A 2 body problem

"Love" she says, using her dry tongue to flick the word from her mouth, "is a two body problem."
She takes a stubby point of chalk from her sagging pocket and drops to her knees.

"The pull of each body directs the other. The greater body leads but both have equal importance in the solution"
She scrawls an equation across the scraped, fading black paint of the stage floor. The wood below shows through in scratches; from dragged chair legs, the steel tips of tap dancers, the pressured pin at the base of a cello.

Each journey of chalk reverberates through the theatre and, as she shuffles along, her supporting palm and the loose ankles of her trousers scuff the numbers a little, like a sloppy left-hander. She reaches the side of the stage and then climbs down. She sits, front centre.

"Now solve it"
The dancers stare down at the floor.
"What about music?"
"It is the music, you fucking idiots"

He takes his partner by the waist and she shakes out her legs.
"Ready?"
"Yeah...wait. Who's x and who's Y?"
"It doesn't matter"
"But she.."
"It's insoluble"
"God. Typical. Think they'll sort things out?"
He shrugs and straightens out.

Beauty

The golden ratio is a connection that appears in nature with bizarre regularity. I'll try to explain it as clearly as I can. Take two poles, one shorter than the other, and attach them together to make one long pole, let's call this a flagpole. Now measure all the poles; the short one, the longer one and the flagpole. Next, work out what percentage the short pole is of the longer pole and what the longer pole is of the flagpole. If these percentages are the same then we have a golden ratio. It's always the same percentage too, around 62%. This may seem just a mathematical nicety but this connection appears throughout nature, everywhere in the universe.

It shapes the spirals in the heads of sunflowers and the long arms of the milky way. It's in the proportions of bodies and, in more detail, of faces. Leonardo Da Vinci used it in the layout of many of his paintings, not as another code for some ludicrous religious mythology but because the human eye is drawn to this ratio. It makes things look how they are meant to, you could say it's beautiful. You could say it's beauty, maybe that is a measurable thing, anything could be if you found the appropriate connection; the whole world and everything beyond, laced like buttons on a line.