she was bored

so she casted her fingers

Talk about a birthright

Can you imagine a world where mainstream medicine is so arrogant that new born babies are inadvertantly denied the very blood nature intended for them? Of course you can, this is it! My mother Judy Mercer's motivation to research the effects of delayed cord clamping was inspired by the common practice of cutting a baby's umbilical cord before all of the blood cycling through the placenta has found its way to the child. Why would anyone do something so unfathomable as deny a baby its very own birth blood? Well, I asked our former pediatrician, who was once head of neonatalogy, who responded "we thought babies' blood was bad for babies, it's too thick." Another practitioner told me similar nonsense. How could anyone think a baby's blood would be bad for it? The blood bank business is another danger to babies. Parents, in fear of "what might happen" deny there babies up to half of their blood, blood they need to fully saturate and stimulate their lungs and brains and every other vital organ. My mother was recently at a birth where 5 oz. of the a baby's beautiful blood had been banked, just in case. Fear is often vampiric.

In recognizing the need for study of these trends in childbirth, NIH funds the research my mother conducts at The Hospital for Women and Infants in Rhode Island where she monitors the effects of delayed cord clamping in preterm infants. Many other researchers around the world have grown interested in this question so my mother is one in a community of very thoughtful practitioners and scientists restoring a great deal of wisdom to the birth process. It's sensible to let the umbilical cord stop pulsing before it's cut. That's the body's signal that the baby's good to go. Patience please. Below, an excerpt from an interview with my moms from Science and Sensibility.

In 1975, I vividly remember reading Frederick Leboyer’s book Birth Without Violence in which he advocates not cutting the umbilical cord until the infant has successfully completed her transition between her two worlds – the fetal world of water and placental respiration and the neonatal world of air and breathing. He says “For a few minutes the baby straddles two worlds…then, slowly, slowly she can cross the threshold from one to the other peacefully and easily with safety…as long as we don’t interfere [by premature clamping of the cord].” I adopted the practice of delaying cord clamping to ensure a more gentle birth and have used it for more than 30 years.

I had an epiphany at a home birth in 1979. An infant was born very rapidly with the cord 2 and 1/2 times around his neck. He was as pale as the white sheet his mother had on her bed and limp and breathless. I was very afraid that I would not be able to resuscitate him. I placed him on the bed and immediately unwrapped the cord from around his neck and dried and stimulated him with no response. His heart rate was well over 100 and the cord was pulsating vigorously. I noticed that his color was changing from the pale white to pink as his body gained the blood back into it. His heart rate was always over 100. In about 1 and 1/2 minutes, he flexed his extremities, opened his eyes and took a gentle breath. He looked at us like “What is the fuss?” and never cried. I tried as hard as I could to get him to cry as I believed at that time that he should do but I could not get him to. He nursed very well and was a normal child at one year of age when I last saw him.

Blood for babies, OK, Brooklyn? OK, Brooklyn hospitals? What better gift for future generations. Now back to our regular nonsense programming here at Brooklynometry...

river of life

In the box with the Mercury Mysteries was a 1976 edition of The How and Why Wonder Book of The Human Body published by Grosset and Dunlap. In case you have concerns about the plate above, rest assured, it was approved of by Oakes A. White of the Brooklyn Children's Museum. Now there's an arborial name.

So I'm not sure I understand how this diagram works but it looks like the midpoint where all the blue turns to red is something like a jubilee zone. A magnification would certainly reveal drunk fish flipping in the currents.

Flash Flood

I heard the warnings on the radio like everyone else and maybe they too wondered where in Brooklyn flash floods occur. I don't think the watershed in Prospect Park gathers enough water to cause a torrent in the ravine, but maybe it's happened. The real danger Monday was falling into the sky by stepping in a puddle, or becoming hypnotized by the upside down worlds framed in liquid mirrors because it is easy to tell those worlds are a lot wilder than this one.

the windows

Last spring the Anthropologie windows were all about bees and hives. This year they've strung them with garlands of plastic flowers cut from water blottles. The cascading blossoms work especially nicely on the 17th St. side of the store, I've never seen something so sharp-edged look so sweet. Around the corner the dense tangles of flowers in the 5 Ave. windows seem a little wounded. I've seen cozier tangles.

Leaping Sheep?

This afternoon we saw the kinds of clouds that really do look like animals. My son objected to my call here, to him, it was obviously a rabbit. I suppose he's right. Then he called my attention to another cloud that was supposed to look like a monster and I happened to sight what I took for a Coopers Hawk or Merlin. Slightly larger than a pigeon, neater than a red tail, but still pale and reddish.

Murder makes me nervous

Another Mercury Mystery I came across on 10th Avenue Saturday night, this one published in 1946. It costs ten cents more than the '35 offering. I looked for a passage I'd feel inspired to excerpt but came up with nothing. I think I'm spoiled by the image of a pillow cooked in butter. Just think of all the things one can cook in butter! Dryer lint, the stray socks, my camera...

Mercury Mystery

Published in 1935, found among other treasures in a box on 10th Avenue. Seems promising, it begins "When I opened my eyes I was sure they were going to fall out of my head and start rolling across the floor like a couple of marbles. The pillow felt as if it had been cooked in butter. I looked at the time. It was only eight o'clock, and I knew that if I could sleep four or fives hours more I might get over the notion I was going to die. But my head was full of worms, those mean little gnawing worms that you can hear gnawing their way through a tree-trunk or through your head when you've been drinking as much as we had drunk the night before. We had had everything, all the way from Scotch to Pernod and back with way stations of Amer Picon and, for no valid reason, some Danziger Goldwasser."

I came across a section that reflects our noble town "'I remembered there was a fellow in Brooklyn got taken to the hospital one night. Someone had shot him in the rear end. He claimed he had been standing on a street corner minding his own business when a car came along and somebody stuck a rod out of it and shot this guy in the hinie.' Danny put back the last of the suits. "We'll we'd about made up our minds that somebody had mistaken this poor dope for somebody else when we thought to look at his pants. There wasn't any bullet-hole in them. So he must have gone out to stand on that street corner, minding his own business, without any pants on. Or maybe he'd been minding somebody else's business when he got shot, without any pants on."

Later the characters get crafty. "Danny poured the plaster of Paris into a hollow he had made in the robe out of my car. Then he took some water and made a paste. He poured this plaster of Paris into the foot-tracks that he had hardened with shellac on the clay of the beach. When he had finished he had a set of little plaster feet, all clear and fine, with the wrinkled and bunions showing on them. Then he picked them up one by one, picking up the feet as if he had been God."


A pillow cooked in butter? Who could ask for more in a mystery?? But there IS more in the The Hangover Murders I gather, or it wouldn't have become the basis for the 1935 film Remember Last Night.

The Monster who Swallowed Everything

My son Russell was very excited about this book he brought home a book from school, How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have? by Julius Lester. He insisted that I not delay in reading it with him. One story is called The Monster Who Swallowed Everything, in which a monster the size of mountain consumed village after village, houses, people, dogs and all. It was hard to read it without thinking of what certain kinds of corporations do to this nation as they rule this country by influence. Insurance companies for instance, in supporting the status quo, what kind of autonomy and freedoms have they swallowed in their greed?

Is there a website that rates corporations according to the degree to which they protect the people and ecosystems of this Republic in a proactive, sustainable, generous and respectful manner? A trustworthy watchdog organization is even more essential now that the court has ruled against the people in favor of the wealthy. It's an old pattern, the governing body demonstrating that it is less inclined to empower the people most in need while handing out gifts to those already well off, all the while eagerly identifying itself with (a disemboweled) Christianity.

fencing accident

circuit

Last legs?

The old caloric double oven in our kitchen. Who knows how old it is.

It has problems, the ovens don't bake things evenly, the pilots go out easily, it's internally grimy beyond rehabilitation, but man is it cool. Certain parties are bent on seeing it replaced very very soon. But I can't let go. I think.

I saw the new things at Sears. What gives me the creeps more than anything: the digital components. Do they really add anything besides opportunities for repair? What should I do?

beach glass

A break in programing

...to enjoy the sloth Weather Hare met in Costa Rica. You must take a sloth break.

Reflection

I guess it's no surprise that many are hostile to Jung, he provided much to irritate. For instance, the idea that we project our shadow onto the world where it gives that special aura of annoyance to all the things that get under our skin. Anyway these are a difficult few days, marked, from my perspective, with endless shadow play of projection, hypocrites accusing others of hypocrisy, control freaks accusing others of being controlling, the selfish accusing others of selfishness, people taking inspiration from eastern philosophers accusing others of orientalism. The moments when one turns the lens on oneself, with acceptance, seem rare and sacred, no wonder, its a really hard thing to do. So while many would love to expunge Jung from their consciousness, here's another thing they might like to forget as fast as they can, Buddha: To straighten the crooked, you must first do a harder thing...straighten yourself. Or for those who prefer the flavor of the Occident: Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye. Matthew 7:5

Kings Plaza 6 Theaters Closed

Hoping to take the young ones to a movie while at Kings Plaza by special request we were surprised to find the theaters shuttered, for good. A security guard told me they shut the doors two weeks ago and are constructing a Best Buy to fill the space. At Cinema Treasures commenters provide a window into the history of the Kings Plaza 6. One writes:

"Since I was the one who posted this theater originally to Cinema Treasures (I'm also gena2), it only seems appropriate that I be the one to post of its demise. I heard a very strong rumor that this theater will be gone soon, and in its place there will be a Best Buy (like we really need that). It saddens me greatly, as this theater (like the Kingsway, the Marboro, and the Georgetown Twin) was one of my childhood theaters. My late grandmother took me here to see Rocky 3, though I'm sure she was slightly disturbed that her six year old granddaughter wanted to see it. (I liked the theme song.) My last memory of going here, is seeing "What's Love Got to Do With It?" about the life of Tina Turner. During all the scenes in which Tina was getting beat up by Ike, a man near me was yelling "Go get her Ike! Beat her up BUT GOOD!' It was at this point that I realized I could no longer patronize this theater. The moviegoers were just too insane. But I'll miss it. Thinking of going one more time for old time's sake."

I wonder if she went, and what the people were like. I can't endorse defining the crowd by its most obnoxious member, as that is a heinous mistake I notice I make too often, but I do enjoy her memories of the theater.

tell me it ain't so

What? Closing a family shelter down because of Eminent Domain? On MLK day no less? Ya bullies! More at FIB.

troposphere

From The Flower Garland Sutra, in which the qualities of clouds are so deeply elaborated they become the mystic's cotton candy: "Because their hearts are enraptured, they spontaneously produce clouds of udumbara flowers, clouds of incense, clouds of music, clouds of robes, clouds of canopies, clouds of pennants, clouds of streamers, clouds of fragrant powders, clouds of jewels, clouds of lion pennants and crescent towers, clouds of songs and eulogies, clouds of various adornments, and reverentially offer them all to the Tathagata*."

*one who has found truth, who has thus gone and thus come.

8th Street Ornament

Met with much hospitality and a lesson in sublimely orderly housekeeping on 8th Street. I'm still trying to understand what the contra in contramusic is all about, and the apartment's hallway, which was so long it seemed to get longer as I looked, is yet another element putting me in the mood to reread Alice in Wonderland.

Mohawk and Montauk

Someone pointed these twin ornaments out to me this week as we discussed stone carving and other vanished skill sets. The ornament on the left appears on the Mohawk, which faces 13th St in Park Slope, and his companion on the right gets the 14th St. view. Nice headresses.

encaustic & good news

A friend who used to babysit for our children recently went missing. She hadn't returned to her current job after the New Year and no one heard anything from her. For over a week we worried. How amazingly good to hear that she is fine and on her way back to Brooklyn, finally on the rebound from the misadventures that delayed her return from St. Lucia.

No Divide

The fault lines that break so many hearts and bones also lead many to common ground that is almost impossible to find in complacent times. I suppose that's what Rebecca Solnit discussed but I wouldn't know for sure because I never read her book, A Paradise Built in Hell. She was brave to take on such a tricky subject. On the radio I heard Bill Clinton envision this catastrophe as a chance for some kind of spiritual renewal in Haiti, but the truth is the strange work of the catastrophic puts anyone anywhere in an entirely new landscape in which divides are diminished; now Haiti seems much closer.

People want badly to help. I've heard people recommend donating to the following organizations: Doctors Without Borders, Mercy Corps, the American Jewish World Service, UN Relief Fund. This list from The Takeaway mentions many others. I'm also told you can text "HAITI" to "90999" and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help relief efforts (charged to your phone bill), but I haven't tried it out yet.

cap and blindfold

Grand Recycling

Maybe the most epic recycling is that of the sea floor where it melts under the weight of continental shelves, but the revamping of the armory for use as a neighborhood sports complex is very impressive. As proponent of adaptive reuse Dave Burney suggested, check out those trusses. If this was built today it's pretty hard to imagine the product wouldn't be a nightmare along the lines of the Atlantic Center. No trusses to speak of. By the people, for the people, 7 years in the making, the Park Slope armory represents an inspiring community enrichment. I wonder what's in the works with all those other Brooklyn armories?

corner nimbus

So Hot

My new favorite way to warm up is to daydream about Maxwell Montes. Sounds like my new favorite pornstar but the geeks know it as the tallest mountain on Venus. 11 kilometers tall and a chilly 760 degrees Fahrenheit. Meet me there for lunch? We can have pyrite crostini and explore the Cleopatra Crater. Hey, I didn't name it.

Blue and Red

Before Christmas I started to see a field of blue and red flash in front my eyes when I was falling asleep or meditating. A field with bright, ultramarine blue on the top and full red on the bottom, an equal split. I was barely aware of what I saw at the time but the image's quiet voice has become louder and louder and I've gradually become aware of what it might mean. This is one of those strange gifts that starts in the liminal but has built in the physical, a gift that will not be denied.

Things people said and wrote started to echo the vision in very distinctive ways. I won't go into it, but it was as if the world were taking a highlighter to the vision of this colorfield.

I'm sure there are endless meanings anyone could spin and dream about blue and red, but this is enough for me: the heart is the chromopause, the color boundary, between red, oxygenated blood, the earth, and blue, the freedom of heaven, the color of unencumbered blood that's delivered its load of fire to myriad hungry cells and turns again to be recycled.

A few days after Christmas the gift of blue and red bloomed into bodily realiztion; I intuited to meditate on the heart and work with other *chakras* because my heart, battered by holiday challenges, needed an infusion of spirit and love. To my surprise, it worked. The heart infused with spirit is the place where heaven meets earth.

I have spoken to others experiencing similar boosts to the heart wattage. These days of the heart, the blue and red days, are the days of heaven and earth mutually recycling, days in which the only thing fundamentally meaningful is the opportunity to give gifts and receive them, as simultaneously as when hand shakes hand or friends embrace.

Facebook people, talk about color all you like. I don't care if you're talking about your bras, underpants, your eggs. I couldn't care less about the literal being referenced, it's the color that brings the spirit to life. Thanks for the abstract gifts some might call nothing.

friday, towards st. george

The Rarer Air

Someone might look at a shaft stuck down into the water and think it crooked even though it is straight, because water is denser than air, but the shaft is straight to him who sees it only in the rarer air.

–Meister Eckhart, The Book of Divine Comfort

Friction on Fifth

I had a run in with an avatar of the Queen of Hearts last week at Saved on Fifth, she was walking into the store when my children blocked her way as they argued about who was going to get the only blue face-mask style hat. When most people would have politely said 'excuse me' she aggressively trumpeted "Get you kids out of the way!" The attendant onto whose elbow the old queen clung looked at me with abundant apologies in her eyes, what could she do about her hostile octogenarian employer? I pacified the chaotic pack of young ones as they passed, although, like Alice, none of us hit the ground to escape the queen's wrath. I think I may have lost my head.

Nothing is simple. Even though the hostile force that passed by us might be the same that causes the souls of tender ones to flee this realm for the safety of dream lands, this crone also demands we ground ourselves, leave the realm of the head and inhabit the forgotten realms of the body and the neglected foundation of the earth. That is no easy task, and it is the only gateway by which the lost spirits can reinhabit the flesh and flower in the heart. This Queen makes a very interesting trainer as she her cruelty plays at flushing the most tender parts of the heart away from this realm of the flesh, and then opening the gates by which they reenter through the metaphor of beheading. As anyone who has spent any time in therapy knows, to be reborn we must loose control and let the wild ones emerge, contain their passions, welcome them home. Maybe then some adversary tries to scare them away again, and we see what happens, and we hold on for dear life.

Kindergarten

The Fairest Child in the House?

In my imagination I have already read all of Boehme's writings and made a compilation of the riches of all his references to Babel. Wow, that was fast! This one is especially well fleshed.

Now whereas the children of God have divers and manifold gifts in writing, speaking, and judging; and they have not all one manner of expression, phrase and style; whereupon self-reason afterward doth by artificial conclusions draw out of them what maketh for its own turn, and frameth a Babel to itself; whence such a multitude and wearisome heap of opinions are risen; so that men out of their writings have forged and invented diverse conjectures and ways unto God, and men must be forced to go in those ways, whereby such controversies and unchristian contentions are arisen; that men for the present look only upon the strife of words, and disputes about the letter, and those which, according to the reason and principles, do overcome by verbal jangling, and exchanging Scripture for Scripture, are applauded; but this is nothing but Babel, a mother of spiritual whoredom, where reason entereth not in at the door of Christ through Christ's spirit; but presseth in of itself and climbeth up by its own might, strength and pride, being yet a stranger, or unregenerated, and would always fain be the fairest child in the house; men must honour and adore it.

The usage of the word whoredom reminds me to consider the term as a representation of a tendency for unconscious and unconsidered self-betrayal en-masse, not as any kind of condemnation of sensuality.

As for "but presseth in of itself and climbeth up by its own might, strength and pride, being yet a stranger, or unregenerated, and would always fain be the fairest child in the house; men must honour and adore it," this beautifully represents what Buddhists call self-grasping thought, or the habit of twisting one's intellectual representations into a sort of psychic armoring that some might call narcissism. Compare to Mannheim's idea presented in an earlier post;"It is a more worthy intellectual task perhaps to learn to think dynamically and relationally rather that statically. In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those person who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest."

A working answer... absolutes only when absolutely necessary, no intellectual striving. Only beautiful dreams and dragonfly eyes.

soap soup

Fell back on the wagon of making homemade laundry soap recently when I became too lazy to go to the store and buy some. It would be impossible for me to say what part of the process I enjoy the most, but grating the soft pink Zote soap and then melting it on the range top nears the top of the list. Watching it suddenly thicken into a curious slime courtesy of 70 mule team Boric acid is high on the list as well.

Used and Rare

A gift purchased at the P.S. Bookshop in Dumbo. I don't think I'll read this, I'll be too busy ogling the cover or reading the notes in the margins. I didn't realize how much I wanted to see a U with an enormous plume, or the word vulgar jotted in the margins, even if I always feel indicted when anyone uses that word.



Mannheim, one of the German intellectuals who fled the Nazis, wrote this in 1937.

fire and wood

Someone left a volume of the medeival theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart's work in front of my house a while ago, shortly after I had added a book of his work to my unwritten wish list. He was a fascinating and physical writer, and in The Book of Divine Comfort, which I am reading now, he keeps coming back to the fire motif. Here's a sample, which may help warm the chilly.

When fire goes to work on wood, kindling it to burning, the fire first fills the wood with desire for its own dissimilar nature, by taking away from the wood its solidity and coldness, its hardness and watery moisture. Thus the fire makes the wood more and more like itself and still neither can rest, be satisfied or quieted in mere warmth, heat or likeness. The fire begets itself in the wood, giving the wood its own fiery nature, even its own being, so that wood may be identical with the fire and neither more nor less distinct. Before this can happen there is always a smoking, crackling struggle between wood and fire, but when all unlikeness is removed and done away, the fire quiets and soothes the wood. I say further, and it is a fact, that there is a power in nature which hates even a covert likeness between things–especially when it brings out differences and bifurcations.

The distinction between likeness and Oneness, which he hones in this essay, evokes the 3rd Century anarchist Taoist Zhuangzi when he advised "spit out hearing and eyesight...

"Well, then—mind‑nourishment!" said Big Concealment. "You have only to rest in inaction and things will transform themselves. Smash your form and body, spit out hearing and eyesight, forget you are a thing among other things, and you may join in great unity with the deep and boundless. Undo the mind, slough off spirit, be blank and soulless, and the ten thousand things one by one will return to the root—return to the root and not know why. Dark and undifferentiated chaos—to the end of life none will depart from it. But if you try to know it, you have already departed from it. Do not ask what its name is, do not try to observe its form. Things will live naturally end of themselves."

Chapter 11, the Zhuangzi (莊子 "[Book of] Master Zhuang"), 3rd century BCE, (11, tr. Burton Watson 1968:122-3)

In this age of manic productivity, Zhuangzi's admonition seems like the most insane challenge possible. Rest in inaction? Yeah, ok.

fun indoors

I suppose the reason that I love folding and winding paper so much is how well it compensates for my sense of having a LACK OF CONTROL. Thin layers of paper generally let me have my way. Anyhow the thing above is called "a flower." You can make it yourself, instructions here! While the preoccupation might be classified in the category of escapist strategies I am quite convinced that in the long run it can only enable my world domination. I'm presently studying plans for a 2 inch paper catapult.

As for what's been going on in the Brooklyn Bachelor's freezer, well, I think he might want to install a surveillance camera so we can see what the ice nymphs are up to.

road trip

When we started the trip down 95, snowfall muffled sight and sound but the road appeared clear enough to proceed. Later it became the kind of day when cataracts of cloud cover allow you to look directly at the sun. Farther South in Connecticut the sun had ditched its clothing and flirted with veils of clouds or ripped through tree banks. I could tell the road was wanton, or was it the sun, blaring straight ahead, then suddenly disappearing and emerging far to the left or the right, briefly flaring through pylons and power plants, plunging below hillsides or rising above bare trees . We wove home that way, dancing with the sun that flooded our eyes even as the cold beyond the windshield could draw tears, beholding the light as did all that came before us and all that will come after. It's what eyes were drawn for.

Home again, the challenges begin. No more snapshots from the shotgun seat.

Southish

I unpacked for three hours at least when we got here, it was like curing myself of an abscess. I tip my hat to my mother and step father who put up with this pack of hounds and our hideous racket for longer than they expected, and bore it with considerable grace and plenty of spritz cookies.

high points: meringues and church's icebergs

My mother and I are smitten with a painting that hangs in the Rhode Island School of Design Art Musuem, a painting of icebergs at sunset by William Bradford. He and Church and perhaps others made several arctic trips to paint the mammoths which make such compelling subjects. It is easy to imagine a life painting only icebergs or photographing only ice.

I hope it's a great year for icebergs. As for meringues, beware. They go deep.

snowy pawtuxet

I say I am a solid mass, but things appear much more complicated. Just one little prick, and we have rivers.

dog dream

What I love most about New Year's, we don't really have culturally sanctioned mass hysteria very often, except for constantly. H1N1, panty hose, Y2K, etc. When I was young you could buy these pills that you'd chew after brushing your teeth and if you had missed any places they'd turn bright red. Somehow that product mocked us too much to garauntee its survival. But still, happy happy, as my dad often says, today is the first day of the rest of your life.

I'm not sure if the recent sightings of the ghost dog at our house were caused by group hysteria, but I'm sure they influenced this dream I had: I dreamed I had sleep paralysis caused by the visitation of the phantom dog. A small cream colored dog, in one part of the dream a Pekingnese in the other some sort of short-haired terrier. When I could move I picked it up in my hands and dangled it in front of me. It didn't weigh much and its soft tummy bulged slightly. All the sudden the dog had no head! Tricky ghost! Then, it suddenly had a red and white clock for a head.

Like a mandala a clock has a bindu point, a central dot, the anchor for the arms. The clock's hands echoed mine as I held the dog. But where was my bindu, naval, the point of emergence, the root, the speck of infinity? Creeping silently around the edges, out of my sight, as always.