ALGORITHMS OF LOVE

The best signs of history are objects so complex and so bound in webs of unpredictable contingency that no state, once lost, can ever rise again in precisely the same way.
                           - Stephen Jay Gould

On the back of a man’s t-shirt, an image of a tree with flowers and birds, painted medieval style.

A Japanese guy busking in a corridor on the underground - completely immersed in the song he is singing, with very soft-edged guitar and with equally elusive vocal patterns drifting in and out, amazing stuff - can still be heard as I arrive on the platform to be greeted by a poster advertising a film about a woman with motor neuron disease which announces that she wrote the text of the advert using tiny movements of her chin.

A few steps further along the platform another poster confidently announces in big type: “I was the man in the blue shirt sitting opposite who stared at you all the way from Camden Town to Charing Cross.  You were the woman in the fantastic glasses.”

A blond girl carrying a small Swedish flag - the kind used to guide large parties of tourists through busy urban settings - walks quietly down a crowded street, on her own, lost in thought.
On a man’s sky blue t-shirt is a print of an orange bicycle, but only the front two thirds have been printed: the back wheel, half of the chain, and the frame from just behind the seat are all absent.

As I sit down on the train I suddenly sense that the woman in the seat next to me is shining.  I do what i always do in this situation: i refrain from looking at her, allowing the sensed algorithm of beauty to generate medieval patterns of respect and quietness inside me.
 
Entering Liverpool Street station a few hours later that awareness re-emerges inside me for a few moments.  I slow down my walking a few degrees and feel the soft focusing of a kind of loving intelligence inside my body.

(…………. /
                …………….)

She sits next to me on the train.
"Are you a monk?"
"….. Yes."
"Do monks usually call themselves monks?"
"Well, only when their mind is very quiet or the situation is kind of formal."
"What do they call themselves at other times?"
“They call themselves whatever they want.”
"What do you call yourself at such times?"
"I call myself a mathematician."
…..
"A mathematician.  How would you define a mathematician? ….. just someone who does maths?"
"Well, that definition is a bit weak.  Everyone does some maths during the course of the day.  They look at the train timetable and look at their watch and do a little subtraction, that kind of thing.  But they dont consider themselves mathematicians.  A better definition would be: ‘a mathematician is someone who sees opportunities for doing mathematics where most people dont.’ "
“You could apply that to being a buddhist too I guess.  To being a buddhist monk.”
"Yes.  a buddhist is someone who sees opportunities for studying or practicing buddhism where most people dont."
“As a buddhist mathematician what have you seen today?”
"Well, I saw a tree on the back of a man’s t-shirt, painted medieval style, with leaves and birds on it.  It was somehow recognisably medieval.  and I started thinking about how trees change through the centuries, both in art and in real life - how a tree in a nineteenth century painting doesnt look like a tree in a fourteenth century painting, and how the DNA - do trees have DNA? - anyway, you know what I mean - how the DNA of trees has probably changed too.  And then I started thinking about logic trees.  I started thinking of creating a kind of … friendly foliage … for logic trees … using algorithms of change created from the natural and artistic history of trees.  I wanted to paint these trees, and have all the lonely people walking beneath them…"
…..
"This is my stop.  Thank you for talking with me.  Do you think we will meet again?"
"I’m sure we will."