle of the Grail every year on Good Friday to bring the Host from Heaven. The dove was also the badge of the Knights of the Grail. European folklore made the dove the one shape that the Devil could not assume. The dove was also one of the very few common animals that were never mentioned as familiars of witches.

In the ancient world, several cultures sometimes portrayed the soul as a dove. There is an enormously moving sculpture in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from the grave of a Greek child who died in the mid-seventh century B.C. The young girl holds a pair of doves or pigeons in her hands, and her lips touch the beak of one. The doves are to go on and have the marriage and family that were denied the maiden. The dove was the symbol of Saint Scholastica, founder of a convent and the patroness of rain. Her twin brother, Saint Benedict, visited her on her deathbed. When she died, Saint Benedict saw her soul ascend to Heaven in the form of a white dove.

The dove is also holy in Islam. Christian polemicists sometimes tried to discredit Islam by claiming that Mohammed had a dove feed from his ear. This was allegedly a trick to make his followers believe that the Holy Spirit was giving him advice.

In their collection of German legends, the Grimm brothers tell how a dove saved the town of Höxter. This community had held out valiantly against the mighty army of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years’ War. At last, when other attempts had failed, the imperial generals ordered their troops to bring in the heavy artillery and bombard the town into submission. In the evening, a soldier was about to light the fuse of the first cannon when a dove flew down and pecked his hand, forcing him to drop the kindling. The soldier took this as a sign from God, and he refused to fire. This delayed the bom-bardment long enough for Swedish troops to arrive and lift the siege. The dove, particularly in a drawing by Pablo Picasso, was a symbol of the peace movement during the Cold War. Is the dove a little too perfect? It suggests eroticism without lewdness and virtue without self-righteousness. It is rare, indeed, for any symbol to be accepted with so little ambivalence. Perhaps it is possible in this case because the pigeon functions as a sort of double to the dove, deflecting any resentment.

When people do distinguish between doves and pigeons, the rock doves become the black sheep of the family. The urban pigeons descended from the rock doves, which originally came from the northern coasts of the British Isles. People have not always distinguished very sharply between pigeons and doves. Pigeons were often trained to carry messages in the Roman Empire. This probably contributed to the role of a dove in Christianity as a sort of messenger from God. In Christian paintings the dove of the Annunciation was often portrayed as a white rock dove, with a very broad fanlike tail rather than the narrower tail of the turtledove and related varieties. The passenger pigeons of North America, once so numerous that they darkened the skies, were driven to extinction in the early twentieth century. Now they are remembered as a symbol of human rapacity and the lost bounty of the New World. Poet Wallace Stevens probably had the passenger pigeon at least partially in mind when he wrote “Sunday Morning” in 1915.

But pigeons generally blend in so well with our urban environments that most people hardly even notice them. The few who do pay attention find much beauty in their enormous variety of patterns and tones, caused largely by the mixing of urban and feral birds. Pigeons thrive in cities because the facades of buildings resemble the stony landscapes of their original homes. People sometimes call pigeons “rats with wings.” It is now illegal to feed them in New York City, though many people, especially immigrants from the Mediterranean, do anyway.

There are small but devoted circles of pigeon fanciers who race the birds and display them at pigeon shows. While lovers of many animals, such as horses and cats, tend to be female and aristocratic, pi-geon enthusiasts are generally male and blue-collar. They identify with the toughness of these birds, which can survive easily in the roughest of neighborhoods.

Mourning doves are also found in New York and other cities, although they are not as common. They are a bit smaller, have a delicate call, and often seem like feminine counterparts to the more masculine pigeons. Most of the time, mourning doves are even more unobtrusive. Few people ever even think, at least consciously, of a connection between the dove on the street and the one in church. But isn’t it like that with many religious symbols?