Parasitic Oscillations
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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
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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