Parasitic Oscillations Page 3
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