Pictures added on May 8 to celebrate Ms Hoffman's own recent "VE Day", now she's absconded from the New York recording scene.
We shall soon embark on a far-ranging search, likely to take prominence occasionally in the coming months, to find out very much more about who the mysterious Lilith of myth, legend and sometimes esoteric domains is.
 The ancestral "white Eve": I've heard or seen this woman important in some musical circles called that, along with many other names synonymous with other "first ladies". These crop up in numerous cultures with a deep attachment to natural cycles.
Some of these notions and cycles are rarely evoked and seemingly vanished in modern societies and urban or other artificial environments where life is remote from most natural roots. Many point particularly to Cecilia as the woman for musicians, but for Bethany F. Jenkins, she is the patron saint of church music.
That's a pretty telling distinction. It's easy to forget, in today's highly industrialised world, how the kinds of music we take almost for granted were once considered profane at best and sacrilegious at worst. I don't see this entry's musician, snapped here at the '97 Lilith Fair, being beatified, since it's hard to imagine this:
"On her wedding day, she prayed to the Lord and asked Him to protect her virginity."
So says Jenkins in her account of the Saint Cecilia of Roman Catholicism. Apparently the young lady's man, Valerian, said he'd play along with this and go without sex! They came to very unfortunate ends.
By the opening "we", I mean anyone who cares to stay the course with me or drop in sometimes on the log, whose nature -- a shared learning of life and exploration of our relationships -- has recently been disclosed less in my own words than those given me by other teachers, including friends.
That's how I like it, now I've done a whole year's using work with music to say many other things too. However, in some quiet research and talking with people, it's been Lilith to the fore, as the woman for whom many creative people here name a lot more than their music festivals.
With the musicians, I plan fairly shortly to resume writing on a recurrent theme that runs deep, including its overtly sexual side, but disappeared when the music log "crashed" in the winter and a month's worth of entries with it.
 Nearly all of those are back, but some deliberately were left aside for a while. It struck me that other columns I've yet to reinstate need an overhaul, since they concern voices of women whose creative achievements and attitude should be dealt with sometimes as a theme in itself.
One singer-songwriter has come a long way since the years of which she recently said:
"as a teenager i felt completely fucked-up: angry, different, depressed, outraged by the world, by societal norms and expectations; i was self-destructive and i under-achieved ... but, alone in my room, i taught myself the guitar and wrote songs. it was something that seemed like it mattered. it was a release, it was a place of honesty."
That extract from Lauren Hoffman's notes at CD Baby reminds me of a friend whose personal correspondence is so similar in style that mailing her with "proper" punctuation I avoid when being brief. Still, it runs against what's ingrained in me, for my own style was learned when only the likes of e.e. cummings (Poets.org) and his imitators were allowed to get away with it by most "educators".
Hoffman's adolescent feelings take me back to days when like many people, I was rather the same, including under-achieving as a social animal at least. I used no guitar but for two terrific periods, I had access to great organs on which to express similar and other sentiments in usually empty churches.
When people came in I eased off if the noise I was making was excessively stormy and got out some sheet music instead. However, a huge pipe organ with lots of pedals and stops is a marvellous instrument for unleashing some kinds of "body music", for playing one can be strenuous physical exercise.
Lauren made a very fine start with
'Megiddo', then turned her back on the United States. She declared she planned to do the same with music, made the passage to India a lot of us have since the 1960s and this year, Hoffman did a comeback on CD with 'Choreography'. Now that album is one of those lost pieces of "body music" indeed.
 More recently quite a poser for Womanrock (blogrolled), Lauren's a changed woman and the 'Choreography' released in January is such a capital achievement that on listening again, after a promise to get back to her, found me deciding it's time to write more in the Orchard about other 'Altered egos and natural states'.*
In that more personal entry, you'll find out just how much I'm feeling my own way forward now in a fashion you may know well enough, but which comes as a novel and again capital experience for me -- an agreeable one!
I'm in good company with Lauren Hoffman too, since though I've put some allegedly in parts "weirder stuff" in the Orchard, I couldn't pull on beyond my recently logged experiences without thinking a bit like her:
"And I wish I could hang out up in the sky and be the light to shine you home
So I write another fucking song about the darkness
And how you're not alone."
Just those splendid lines from one song on 'Choreography' say a lot about a woman who has wised up to life with a wicked sense of humour and sometimes chisels her wit very fine.
We'll be back to her since even sex is something I plan to tackle from some very fresh angles, as generally recommended for the maximum enjoyment of our pleasures.
This merry May, in that Orchard where every month gets a title as some of you have observed, seems set fair to be one with "unclouded confessionals". So I've already chosen its name -- but let's not get things mixed up. Mainly the non-churchgoing confessions shall come from mouths other than my own.
For now, I've got more personal spaces to explore again while getting the rest of a life back. And I like it that way too. These include compiling Songlines for other people whose paths have seen big turnings of late, so the log will roll on unpredictably ... and slowly.
Until we hear a little more of Ms Hoffman's style in a different and illustrated context, here's a poser, for a long weekend in places where a bank holiday marks an end of one bit of war, from Lauren's 'Love Gone Wrong':
"I've got to crawl out of this whole
What is love? I want to feel something real
Like a car crash, when I land I will be shaken,
awakened to
Now, like a flash in a dream of the waking world."
Yes, I also like being slowed down and dreamy again.
_______
*The stone circle in the picture is a scanned detail from a card I quote from in the Orchard.
You can find more by a man who says what he does "is informed by the cyclic principles on which nature works" at Martin Hill's Sustainability by Design.
I'd contend we're all of us best informed, if we have got any sense, by such principles...
11:52:22 PM link 
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