Preface
3Being neither scientist nor philosopher, I cannot even attempt to explain Buckminster Fuller. Bucky’s own writings do that; notably, his life-work, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, volumes I and II. One of his great virtues as a teacher is that he never patronizes his audience, young or old, since he assumes that if he, the self-styled ‘‘low-average man’’ can understand anything abstract or concrete—for him only two facets of the same phenomenon—so can anyone. Then, too, there is a constant proliferation of his inventions, his artifacts, which are elegant demonstrations of the generalized principles he has drawn from his close study of the cosmos. For this layman, his Expo dome is ‘‘pure principle made visible.’’
4 For those who need or want critical evaluation, there are a few splendid books by E.J. Applewhite, Hugh Kenner, John McHale, William Marlin; ‘‘popular’’ pieces such as: Time's cover story; Life's portrait by Barry Ferrell; and the New Yorker profile by Calvin Tomkins. A handbook of both ideas and inventions is readily available in Robert Marks and Fuller’s The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. [MF60]
5 For that matter, there are my films: the ten-minute vignette in ‘‘Sketchbook No.1: Three Americans’’; the half-hour ‘‘Introduction to the World Game’’; the half-hour ‘‘Primer of the Universe’’; the one-hour television special ‘‘Buckminster Fuller on Spaceship Earth’’; the eighty-five minute expansion thereof, ‘‘The World of Buckminster Fuller’’; and most recently, the one-hour television special, ‘‘Reflections: Buckminster Fuller.’’ They’re getting around more and more, here and around the world.
6 Since they were all done on a one-to-one basis—‘‘from the horse’s mouth’’—they are the principal sources for this book. But, while one critic wrote of The World of Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘As pure a record of Buckminster Fuller as would be possible to make…his is the only voice we hear; indeed his voice and persona are the film…. This is the definitive record of one of the great teachers of our time transcribed in sight and sound for the archives of posterity,’’—they still did not capture enough of the human being behind the public figure of a ‘‘protean genius,’’ the ‘‘Leonardo da Vinci of our time.’’
7 Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone could encounter him, as our family has at Christmas-time, when Bucky plays Santa Claus to the hilt; or summertime at his spiritual home-retreat on Bear Island, where he rows and sails; tells funny stories; composes doggerel poems; sings (in an off-key, monotone croaking) turn-of-the-century ballads and sea shanties; tells impish jokes and dances Irish jigs or the be-bop. Here, too, his most fundamental characteristics become apparent: the boy scout in the wonderland of nature; so curious, through his tri-focal lenses, about everything visible—macrocosm, microcosm, and the mesocosm, man in between all at once—and exploring the mysteries of the invisible; making ‘‘trial balances,’’ not only those of his inventive artifacts, but also of his hypothetical generalized principles.
8 If a book can’t directly convey all of this, then the next best thing, our editor suggested, would be for me—from my privileged vantage point of an intimate personal and working relationship with Bucky over more than thirty years—to offer some intimate glimpses of the human being; and since, as we shall see, the man, his ideas and his work are a deliberate self-creation, a work of art, then my selections from our hours of film and tape should be in the form of an autobiographical monologue/scenario (copiously illustrated). As we follow this self-creation, it will become clear that he is a marvelous composite of Yankee pragmatism (the inventions) and more importantly, of the deep streak of New England Transcendentalism (the ideas, the generalized principles, which he claims bring us closest to Nature-God). I would venture to say that Emerson's essay ‘‘Self-Reliance’’ is his bible, especially the last sentence: ‘‘Who so would be a man, must be a non-conformist.’’ Bucky's been that from his earliest years, and, I daresay, will be that forever.
9 This book is dedicated to my beloved son, Jaime L. Snyder (Bucky’s equally beloved grandson) and all his fellow passengers on spaceship earth—those ‘‘into’’ Bucky and those who should be—in the hope that they won’t ever be discouraged by the ‘‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,’’ but rather find inspiration from Bucky’s resounding life-yea-saying why-nots.