A mathematical poem sits on the wall and says nothing about how to read it. These three are the three answers I have found to that problem — walk somebody through the arithmetic, talk them through the structure and the imagery, or drop the explaining altogether and let the thing be heard. They get progressively less willing to explain themselves.
Three out of fifty-three. The rest live on my two YouTube channels — Mathematical Poetry and Polyaesthetics.
Nine characters, two and a half minutes, and no prior mathematics required.
The poem reads love equals the limit of one over ego, as ego approaches zero, and the video does the one thing a wall label cannot — it works the arithmetic out loud. Cut the ego in half and love doubles. Make it a hundredth and love becomes a hundred. A millionth, and a million. Nothing here is decoration: the fraction is doing the saying.
Then there is the lim, which is the part people skip past. You cannot divide by zero — it is undefined, it does not mean anything. Newton’s way around that was to get infinitely close to zero without arriving, and to use that instead. Which is exactly what the poem needs, because it leaves the last claim where it belongs: infinite love is a value the function approaches as the self goes to nothing, and never a place anybody stands.
Sacrifice is the whole of the operation. Bliss is what the operation approaches.
A Mayan creator god reaches for a Zen circle. The algebra is what puts the two of them in the same room.
The piece is written in Spanish, and that is not an affectation. The Popol Vuh, the creation story of the K’iche’ people, came to me the way it came to most readers — through a monk’s Spanish translation — so Spanish is the language I found it in and the language the work is in. Everything is translated and discussed in English here.
Structurally it is a similar triangles poem bent back on itself. The usual form sets one ratio equal to another, a over b equals c over d. This one runs closer to a congruent triangle poem: emptiness is to form as form is to emptiness — the sentence from the Heart Sutra, written as a proportion. The video takes it through the algebra a line at a time until it reduces to emptiness squared over form squared equals one, and one is where the piece was headed all along: oneness, or, if you take the word apart the way it was built, at‑one‑ment.
The rest is the picture. The circle the creator god is reaching for is an il‑won‑sang — ensō in Japanese — the brushed circle Zen monks make and remake as a meditation, and a symbol of emptiness. The god is Heart of Sky. Down the right-hand side runs a passage from the Popol Vuh about a world that still ripples and murmurs and hums, and is empty, under the sky.
This one does not explain anything, and that is the point.
The lyrics are the Heart Sutra, adapted and set to a blues. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form — the same sentence the piece above spends seven minutes taking apart — arrives here as a chorus, followed by the long catalogue of negations the sutra is famous for: no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no old age, no death; nothing to gain and nothing lost. It ends where the sutra ends, on the mantra — and then Hyon Gak Sunim’s voice asking What am I? He did not record that for me. I took it from an existing recording on the assumption that he would not mind.
It is also made entirely out of the tools that exist right now. The music was generated with Suno; eight eight-second clips came out of Google VEO; the temple photography, the graphic work and the lyric design are mine, cut together in Final Cut. I am not going to pretend that is incidental — a text that has been chanted for fourteen hundred years is a fair thing to hand to a new instrument and see what comes back.
Sung rather than solved. Some things go better in twelve bars.
The three above are a selection, not an inventory. Everything else is on the channels: Mathematical Poetry carries the poems explained, the gallery talks and the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art lecture in two parts; Polyaesthetics is the larger and stranger of the two, and is where the newest work usually lands first. New videos are announced on Substack.