1 What Am I Doing Here?
2Thirty years ago I used to breakfast at a drugstore called Mac’s, where the toast was fresher than in campus dining halls and moreover you had your pick of magazines from the newsstand by the door. Magazines were in their golden age: cornucopias of novelty. You leafed one while you ate, put it back if you didn’t want to buy it. Most got put back. Mac made his money from the lunch counter, and wrote off the dog-earing of his newsstand stock as goodwill. So you could monitor the abundance, and paying for the odd item you really wanted didn’t strain an undergraduate budget.
3 In the first week of March, 1943, I spent ten cents for the current Life, and back in my room cut out the pieces of the Dymaxion World Map. There were tabs to fold and glue, and you ended up with a sort-of-spherical shape, made of squares and triangles on which colorful continents were printed. The colors demarked not countries but mean low temperatures, which were alleged to make more sense in an airpower world. The sort-of-sphere was attributed to Archimedes, and if I’d taken it around to the math department they could have told me it was a cuboctahe-
4 2 BUCKY
5 dron. Being an English Lang. 8c Lit. major I didn’t, and so missed meeting Professor H. S. M. Coxeter.
6 This misshapen globe wasn’t the point of the exercise. It simply proved that the whole earth was symmetrically there, to validate what you were looking at when you spread it out to flat paper again. Then you saw the whole world in one view with minimal distortion. The departure from the shapes you see on a globe wasn’t noticeable, and there’s no all-at-once way to see the globe. Along the edges of the fourteen parts distortion was zero, so you could fit them together in various jigsaws to get special-purpose maps: the one-continent map with all the land masses joined, Hitler’s Heartland map with the Americas on the periphery, Tojo’s Rising Sun map, mid-Pacific ringed by continents.
7 The effect was to undermine the teachings of that One True Map, Mercator’s, that hung in every classroom, with its Eurasian and American masses separated by two great oceans, across which ships moved east and west. They steamed over the broad warm Pacific to Japan, through gray Atlantic waves to England or Europe. But on the Dymaxion Map (and the globe confirmed it) the short route from San Francisco to Japan pursued coastlines and almost brushed the Aleutians, while the air route from Toronto to Berlin was never more than a few hundred miles from land.
8 Toward the poles, Mercator’s world was grotesquely misshapen, but ships didn’t go near the poles. Years later, when airlines advertised a ‘‘Polar Route’’ from Los Angeles to Stockholm, it seemed like a trick: clear off the top of the map and then a reentry, like Buck Rogers passing through a tuck in space. On the Dymaxion Map it seems obvious, almost as though the Dymaxion Map’s inventor was foreseeing a day when hundreds of thousands of vaca-
9 WHAT AM I DOING HERE? | 3 tioners would casually cross the Arctic. (I’ve done it myself, more than once. I can remember when I never thought I’d fly.)
10 The inventor’s name was R. Buckminster Fuller, identified in a caption as a man of bizarre accomplishments now connected with the Board of Economic Warfare in Washington. A photo showed him, moustached and talking earnestly. That was the first I heard of him.
11 After that his name surfaced from time to time. There were bits of lore about his three-wheeled car and his suspended house. There was a Reader’s Digest filler about how he slept ‘‘the Dymaxion Way’’---not piling up arrears of fatigue and then needing an alarm clock, but dropping off the very minute he needed to for just the sleep his body took, which worked out to a half-hour in every six and gave him twenty-two-hour working days. That sounded like just the ticket at exam time, but I never met anyone who could make it work. Normal mortals postponed unconsciousness too long and then slept like logs twelve hours at a stretch, which was sybaritic but non-Dymaxion. Later there was something in Time about the Fuller Research Foundation, and by the mid-1950’s one was hearing of Geodesic Domes. They were Coming, several articles predicted, and I kept expecting to see one but never did, not in those days.
12 My own work, apart from teaching myself to teach, entailed trying to see around a corner in time. I was teaching literature, and I’d been taught about the great literary tradition that ran from Homer, straight as a corridor, right up to a blank wall about 1850, where my undergraduate curriculum had more or less ended. Right at the wall there was a left turn, around which was said to lurk chaos ---modernity. (‘‘There be monsters,’’ one read at the edges of old maps.) When eventually I peeped round it, a huge
13 4 | BUCKY pulsing extravaganza caught my attention and wouldn’t let go: Finnegans Wake. How to come around to where it was, without losing sight of everything else?
14 I bought the Campbell and Robinson Skeleton Key, which was certainly a help but somehow wrong. When I could revel in Joyce’s verbal polyphony, the logic that was running down the page seemed quite unrelated to the Key’s guiding paraphrase. I didn’t think of the flat map and the globe, which was just as well since the analogy would have entangled me. Maps, for instance a road map, are normally OK over small areas, but the kind of help one was offered with Joyce---or Eliot, or Pound---didn’t fit even patches of detail very well.
15 Soon I was encamped among the happenings in the ‘‘modern’’ angle of the corridor, from which it seemed impossible to see back. Joyce and Pound held transactions with Homer, Eliot with Shakespeare, but the real Homer and Shakespeare seemed out of sight. A friend had said you couldn’t hope to think coherently about the new environment---‘‘You just let it hit you.’’ That was why he stayed out of it. If you didn’t stay out of it, you observed a Two Literatures Policy, one traditional and discussible, one anarchic.
16 Such was my own route to what everyone sooner or later confronts: the generic twentieth-century problem, discontinuity. Have we still lines of communication open with Jefferson, Socrates, Christ? Or have we spot-welded about ourselves a world we can’t think about? Must you just let it hit you?
17 What imaginative act can really unite the airplane and the horse, ‘‘artifice’’ and ‘‘nature’’? A child leafs picture books of horses and lambs while planes from La Guardia roar over her nursery. Her first word is ‘‘air.’’ (She is Buck-
18 WHAT AM I DOING HERE? | 5 minster Fuller’s granddaughter.) Planes before birds, poor child. Is our pity well based?
19 For that matter, is ‘‘nature’’ dead? Many urbanites must drive miles to encounter it. Many never do. Thousands of belle-lettrists will lift up their voices like spring frogs to indict the world of technology, a chromed wasteland, soulless. Other thousands don’t think it dull at all. To the moon! What a challenge! Are they barbarians? Are the others aesthetes? Having it both ways is barely possible; the strain is etched on Walter Cronkite’s face. It’s simpler to opt for your choice of Lord Snow’s Two Cultures. (Yet Snow’s sunderings may be illusory, like Mercator’s oceans. He seems unaware of the Two Literatures, and his own literary habits are Victorian.)
20 Did values break? Did morals? Did a chasm open? Huddled this side of it, are we being paved over? If so, should I be riding a bicycle to symbolize disapproval? Or live in a cabin, eating organic watercress? But there would be no bicycles without carbon steel, and the watercress comes by truck. Take up bead-stringing, the ultimate dropout gesture, and your starter kit will contain a spool of wire drawn from a brass bar in a swift Japanese machine, and brought all the way here by ship and train and diesel. Facing up to such facts at last, you can moan, ‘‘No way,’’ or, oddly enough, take another dropout route to a commune housed in Geodesic Domes.
21 Or stay with your job, and if the written word is your job you have valuable incentives, because language, even Joycean language, seems to want to make sense. The engineer can always disown the past---what did Shakespeare know about carbon steel? The painter, even, can turn naive and say he’s just playing (being Titian was work}. The city planner can plead urgent business (traffic jams
22 won’t wait). But language, in part because it now leads a classroom existence, exacts the effort to make connections. The great moderns had disowned no traditions. They extolled the past they ransacked. Pound venerated Chaucer. What The Cantos had in common with The Canterbury Tales might be the view round that corner. Bucky Fuller might have told me that I was looking for a Coordinate System.
23 In a book I wrote about Pound in 1949 I did manage a couple of intuitive axioms. One was that the same law governs the whole and the parts. If you can understand how a man fits a sentence together, you have a model for his way of building larger units. That was one glimpse of a continuity.
24 My other axiom was that everything functions as the context of everything else. This implied a difficulty I couldn’t solve, since it seemed to leave no secure reference points to start from. I affirmed it anyway, because it let me say what seemed true, that an ambitious project can be sustained without what book-reviewers mean by ‘‘structure’’: a framework of narrative, a framework of logic, something foursquare to which the elements are fitted like clapboards and shingles. I might have adduced geodesics if I’d known about them, but in 1949 only Fuller and a few of his students did. They were playing with the concept at Black Mountain College, likewise unknown, and the Dome patent lay five years in the future.
25 I was discovering how much we talk by unspecified analogy, especially by intuitive analogies with architecture. Buildings, all around us, seem man’s most successful creations---some of them have stood for millennia---and the idiom of architectural success seeps into our minds. (We disregard the failures.) In book-review jargon, for example, a poem may be called a ‘‘little gem,’’ meaning apparently
26 WHAT AM I DOING HERE? | 7 that it has been cut from a rare substance called ‘‘poetry,’’ but a novel or an epic is like a building. It has ‘‘structure,’’ sometimes even ‘‘foundations.’’ The writer designs a ‘‘framework,’’ and also works with ‘‘surfaces,’’ which are less important. It is filled with ‘‘perspectives,’’ emanating from ‘‘points of view.’’ If it really claims attention then it is ‘‘weighty.’’ A critic may talk all day using none of these words and still say little that’s not absolutely controlled by them. They locate the conditioned reflexes by which we value reality.
27 Not just literature, reality; at the very least anything man-made. Could a policy be stated from Washington without the word ‘‘basis’’? Conversely, buildings make moral statements, well understood by bankers. The preferred statements are static, basic, rectilinear. (There was an airy geodesic restaurant in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The owner couldn’t raise money on it till he’d blackened the translucent panels so it looked substantial.) School supervisors talk this language when they ask for ‘‘lesson plans.’’ And beware of ‘‘the superficial,’’ and forget that all that can meet our senses is surface. The laudable is positively dense with virtue.
28 We get our everyday language, hence our criteria, from what we understand of the visible environment, especially from what we understand to be the successful human gestures, the structures that last. But what if we misunderstand those themes? What if we’ve been misreading architecture, misreading the human effort? That was the question that came, subliminally, from Fuller, who continued to be a reiterative bit of environment.
29 Then about 1963 he suddenly invaded the print world. That year I bought his new Ideas and Integrities, ‘‘A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure’’ and his first book in twenty-five years. Concurrently, No More Secondhand God
30 ---poems (poems!)---was published in Illinois, and in the library a new book about him by Robert W. Marks gave the first overview of what he’d been about: the houses, the domes, the car, the mathematics. I tried to have him invited for a lecture, but the conditioned reflex of the rest of the committee was ‘‘domes,’’ which was somehow dismissive. (The consensus was for a real sage like Erich Fromm.) It was late in 1967 before I laid eyes on him, no longer the amiable fireplug of the photographs but a tiny white-haired jaunty man, rather deaf. He was seventy-two.
31 There was something in him unpredicted by his writings. In ten minutes he had explained about Whole Systems, which are always unpredicted by their elements. Within half an hour those substantial buildings by which we gauge achievement had become the traces of a mistaken effort to freeze reality into cubes. Reality flowed (Heraclitus had said so), but flowed through persistent knottings so that one need feel no vertigo. (Geodesics was part of the science of knots.) Pattern persisted. (Homer was such a pattern, as Joyce had divined.) A tree---the Romantic norm---yes, that was real: both while it lasted and before and after it lasted. It was not only a process in time (Yeats’s ‘‘great rooted blossomer’’) but an embodiment of permanent principles that preceded it and survived it. ‘‘Principles do not begin and end.’’ They were ‘‘organic,’’ and yet were an engineer’s principles. Tension webs surrounded incompressible spheroids of water, and as the webs flexed a windstorm didn’t snap the huge weight of those limbs. He swayed and spread his arms and became the tree, talking, talking. (Pound’s earliest poem had begun, ‘‘I stood and was a tree amid the wood . . .’’)
32 All his cascading detail pertained to a simple, liberating theme. Our thoughts, our language are collected from the
33 physical world, from nothing else. But the physical world of Copernicus, of Bohr, of Einstein has barely affected them; we still say ‘‘solid as a rock,’’ we still say ‘‘down to earth.’’ Solidity, solidarity, for Bucky these are sad affairs. ‘‘Solids are the fraternity of the fallen-in-together.’’ So much that is real, and has come from a newer understanding-much technology, much art---affronts the only words we have, and we fuss like the old lady who thought airplanes ‘‘against nature.’’
34 But nature has always contained the airplane’s principles. The Universe has never changed; what is true now was always true; some people, chiefly seafarers, have always acted on certain important truths. Such truths are perfectly accessible. An outfielder running to put his glove where the ball will be has Einstein in his bones if not in his head, and Homer had the feel of molecular structures through building them of language. So there has been no radical break. Certain knowledges have simply become so central we need to stop evading them, so as to get free from not knowing what we are doing. Thus we wage wars to keep things from changing, and yet every war brings about change; despite fearful destruction the standard of living improves, most frequently for the vanquished. Thus we shrink from spending, yet spend, and yet nothing seems spent: men grow wealthier. Thus we know we cannot live without technology, and yet seem to destroy our lives with it. We need to know all the time certain things we know some of the time: things the outfielder knows, things Homer knew. This entails a new model of the physical world, public and clear, for our thoughts to correspond to. Any sensible artifact is part of such a model.
35 This was a new reading of the human story, not disowning nor discrediting what we experience, but rendering it all continuous. (No more time-comers, nor periscopes to see around them.) Technology was no recent affront. It had continued from the day a man first jumped on a fallen tree and discerned leverage. Still earlier, men had devised language. That took at least two men, and gave us ‘‘our first industrial tool,’’ an industrial tool being one a single man can’t devise. (A stone hammer is a craft tool; a carpenter’s hammer---forged alloy steel---is industrial.) The very principle of industrialism is social. But mechanization ---the physical working of pure principle---was older than man by far. ‘‘We are all mechanized.’’ Which of us was not trusting mechanism to convert yesterday’s lunch into hair poking through the scalp? Did we think we were doing that?
3637And Nature? ‘‘Nature is never at a loss, never wondering what to do when you or I leave off.’’ (A coin tossed over his shoulder struck the floor. ‘‘It always does.’’)
38These simplicities of example were Lincolnesque. And Fuller was Lincoln’s countryman in his willingness to absorb any instance however trivial, accept his own egocen- tricity that claimed our attention for the obvious, and recast the obvious into conceptual patterns that penetrated the modern world and did not threaten the ancient. (What can a tossed coin threaten, or a tree?) In his talk all was concurrent: space travel and horsepower and horses: ‘‘ways to valve solar energy into preferred patterns’’---the horse eats oats which eat sun. The jet plane’s kerosene was once sunlight, caught by long-ago plants whose conversion into petroleum would cost us $1 million a gallon. And his domes, his homemade mathematics, his cherished 60-degree coordinate system. The mathematical assertions---Nature does not use pi, always works in whole numbers; the tetrahedron is the primary system---would seem naive but for the fact that the structures which embody them have been patented and have the qualities he claims. They are pack
39aged, in a Fuller discourse, with other structures, metaphysical structures that may prove equally habitable.
40 His talk solved for me, that week, a book called The Pound Era I had been trying to think out for years and was suddenly able to start writing. That was one validation. Since then, on five years’ acquaintance, I have found him continually interesting, without feeling I needed to choose among several ways of being interested. He has true believers, who like to quote the Columbia mathematics professor after a Fuller lecture: ‘‘My only regret is that Euclid and Pythagoras could not have been here.’’ They do their best to turn him into a cult, and don’t like you asking questions. There are partial dissenters, who buy for instance the domes but shy off ‘‘the theory trip.’’ There are the sporadically bedazzled, who love to listen but couldn’t tell you a thing he said. There are vigorous dissenters. (‘‘He’s a dangerous man,’’ said one ecologist---he positively encourages technology.) At the very least Bucky Fuller, his story and his artifacts, are as remarkable a piece of Americana as our rich century affords.
41 I don’t attempt a ‘‘life.’’ The documents are so copious the biographer will be years absorbing them. I’ll try to give a sense of the man his own books may obscure---that will include some hints at his limitations---and a guide to the system of coherencies he’s given us for our space-age navigating.
42 A guide, not an outline. His dynamisms don’t submit to outline. ‘‘People expect one-picture answers,’’ he says, implying that they should think of cinema sequences. There’s no more a definitive arrangement than there was for the parts of the Dymaxion Map I bought at Mac’s. That map, like his lectures, was meant to correct a misleading view of the world. Yet one of its arrangements can look like Mercator’s---which was true enough to sail by, after all--- and one of the ways I could arrange this book would make Fuller’s talk seem systematic. I could also make it look like a string of platitudes, or like a set of notions never entertained before, or like a delirium. I won’t do any of those things. It’s a poet’s job he does, clarifying the world. That’s the emphasis I understand best. Should we muff our part of the world’s work irretrievably---a possibility he does not ignore, though his optimism is famous---then it will have been Fuller’s achievement anyhow to show a vision of what might have been. Pythagoras, long ago, glimpsed what might have been, a harmonious civic and intellectual sanity. That vision, what survives of it, no one thinks mistaken, though Greece itself perished.