(CNN) — Scientists analyzed the portrait of the Mona Lisa, a woman with famously mixed emotions, hoping to unlock her smile. They applied emotion recognition software that measures a person’s mood by examining features such as the curve of the lips and the crinkles around the eyes.The findings? Mona Lisa was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry, according to the British weekly “New Scientist.”

so they did it:
the same
who, drunk on the enlightening
distillation of logic
drew reason’s coils around the gods,
suffocating them

who found it was not faeries
but rather condensation
that gives us dew
on shining green grassblade mornings, when you and i
were still learning the outlines of each other

who drew close the universe
for us to see no longer
swans or serpents or compasses,
but rather gigantic nuclear explosions –

(though, to be fair, the poets have rallied
and found that even physics, at its edges
has a weakness for beauty
and the stars, connected
like dots
are treeshadows on a green spring afternooon).

they have taken beauty’s mysteries
and read to us, loudly, the last page
(it was the butler, it always is),
strapped her to the examining table and undressed her,
delineated her curves and graphed them,
and found her proportions (golden! glorious!) to have a demonstrable ratio

and now the most enduring symbol
of qualities we cannot quite define
has been broken into
four simple quantities.

and maybe there isn’t any wonder left in the world
as you say,
because they have dissected it,
and now it is dead,
but
maybe the only reason we find meaning
in our mortality
is because there is nothing else to do with that:
the unyielding wall at the end of our search for fact
which has no concern for
aesthetic
or
romance.

and every time someone says
there’d be no meaning to life
without death,
I think, no;
there’d just be a different one.

and every time somebody says
that the world is ending,
i think, no;
just this one is.

one spring night,
the air liquid-warm and soft
with the memory of dusk
I was driving home a friend
of a friend
and suddenly
he gestured out the window,
almost without decision,
like a marionette pulled violently
and without will
and he said,
“i’ve been seeing that car over and over for three years,
those bumper stickers,
that license plate,
and I need to know who they are –
we have to follow them!
and so we did, for several miles,
before we lost it in the dark
and the stretched knots of taillights
but just as it was swallowed into the night’s dark womb,
he leaned precariously from my window,
screaming to know who they were, and why.
and as their silhouette faded into the road
and the deep sky,
i understood what you meant.

Still, scientists will probably never know what made her feel the way she did.

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