Well, back to this with the understanding that anything I say is the
ultimate in navel gazing and rationalization.  But it is fascinating to
have someone look at your work and get you to see and question things you
didn't know were there.

>I do think your poem has some of that fear of
>one's predecessor in it, Ken, though it does seem to me
>too somewhat sexist, though I'm not incensed :) in saying
>that, it's just that you've made Lillith God here; she's
>responsible for everything, Cain and Abel, the murder
>of one by the other, the estrangement between husband
>and wife, the wreckage in Adam.

Yes on all counts...I suppose the sexism falls out of her position as the
invisible but perceived "Other" who's affected every aspect of the couple's
life--I saw Eve as Lilith's surrogate, receiving Adam's passion for a woman
he could not have, bearing children that Lilith couldn't or wouldn't
bear.  And yes, I suppose the children are both with a curse.  To say this
rather crudely, I saw it as something akin to a guy in bed with his wife
but saying another woman's name at his climax.  That's the stuff of crass
jokes but I don't imagine it would be terribly amusing in real life.

For all that, the idea that I made Lilith into God was the biggest
surprise.  Why?  In a way, my view was even bleaker than Lilith-as-God.  I
viewed this world of the poem as literally God-less.  But I suppose you are
right: in the world I constructed she IS as near to God as we get.

>So the poem goes
>beyond the traditional reading in that sense for in
>a traditional reading....  So
>it may be that the poem even further demonizes
>Lillith by making her so powerful.

I suppose there's an argument to be made that Adam is even more at
fault--he can't let go of Lilith; she both creates and then fills an
emotional and moral vacuum between husband and wife, only the poem seems to
suggest it's filled by a black hole that sucks in the two children.  See, I
don't know...I don't exactly recall what was in my head while I was working
on it (I know the first draft just roared out of me), and I have never
spent time thinking about it.  I didn't write it with a theology in mind;
yet if you touch a Biblical subject or one that grows out of religious
tradition--even if it stands it on its head or side--then you've opened the
door.

>think all that baby killing and boiling them up in
>cauldrons (of which Lillith seems among the earliest
>of incarnations) is the sort of propaganda and demonization,
>the same mechanism that leads to such things as 'the blood libel' attached
>to the Jews,

First...I know the Lilith legends are not Biblical; I first thought they
grew from Midrash but it's indeed more likely that they grew even later
than that, in the cabbalistic literature.  I wonder what on earth could
have possessed the rabbis to dream up Lilith and her hideous attributes at
a relatively late date.  The suggestion that the creation of Lilith as a
demonic being from within Judaism itself--Lilith the child-killer,
etc.--could have opened the door to Christian allegations amounting to the
blood libel is quite disturbing: did I read that right?  It sounds rather
like handing someone the gun with which they shoot you.

In any case I'm quite ill-at-ease discussing my own work so here's where I
get off the horse.

Ken

-------------------------
Kenneth
Wolman                     http://www.kenwolman.com
http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
"Sometimes the veil between human intelligence and animal intelligence
wears very thin--then one experiences the supreme thrill of keeping a cat,
or perhaps allowing oneself to be owned by a cat."--Catherine Manley