dimanche 21 mai 2006

On Lady Lilith as a working companion Today Lilith asked for a place of her own in the list of links on the left. I was happy to oblige and finally refrained from adding a little question mark after "locating Lilith". We'll snuggle up just a little closer beside her shortly, since this has a been a day of preparation both domestic and spiritual. It's time to go back to the world of work. So the fridge got defrosted, my clothes have been washed, the apartment is as tidy as it'll ever be, and had I dared I would have bathed the cat! Kytie is not merely moulting, some of her back fur is matted, which isn't very sleek for a familiar. When she decided to take up residence, I was told the tangle appeared after a costly operation she'd had, but soon I worked out it's simply because she's so fat she rubs her back every time she squeezes through the entrance to her litter box. Kytie doesn't need a bigger cat litter. And they don't understand, the people who say, "Put her on a diet." She's been on one for months but it has failed to work since she seems to conjure food out of thin air. This book of Lilith has been spruced up, however. It may look just the same, but appearances are deceptive. This is an overhauled version, with Internet links verified as much as possible, though not all of the thousands, and an up-to-date search engine. I forgot these monthly revisions while sick, but they matter. The word count for the whole site since February 2003 was apparently 865,309 before this entry, and there are 218 indexed web pages, almost two-thirds of which must be devoted to 'Voices of Women'. If nothing else, I need to know who is where myself. Now I hope my workmates are ready for me at the Factory tomorrow since I may look the same, but that will also prove deceptive! I don't feel the same, after learning so much about my feelings themselves and my weaknesses, while having had instruction in developing my faculties, including unexpected ones. I've been especially assiduous about planning my lunch breaks! It would be too flattering to be aware how eagerly a number of journalists await my return if I didn't also know that this is because they feel hopelessly lost in Africa's current affairs, which I fortunately can't plan. I've missed one or two people nearly as much as the desserts in the canteen. Those can be remarkably nice like the folk who get up at 4:00 am to be there to make them. Fresh fruit tarts with perfect pastry and harmonious variations on the theme of chocolate will be doubly good now, since they will help restore my physical strength and if the bosses let me, I plan to enjoy them sometimes in the company of my favourite bloggers -- and often of Lilith. "Who is this lovely lady on your arm?" folks may ask, if they don't look like they've seen a phantom or a goddess. I'm surprised to have the ghost of an answer to that on a day when I've even been able to make the calls and send the last mail I wanted before going back on to the job. But I do. What has appeared on the Log for months often astonishes me, though it frequently goes here with help from women who confirm my intuition. Making a start in a long quest, now I'm aware of it consciously, today's portrait of Lilith is by Beth Hansen-Buth, whose site of her own, Wyrdhaven, is right up my street. She says it's "under serious reconstruction"! Beth's art shares an interest in mythology and old lore, according to her page at Gods, Heroes and Myths. The version of the tale there holds that: "Lilith is the Goddess of every woman claiming her own right to pursue her goals. Jewish mythology teaches that she was Adam's first wife, but she refused the submissive role of a help-mate, and left the garden to wander in the wilderness. Legend also has it that she was there before the earth was formed, and is made of the stuff left over when God diminished the moon so it wouldn't fight with the sun. In her right hand she holds a star, which represents her strength of will. At her left flies an owl, which represents the wisdom she has gained in discovering her independence. She stands upon a rocky outcropping overlooking a river valley. Behind her on her right is a pomegranate tree, a symbol of life and rebirth, and some say it was the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil." Well, if free-minded women musicians aren't people claiming a right to pursue their own goals and share their wisdom with us, then who is? Moreover, as somebody strongly influenced by lunar phases who can often say where the moon is in a cycle without having to look, I like the line about Lilith being made of left-overs after the moon was diminished to stop a fight. We need to be careful about sex, however. My long poem of 1995, 'Gaia's Complaint,' inevitably went down better with some people than others, but bewildered one friend with imagery most found accessible. I couldn't fathom why until it dawned on me that Andreas's mother tongue was German, which for him switched genders round from infancy. 'Gaia', which I shall give a new part of the log one day since some people enjoyed it, doesn't make sense if you conceive of the sun as a feminine principle (die Sonne). Somehow I honestly feel much more comfortable in myself and ready to take on the challenges of work with Lilith somewhere nearby, when I know I'm still low on energy and have yet to regain full health. But what then of the "demonic" side merely skirted so far, which makes me ill at ease only because intuition tells me it's wrong and that Lilith represents a force for good and not evil? Now is no time to dig deep again, when tomorrow I must be outgoing; but all the same, another version of the legend is interesting. It also tells more about the first Lilith Fair music festivals, which took place in 1997 to 1999 at the initiative of the Canadian Sarah McLachlan, about whom I've written little yet though she's well represented in my library. In 1999, giving her own sources, Magdalin Leonardo popped the question of identity as part of a Lilith Fair dossier at Womanrock magazine: "Everyone knows the biblical story of Adam and Eve, but according to some sources, the Old Testament is not entirely accurate. In the Talmud, she is described as a winged demoness disguised as a human. She also appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the roots of black magic. But no matter where the name of Lilith pops up, her basic story is always the same: "After God created Adam, he created animals to keep him company. Bored, Adam asked God for a companion. But it was Lilith, not Eve, who first joined Adam in the Garden of Eden. In the beginning, Adam was pleased, but as soon as Lilith showed him that she had a mind of her own, their relationship soured. (Sound familiar?) "Lilith refused to be subservient to Adam; she insisted that they were created equal. This got Adam very angry. After he flew into a rage, Lilith left Adam and starting hanging out with Satan. Faced with boredom again, Adam begged God to help him get Lilith back. But she would have no part of it. Even after God sent His angels to find her, Lilith vowed never to return to Eden. "After her rebellious act, God punished Lilith and she was labeled a demon. But she wasn't destined to dance with the devil forever. Thanks to Sarah McLachlan and Lilith Fair, she has been elevated to the status of goddess -- a beautiful icon to be admired and adored by women of all ages for her independent, non-conforming spirit." Where does that leave we men? Those are good tales. The so-called war of the sexes did indeed in the 20th century make for a mass "liberation movement". Yet in much of today's world, women still don't have social or legal parity with men, however they may feel deep in themselves. Legend, then, makes a sexual conflict one of the oldest stories in the world. Yet we've only just begun to meet Lilith. I do like having her on my arm, but I don't want to go any further tonight. If the above is to be believed in any sense, it is women themselves who have redeemed Lilith from diabolical status. I still find it far too hard to believe that entirely. Man or woman, we all have a dual psyche, consisting of both female and male principles. Lilith has plenty to teach us about that and the search goes on... 11:42:39 PM  link   your views? [] 'Goodbye to all that', it's time for Tristania Where on earth were we? On earth it is, that much I do know again after a long excursion to Hell and also my personal Heaven. These are at the opposite "poles" of an illness I no longer attribute just to the diagnosed physical causes that laid me low in March. One side-effect of the healing strategy was to understand how I've sometimes known big life experiences in what strikes me now as the "wrong order", before I was truly ready for them spiritually. It would take too long to show what I mean, but the outcome is that simplicity is clearly a part of getting better. Just as it is with the uncomplicated building blocks of music, so with life. What we choose to study may often seem complex, but in affairs of the soul it's the same as in physics and the life sciences that interest me: the underlying truths almost invariably prove to be simple ones. If you get a sense of déjà vu, maybe it's because John Collier's painting of Lilith was chosen on Monday to illustrate a Log entry cross-referencing my chapters on manic-depression. A profoundly mysterious entity, Lilith belongs both here, among many women who took her name for their music festivals and in the Orchard. I have realised that a May 15 entry should give what I'd like to be both a broad overview and firm ground for hope to anybody, if they have reason to want to know more about the often poorly understood bipolar disease -- with its sky-high uppers and tortured downers -- that caught me and my loved ones off guard more than two months ago. So while I began to get an ear for a strange music of soaring vocalist Vibeke Stene and the rest of a sometimes sepulchral band of Norsemen in Tristania (official site) behind her in a 'World of Glass', I summed up most of my varied physical, mental and spiritual experiences and insight in that one place. Now in the Orchard and including all relevant links, 'A music week to end the "battle with your mind"' may only be one man's story of the fiercest fight I've yet waged to turn a mortal disease into a healing process. Much of my own hope, however, comes from knowing what we all have in common if I am really to help others confronted with a bipolar condition. So it's all rewritten there now, including how other people's "music" mattered so much in recovering my own. Tristania's own poles are an airy Mediaeval mix with heavy modern metal making for complex sound textures, and I may return to them in like-minded company, but now I've set the subterranean part of my mind to working out which northern deities correspond to Lilith. There is no rush to find out, whatever the Nordic band may actually be singing and growling of 'The Shining Path', a 'Tender Trip on Earth', being 'Lost', 'Crushed Dreams' and on their 2001 'World of Glass' title track. It's the kind of music I scarcely expected to enjoy when the Kid a few years ago led me to a Virgin Megastore shelf labelled with terms such as "death metal"! But I do enjoy it, hearing much talent, and don't find it morbid. As ever when I believe Lilith must be somewhere nearby, I'm a bit surprised by the synchronicity in my listening choices -- I had little idea what to expect from Tristania -- with what I learn in life and from the Log itself when doing the kind of long historical chapter published on Friday. Anyone who cares is very welcome to join me whenever they wish on my own shining path now the next part is clear and I can sense Lilith. I don't believe she is out to lead us astray any more than I do that the other women musicians' sites in the blogroll on the left are islands of sirens who want forever to lure us out of this world. Music takes us both inside and out of ourselves the more wisely to live a "trip on Earth", tender or otherwise. I didn't want what a friend called the "battle for your mind" interrupting the flow of 'Voices of Women' any longer, so other entries have moved to the Orchard. But in that one about how this became a new music week, I wrote some words I would also like here: "I'm pretty sure of my intuition about Lilith. "If ever we find her at all, she may indeed be widely seen as a witch with a "Satanic" side but she'll be a white witch too, no feared incarnation of evil, and her place is beside a well, or a spring, deep inside all of us and it's behind a door. "We all have that door in ourselves from the day we know to open it and stop being afraid of what we'll find in our souls." Such sentiments often arise in me when friends reach points in their lives to be very aware of that door and we can start speaking easily of whatever they get from their souls or need to feed them the way I'm always saying music does. If you are in more of a hurry than me to learn about the "demon" Lilith, at the Wikipedia scholarly people have started writing about facets of her. I'll take time to explore the likes of that in any depth, but oh! what a topsy-turvy world we, its human inhabitants, have made. Earth is such a big shared home where it's only too easy to demonize those we fear. I guess that many women musicians have instinctively found in Lilith -- and in themselves -- an answer to light shed in darkness. If it's the other way round, it doesn't make sense to my ears. 1:00:36 AM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.