Parasitic Oscillations Read online

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  They were on their backs. They were labelled with dates. Their eyes

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  Praise for Madhur Anand and

  Parasitic Oscillations

  “Lyric poets from many regions, traditions, and cultures have long dreamt of making the human voice approach the condition of birdsong. In Parasitic Oscillations, Madhur Anand approaches this literary problem from a wholly different angle, making birdsong her object of study with the precision and amplitude of an environmental scientist working on mathematical models of avian behaviour in complex ecological systems. By the end of this innovative collection, the most ancient and universal metaphors for poetry—as song, as flight—are made new through Anand’s aesthetic research into global intimacies of the human and the nonhuman alike. ‘There are very few things / that are stronger when they are far apart,’ writes Anand. Perhaps poems can sing their song, too.”

  —SRIKANTH REDDY, professor and author of Underworld Lit

  “Parasitic Oscillations traces a ‘path travelling back to a higher dimension…formant and filtering.’ This is a pathless path, crenallated by ‘live’ edges, industrial memory, and the time crystals of colonial (and anti-colonial) artifacts that refract beyond their capacity to be restored. Madhur Anand has written a book that attends to an on-going ‘vanishing’ with brown clarity, in the cardinal, ever-fluxing space between ‘the actual and the desired.’ ”

  —BHANU KAPIL

  “The poems in Madhur Anand’s Parasitic Oscillations track a variety of losses with all the rigour and care of her scientific training. She segues seamlessly from the loss of bird species, to the loss of a motherland and a mother, to the loss of presumed safety during the pandemic. A reader may feel a series of trap doors opening beneath her feet. This is a new, more inclusive and global eco-poetics where we too are specimens. As she warns at the end of one segment: ‘Tag yourself.’ ”

  —RAE ARMANTROUT, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Conjure

  “In the formally inventive Parasitic Oscillations, Madhur Anand, once again, makes scientific inquiry both intimate and vital, but ‘There is a more inner view,’ within, as well. This is a tour de force of life and one of the greatest long poems, ‘Slow Dance,’ that I’ve ever read, period. In this collection of evidence of what is seen and of what is lived, we have a poet at the top of her game. Anand offers the brilliance of the learned and of the lived, of the curious and of the accomplished. And, yes, there’s the music of the birdsong, which Anand—lyrically, generously—offers as a soundtrack to show us how to fly. This is some soulful, beautiful work.”

  —A. VAN JORDAN, professor and author of The Cineaste

  “Anand’s Parasitic Oscillations: pheasant feathers and Maxwell’s equations, imagination and analysis, metaphor and fact, sideways glance of a poet and direct gaze of a scientist, beauty and beauty.”

  —ALAN LIGHTMAN, professor and author of Einstein’s Dreams

  BOOKS BY MADHUR ANAND

  NONFICTION

  This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart

  POETRY

  A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes

  Copyright © 2022 by Madhur Anand

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780771099410

  Ebook ISBN 9780771099427

  (I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden

  Words and Music by Joe South

  Copyright © 1967 Bike Music c/o Concord Music Publishing

  Copyright Renewed

  All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

  Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

  At time of printing the Q/R codes on this page to this page were functional. Songs can also be found by searching the internet for species as named in Syrinx 1.

  Cover and book design by Leah Springate

  Cover images: (egg) Coloured illustrations of British birds, and their eggs, v. 2 (1844) / Biodiversity Heritage Library / Flickr (diagram) Image from page 246 of “Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters” (1872) / Internet Archive Book Images / Flickr

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_6.0_139555241_c1_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Disclaimer

  Books by Madhur Anand

  Title Page

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Sensible Parallels, Portrait 1

  A Simple Note, Portrait 2

  Repertoire for a Restitution, Portrait 3

  PART TWO

  Mind Compression

  Mother Says I Talk Like a Son

  Collection of Wild Birds’ Eggs Is Now Only Permitted with a Licence

  Partition 1

  Every Day Is Independence Day

  Partition 2

  Animal Behaviour

  Surface Temperatures of Albatross Eggs and Nests

  Field Course

  Visiting the Rothschild Collection, Tring

  Summations

  All My Learning Is Falling through the Cracks

  Satyagraha in Tübingen

  Ode to a QR Code

  PART THREE

  On the Nature of Things

  White-throated Laughing-Thrush Caught in My Throat

  Rising Variance as an Early Warning

  Brain Hemorrhage, Early Fall

  Light Is the Fastest Thing We Know of

  Influence Is Infinitely Circuital

  Amplification

  Damped Oscillation

  Two-part Organ, or Returning to Cardinal

  Stray Capacitance of Diasporic Specimens, as Khayal

  Dream Two Birds Left on My Windowsill

  Normal Forms on Hope Bay

  PART FOUR

  Figures

  PART FIVE

  Parametric Oscillation

  PART SIX

  Songs

  PART SEVEN

  Slow Dance

  Syrinx 1

  Syrinx 2

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  SENSIBLE PARALLELS

  Behaviour emerges from interaction
between

  a nervous system, a peripheral cusp, and the

  environment. Not obvious, but a picture starts

  to emerge. Strong fingerprints on the vocal organ.

  Solutions that might not require separate muscles.

  The body uttered/uttering, the field notes inspect/

  inspection. One can call this position borderline,

  part controlled, part chaos, the aim of which to unveil

  a fundamental relationship, instructions for

  a generation, how to revisit global paths.

  How can a single source generate both tonal sounds

  and harmonically rich sounds? Collision, collided,

  collide. Three roots remain remnant and three roots are born.

  Bird, birds, birdsong, songbirds, songbird, songs, song, syllables.

  Amador, A., & Mindlin, G.B. (2008). Beyond harmonic sounds in a simple model for birdsong production. Chaos, 18, 043123.

  Portrait 1: How might we utilize these oscillations caused by feedback to bring our multiple understandings of the world closer together, to talk to one another while embracing the inevitability of noise? Phase plane portrait of the mathematical model of birdsong found in: Amador and Mindlin (2008). ps is the sublabial pressure in units of Pa. k1> is the linear restitution coefficient in units of dyn/cm.

  A SIMPLE NOTE

  It is basically expected that time is a wave

  and history the darker diagram of clockwise

  arrows. Human speech is a subsong of trachea

  and beak. It is illustrated in this letter how

  pressure will control not only strength but also sound.

  It is expected there be some overlap, tension

  while mimicking lexicon, emphasis on power.

  All is transient and symmetric, the slowing curve,

  the fastest collisions, crossing out each syllable,

  each precise boundary. First backward, then forward, stop.

  Gardner et al. (2001). Simple motor gestures for birdsongs. Physical Review Letters, 87, 208101.

  Portrait 2: Birds are often no longer direct subjects of metaphor, but rather remain strange, sometimes silent, a kind of menacing and stray capacitance (which can cause parasitic oscillations), but still harbingers of discovery and hope. Phase plane portrait of the mathematical model of birdsong found in Gardner et al. (2001). ps is the sublabial pressure in units of Pa. k1> is the linear restitution coefficient in units of dyn/cm.

  REPERTOIRE FOR A RESTITUTION

  Learning through imitation, review, maps, memory,

  writing. Association between dialect and

  habitat. Similarity of waves, concerted

  and elastic. Resonance between pure physics and

  human nature, question and debate. A family

  picture pinned against original text. A cycle

  born without any model, with mini breaths, rings of

  hope. A path travelling back to a higher dimension,

  speculation of history, formant and filtering,

  tensions and inspirations, soft atmospheric time.

  Laje et al. (2002). Neuromuscular control of vocalizations in birdsong: A model. Physical Review E, 65, 051921.

  Portrait 3: Superimposing the concept of diaspora on the movement of bird specimens around the world, tracking the co-movements of natural and cultural histories to bring to light the oscillatory, but ultimately entwined, interrelations of humans and nature. Phase plane portrait of the mathematical model of birdsong found in Laje et al. (2002). p is the net driving pressure in units of (dyn s)/(cm g). k1> is the linear restitution coefficient in units of dyn/cm.

  PART TWO

  MIND COMPRESSION

  Every line of thought

  is an oscillation we must enter

  into arbitrarily

  Only this small amount

  of work in a vacuum

  and it all makes sense

  We are bound to equating

  contradictions of experience

  with experience

  When a resonator tries

  to communicate we should talk

  about it, write about it

  That famous incident

  of the train, a collision

  with the ponderable

  The very special cases

  they are present-day energy

  they are light itself

  Einstein, A. (1905/1967). On a heuristic point of view about the creation and conversion of light. In D. Ter Haar (Ed.), The Old Quantum Theory. Pergamon Press.

  MOTHER SAYS I TALK LIKE A SON

  All her life my mother shunned pets

  until now. Maybe because her right foot

  is less connected to her left brain

  since the stroke. It leaves her

  pervious to thunder, lightning, cats.

  She says move but nothing moves.

  It was never one thing then two

  with my mother. It was a third thing

  igniting like rain on a wedding day

  predicting nothing but more rain

  for all a bride’s life. Now, out of the blue Guelph sky

  my mother says: If you must have a pet, make it

  a parrot. They can talk. She tells me her every last

  dream and each dream’s interpretation,

  both permeable as long-term weather

  forecasts, for all her life my mother lived

  in someone else’s dreams, like pending rain. It’s bad.

  She’s at a wedding. She sees the bride’s face

  who should never be seen like that, without a veil.

  The clouds part and my mother is in post-Partition

  Dehradun, is eight and playing with the landlord’s

  daughter, whose name she can’t recall. Their pet,

  a female parrot named Bachi, is whose call she hears now.

  Aaja, bacha, she repeats. Come, child—ungendered.

  COLLECTION OF WILD BIRDS’ EGGS IS NOW ONLY PERMITTED WITH A LICENCE

  Thirst is neither predation nor sport. Only one thing

  thrives in the rain-fed dunes of the Thal desert: bitter

  aftertaste. A place so safe. Where bin Laden once sought

  refuge among Arab sheiks, their white robes fluttering

  in tent cities transplanted over local chickpea

  fields, hunting a stringy meat called aphrodisiac.

  One’s first Houbara is a new sensation. I killed

  8 more during the day but the first was of course the

  treat…like the first glass of beer after a hard day’s work.

  I saw Miss Cockburn’s labelled egg specimens behind

  glass. White eggs, India ink, white noise, artist’s hand, small

  voice barely heard. What’s song after death? What’s life that hard?

  PARTITION 1

  When the Natural History Museum of Delhi

  goes up in flames, Ashok whispers hai Ram, the feathers!

  A bystander sees what can be salvaged: don’t worry

  about the one-hundred-and-sixty-million-year-old

  Sauropod bone, yaar. Dr. Singh yells Asiatic

  Lion! Those good films in the permanent collection!

  Crocodile tears fall for plastic mitochondria

  in a case labelled Cell: The Basic Unit of Life.

  A grad student grieves for the loss of his planned future

  exhibit. Climate Change: Effects and Adaptation.

  By that time, in the western hemisphere, the present

  tense of verbs is erased by an invisible hand.

  EVERY DAY IS INDEPENDENCE DAY

  Heat is never an accident. August is no fool.

  The tricolour anthem—“Victory, Victory, Victory”—calls

  for compet
ition: a kite-string coated with glass, wings

  clipped, small bones cut through. The polluted air—a fucked-up

  relationship between sky and breath, between lovebirds

  and cuckoos—transmits one song: “I never promised you

  a rose garden.” In the public park, social fabric

  tears at the seams, the wind replies: “I beg your pardon.”

  Every day a new line’s taut, every day’s a new knot.

  A Dilliwala’s throat hurts. A warlike mynah is caught.

  PARTITION 2

  The semen-filled grey hand towels, the pinkish-stained black

  panties from God knows which chemical reactions

  occurred those months ago in utero. Dust bunnies.

  Bowls filled to the brim with loonies. Genuine earrings.

  There was just one thing Preet had to hide from the cleaning

  lady: a dog-eared copy of After the Affair.

  When the Natural History Museum of Delhi

  went up in flames, she remembered a plume, grey-pink-black

  emitting from rooftops, a note at her mother’s feet

  which reappeared at the Open Field Collective art

  box displayed for the public. “I Thought You Were Solid…”

  and inside: one nest, one milkweed pod—exploded.

  ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR

  In my fourth year as a bachelor of science student

  I spent days at Storybook Gardens converting pink

  flamingos into handsome statistics, complete with

  disposable footmen, the deleted footnotes of