A Growing Catalogue of Albert’s Questions

How are science, art, and philosophy more alike than different? Where is truth best realized? Amalgamating science, eastern philosophy, poesy, music, and mathematics, the following poem is an attempt to grace the undeniably multifaceted beauty of truth, human psyche, and reality.

Albert, perched upon the window sill,
Watches, quieter than a third eye.
I blossom upon the divan like an open wound.
Then, Albert and I,
Offer our Couroupitan prayers,
To the moment.

Albert, my Psittacoidean confrere and I,
We discuss the nature of Will.
He describes to me the flavours he dissected from the ripest Totapuri mango,
The notes he detected scurrying upon the acrid cashew fruit.
He talks to me of imitation; of how the bird song is learnt,
And of the weather he witnessed when he cracked his shell,
Hatching in Anthropoid palms,
Like a discordant prayer.

Albert the parrot and I, sing;
Sometimes he plucks the harp for me,
Or sustains the rhythmicity of our musical pursuits
By morphing into a makeshift, avian metronome,
Bobbing his head with mathematicality.

Albert preens his iridescent feathers,
As I paint my face,
The sun glitter from the river kisses his beak,
Then the mirror;
As we set out for a day of busking.

Albert poses several questions:
What would I incarnate next?
What is the half-life of Free-will?
(His terms to describe the time taken
For exactly half the amount of Will to decay,
And collapse into the deterministic Syrinx of the universe)
What are the neuronal conjugates of musicality in birds?
What is the distance from the earth to eta Ursae Majoris?

Albert perches upon my head.
For many days,
We sit beneath the Banyan,
Counting the aerial prop roots,
Till new questions hatch,
Till new busking tricks take first flight,
And till new melody tintinnabulates.

Albert flies away
With one feather in his beak,
Circling the canopies
And lands on my knee.
He now asks,
If his feathers and my hair, can sprout like banyan roots,
Away from the ambit of our bodies,
Conquering a little more of the outer world.

V.S. Rakenduvadhana is an Indian writer based in Helsinki. Her diurnal energies are mostly devoted to her work as a neuroscientist, while she maintains her lifelong nocturnal affair with philosophy, music, and art, in its many forms.