Parasitic Oscillations Read online

  the speed of light within the speed of sound

  mirrors within microscopes

  moments within millennia

  a son within the cleaning lady

  voices within voice boxes

  desire within discovery

  and three hundred years ago

  the five Platonic solids

  Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum.

  But the other day

  I watched a YouTube video of a world

  famous novelist at a world famous bookshop

  in Paris

  say she can never remember

  if the sun rotates

  around the earth

  or the other way around

  and her husband the famous

  poet felt the need

  to set the record straight

  and then I understood her choice

  to be that way—non-nested

  INFLUENCE IS INFINITELY CIRCUITAL

  The formerly abused have moved

  to action. Tabooed circumstances

  matter. It is against my principles

  to ignore it. Nowadays the current

  is instantaneous, a curl

  of expression. Reversal arises.

  The attractive repel one another.

  A working agent follows the bodies

  pushed together by translational motion.

  It may be worth distorting the lines.

  There is only so much latitude.

  There are the portions, vanishing, the necessary

  smallness, the debatable

  amount of needless pressure.

  Mystery does not enlighten us in the least

  and we are wasted by friction.

  A single moving particle,

  scarcely any physics in it,

  suggests something better.

  Personal identity lends itself

  to great exhaustion.

  Ignore it then by saying

  we fall together.

  Heaviside, O. (1893). A gravitational and electromagnetic analogy: Part I. The Electrician, 31, 281-282.

  AMPLIFICATION

  I’ve been reading about lines.

  The Radcliffe Line. The Line of Control.

  The Line of Best Fit. Plays, novels, memoirs.

  Drawing the Line. The Crooked Line. Fault Lines.

  A professor of sociology’s book The Fine Line.

  What can I say? I’ve gathered so much moss

  and dried grass now all my nests are lined

  but all my baskets are empty.

  Twenty years ago a young man

  who claimed to be my soulmate

  gave me The Art of Loving

  the author of which claimed “love is a verb.”

  It’s not. Neither is it an art.

  Love can only be a noun, as in:

  The wooden partitions to separate different wings

  of the museum on each of the four floors fed the fire.

  I never did read The Art of Loving but I know of

  the sixty-four arts of the Kama Sutra.

  There are four I still want to master. Knowledge

  of mines. Teaching parrots or starlings to talk.

  Tying turbans. Making a bed. Love can be

  an adjective but only when used as a noun, as in:

  The specimens, the stuffed animals and the chemicals

  some specimens were preserved in were all highly combustible.

  I know it doesn’t count for anything

  that I once tried kissing my soul-

  mate, because he was the kind

  of irresistible man my sister said she would make

  out with if he entered an elevator.

  You know, randomly. Valuable exhibits

  including stuffed animals of endangered species

  were on the first floor, but the fire started higher up.

  DAMPED OSCILLATION

  If

  it happens that the resistance

  gradually communicated by the author

  is a sign

  If

  it happens it is a solution

  because it indicates actual physical systems

  If

  a sudden jump becomes equal to approximately

  itself

  If

  unity is practically reached

  after one revolution

  If

  keeping track of a point means

  a series of short lines

  If

  we write without dropping the accents

  If

  normal is dealing with further build up

  If

  the dead have been neglected

  If

  circulation

  If

  time

  If

  relaxed

  If

  satisfied

  If

  flywheel is equal to telephone is equal to heart-beats,

  however small this substitution may be

  Van der Pol, B. (1926). LXXXVIII. On “relaxation-oscillations.” The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 2(11), 978-992, DOI: 10.1080.

  TWO-PART ORGAN, or RETURNING TO CARDINAL

  Today my consonants are mere control of airflow.

  Only my vowels are sung. When I first write two-toned

  I mean red or not-red, male or female, but now I

  know more. That the root of cardinal is hinge, that the

  square root is of no use, only squared bifurcation

  of bronchi, flips between vibrating columns and noise,

  oscillations doubling. Bass and treble, right and

  hope as the probability of synchrony, left.

  I see light couple and decouple, beat wings at wrong

  frequencies, fly into a bush, orchestrate landings.

  The syrinx and the larynx found at a junction.

  I want those colourless feathers, her colourless lips.

  STRAY CAPACITANCE OF DIASPORIC SPECIMENS, AS KHAYAL

  sa

  Amit via Zoom: “Raga is the environment

  and the environment is the raga.” He makes no

  mention of Cardinalus cardinalus outside

  my window, Amit, who’s homestaying in Tagore’s

  Shantiniketan. There is a bird there neither of

  us hears, but it has heard all the bird species of Guelph.

  re

  I am mathematically modelling birdsong

  with Matlab, the software, by day and reading novels

  by night. In the new novel Gold Diggers I find

  the word Matlab but it appears as the Hindi word

  for meaning. Birds embedded in my ordinary

  differential equations sing louder, sing brighter.

  ga

  Amit says: “The raga is a series of notes, an

  exploration. The goal is to magnify details

  of the ascent and descent from always different

  perspectives. But slowed down, it can be rewritten, a

  crucial slowing down…” And there appears my old index,

  my “critical slowing down before a tipping point.”

  ma

  I am looking at a photo sent to me by ROM’s

  Associate Curator of Ornithology.

  A.O. Hume’s Oriental Pied Hornbill, Dehradun.

  Weeks later I am emailing Arvind about birds

  in his garden in Dehradun, not mentioning Hume.

  He sends me a photo of a hornbill, same species.

  pa

  I am reading Chaos: Beyond harmonic sounds in

  a simple m
odel for birdsong production with noise-

  cancelling headphones, but no poems can be found there.

  Then I reread it while listening to Kishori

  Amonkar, and as I write these lines, she sings “Madhur” twice.

  As I revise, she sings “Mohan”—my father’s first name.

  dha

  Length: 33; Wing: 12.5; Wing Span: 42;

  Tail: from vent 13.25; Feet: Length 4, Width 2

  .1; Life Stage Remarks: none recorded; Reproduct-

  ive Condition Remarks: none recorded; Colours: legs

  and feet black, bill light yellow, iris reddish yellow;

  Diet: stomach: buds and seeds (red); Mode of Acquis-

  ni

  Dynamic Properties

  Do

  Re

  Me

  sa

  tion: Donation; Source: British Museum; transferred from

  Biological Museum, University

  of Toronto; Other Previous Owners: Ex Hume

  Collection. ROM Birds 974.

  1870 by G. King. “It seems that we had

  an old/wrong name for this one,” the curator explains.

  DREAM TWO BIRDS LEFT ON MY WINDOWSILL

  I stroke her spinal cord, I listen for lullabies

  in her neural circuitry, the silent notes produced

  by her vocal folds, at night. But Mother’s larynx has

  always been a black box, a rattle that does not soothe.

  I learn to sleep poorly in the pandemic, fictive

  song patterns are highly variable…compared to…

  stereotyped day-time song. I keep one ear open

  for the painful cry of reawakening, where all

  songs can be mapped onto mathematical systems,

  even nightmares. I mask up and down suburbia.

  I massage Mother’s feet so she can say when it hurts.

  NORMAL FORMS ON HOPE BAY

  Crystal-clear oscillations, sustained expirations

  of Newton’s equations, it can take fifty years to

  find a feather shaped like an arrow. I curl my lips

  to simulate northern cardinals, ancient cedars,

  low-dimensional puritans, shed imitations

  of my upright stance. The escarpment, a dotted line,

  purple and white trilliums announcing more vaccines.

  Science in retreat, Kishori Amonkar sings man

  mein anand, tan mein anand, as third waves deposit

  funeral pyres along the banks of distant rivers.

  I dream of American museums I could not

  imagine, Indian songbirds conserved in drawers.

  I play with three parameters of the Bogdanov

  -Takens bifurcation mapped to stiffness, pressure, and

  time scale in the syrinx. I hear it first, the future.

  PART FOUR

  Figure 1

  Figure 2

  Figure 3

  Figure 4

  Figure 5

  Figure 6

  Figure 7

  Figure 8

  Figure 9

  PART FIVE

  PARAMETRIC OSCILLATION

  1.

  Once I dreamed I put a stop to the spread. After five

  million visits I put a triangular lock

  on my spine, a ringed seal on my mouth. I washed my hands

  for twenty seconds. I put scare quotes around “door.”

  Before I left, I threw down salt where I knew there would

  later be ice. I thought big. And therefore was immune.

  2.

  A set of governing rules acting

  without delay

  without overshooting

  which is to say reducing

  error

  which at its simplest is the difference

  between the actual and the desired

  or the desired

  and the actual. May the controller be corrective

  then indistinguishable

  3.

  Father wrote in Greek and Urdu: calculus, couplets

  in stolen, no, surplus exam booklets. Strange cursives

  justified by red-lined foolscap sheets we recycled.

  Lost notes buzzing in my earphones, distorted signals

  spurious pulses, stray capacitance, self-help jokes.

  On my deathbed it will still be now, wrote Hugh Prather.

  4.

  Then I dreamed of distinguished James

  Clerk Maxwell, who was born on India

  Street in Edinburgh. Of whom it is said

  by age three asked of everything

  that moved, that shone, that made

  noise, What’s the go o’ that?

  When I awoke and all that was left were

  Maxwell’s equations and his scientific

  paper entitled “On Governors”

  explaining how friction checks clockwork,

  how work is spent communicating velocity

  to water. How the disturbance,

  instead of subsiding more

  rapidly, becomes

  an oscillating

  and jerking motion,

  increasing in violence

  till it reaches the limit

  Maxwell, J.C. (1868). I. On governors. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 16, 270-283.

  5.

  Vaccines for every viral childhood disease

  then one comes knocking at the side door of my central

  nervous system: a curly-haired man falling on the

  tarmac in Montreal in the centennial year.

  Falling on the way to my birth, there on the driveway,

  then on the runner to my wedding altar, slipping.

  6.

  part of a machine by means of which the velocity of the machine is kept nearly uniform, notwithstanding variations in the driving-power or the resistance

  Maxwell, J.C. (1868). I. On governors. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 16, 270-283.

  7.

  There it is: the derivative floating in the red

  ordinary differential equations textbook,

  the truth in the thinking. There it is, the slanted rhyme,

  the delta and the lambda, the exact and closed form,

  the non-enveloped protein coat, the twenty faces,

  thirty edges, and twelve vertices. There, it, wanting.

  8.

  You think the truth

  an inner voice to Buckminster Fuller

  9.

  Truth is, I stole Father’s copy of Notes to Myself

  without thinking. Wanting it all, the lie in itself.

  His dog ears were my ethics tests: It is not always

  necessary to think words. Thinking and wanting: two

  poplar leaves, one real, one shadowed, on the cover

  and subtitled My Struggle to Become a Person.

  10.

  parasitic oscillations can only occur in recursive structures

  Wanhammer, L., & Yu, Y.J. (2014). Digital filter structures and their implementation. In P.S.R. Diniz et al. (Eds.), Academic Press Library in Signal Processing: Volume 1 (Signal processing theory and machine learning) (pp. 245-338). Elsevier Ltd.

  11.

  That geodesic dome: maximum efficiency,

  minimum effort. Buckminster Fuller daydreaming

  lattice-shells when his daughter contracted polio.

  What he imagined of all that symmetry, of his

  American Pavilion turned to Biosphère:

  Nature never fails. So what, then, of all its limping?

  12.

  Let us be honest now about how the parasitic

  blurs when we discover what years

  of limping can do

  to a father, which is to say a
ny father,

  which is to say my father.

  Almost wrote feather.

  Maxwell would have called it self-

  oscillation, but that would not explain the three

  wild types, or any set of three. My brother, my sister,

  and me. Let us keep the infective agent

  invisible, or say that it is entirely parametric.

  That lags lead to overcompensation.

  That it is so often the one good

  leg that makes another one bad.

  That there is a word for the singly

  undesired, but let us not name it

  —yet.

  PART SIX

  Song 1: The old bird will remain on the nest until within reach of the hand. Captain Hutton

  The birds used to sit close, and when put off their nests would commence their outcries, and from all parts they would assemble and flit about almost within reach of one’s hand, making an awful noise, and in the dark shade of the forest their white gorgets had quite a ghostly look. Captain Cock

  The only difficulty in finding it lay in the scantiness of the structure rather than in the concealment by the foliage. The bird was on the nest and only moved off about 3 feet, sitting close by and chattering indignantly during my inspection…Their notes, though rather harsh, are very varied and quite conversational. Colonel Marshall