Introduction
3THERE IS no more endearing fact about that remarkable man Bucky Fuller than his liking for this book—were he a normal celebrity he’d loathe it—and no more engaging feature of the book than its record of Bucky’s dudgeon when a detail displeased him. Naturally details displeased him. Things that don’t get told in public in a man’s lifetime, unless sometimes vengefully, are divulged with a graceful candor, and not only that, they are shown to the subject for comment and clarification. It’s as if we had Johnson’s comments on a portion of Boswell’s Life. Or no, it’s not; Johnson would have roared, ‘‘No, Sir, you are a blockheaded puppy and there’s an end on’t,’’ whereas Fuller somewhat frostily offers to clarify what he takes to be misunderstanding attributable to haste. He is, too, right up to his wife Anne’s stature, near enough anyway that it’s erroneous to describe her as ‘‘tall,’’ and besides she wears high heels. He is not an idle yachtsman, which the author never said he was, but some people may, think it when they see the word ‘‘yacht,’’ and what’s more he can reduce time spent on the good ship Intuition to a mere sliver of the time he spends working. As for the interpolation on page 104, linking as it does intellectual and vesical pressure, it amounts to a hydraulic theory of genius, worthy of The Tale of a Tub save that it’s advanced not Swift-like, slantwise, but with an Emerson’s whole-souled fervor (though fancy a comparable avowal from Emerson!).
4 Emerson’s is the name to invoke. Fuller’s great-aunt was Emerson’s friend, the redoubtable Margaret Fuller, whose chair he enshrines in his Philadelphia apartment, to be sat in for special bouts of concentration. Like Emerson, he keeps his antennae poked into the cosmos, where they never cease to intercept orderly vibrations to which uninstrumented mortals are deaf. Like Emerson, he expects the most of all of us; specifically he expects that we will want to concentrate and go on concentrating, in fact pay sustained attention for hours on end. And he posits, like Emerson, that what we deserve from a sage is austere reassurance, of transmundane—not to say extragalactic—origin. And they both assert faith in technology, which they see as patterned human ingenuity, part of the cosmos because humans are part of it.
5 Fuller’s vehicle, though, is idiosyncratic mathematics, whereas Emerson’s was idiosyncratic theology. Any graduate of the Harvard Divinity School could have told you Emerson wasn’t a real theologian, which is just what they’ll tell you at the Institute for Advanced Study if you ask about Fuller’s math. Theology, though, is a tractable medium for the sage, mathematics (despite the example of Pythagoras) less so. Emerson’s public read sermons more readily than Fuller’s reads the Clerk Maxwell equations. Not only that, a long-time osmosis between linguistic domains has left puddles of soul-talk lying everywhere for nonspecialists to dip into. ‘‘Soul’’ is a word you can use more freely than ‘‘tetrahedron’’ despite the fact that few readers will understand ‘‘soul’’ as did Tillich, let alone Thomas Aquinas, and an audience that heard Emerson say ‘‘oversoul’’ was halfway to comprehension before the explanations even started. On the other hand, when Fuller tells us that the minimum system, including the minimum thought, is tetrahedral, he’s accomplished nothing until he also explains what a tetrahedron is.
6 So he has had intuitive recourse to the central tradition of American letters, the tradition of the how-to manual. This is our great indigenous form. From Walden or Life in the Woods (how to build a cabin, know a pond) and Moby Dick (how to hunt whales) through The sun also rises (how to know Paris, catch fish, fight bulls) to The waste land (how to understand the masterpieces) and Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: an inquiry into values (how to meditate on instruction books), the instruction book has been the armature on which American writers have clapped their philosophic clay. Accordingly, Fuller’s ‘‘operational mathematics’’ teaches us to make the fundamental discoveries for ourselves: tying knots, cutting out circles, assembling the three-great-circle octahedron, feeling a tensegrity flex beneath our touch. So much is the reader meant to collaborate, that the famous Möbius-strip marathon Fuller sentences become occasions for collaboration too, grotesque till we cruise vigilantly through them, nimble at the brakes, dipping our headlights at junctions, alert, as wonders flash by, to the glimpsed panorama where range after range of ordered terrain unfolds.
7 Nor was Fuller’s ego affronted by the fact that to get his Sacred Book written might require a collaborator too. ‘‘Bucky’s Principia,’’ remarked one reader, exactly midway between amusement and awe. Newton’s Principia was one jealous man’s grudgingly disclosed system, his most intense concern with receiving credit for his discoveries, not with imparting them. Though Fuller, too, despite some disingenuous candor, accords a high priority to what he calls ‘‘accreditation,’’ he is also a compulsive discloser who feasts on another person’s signs of comprehension. Deprived of that, he starts talking to himself and soon gets distracted. There was no way he’d write a monstrous big book without another person, so to speak, in the room, and Synergetics seems never to have been envisaged except as a collaboration. But various collaborators whose roles hadn’t been well-defined were quickly chewed up, and it looked as if the book wouldn’t get done in Bucky’s lifetime until Ed Applewhite entered the project, and Bucky acquired a co-worker in many ways as remarkable as himself.
8 The reader of Cosmic Fishing will soon guess that the experience Ed Applewhite brought to the collaboration was gathered in intelligence work, where it is elementary prudence not to go to another man’s island without your own boat. The one time he slipped up, the island was literal, Bear Island off the Maine coast. But to metaphorical islands he came scrupulously prepared, and Fuller, a long-time inadvertent people-eater, never got him cornered. Another intelligence maxim is that you can’t gather too much data, and another is that you’re most effective sitting still, keeping cool, letting your opposite number make the moves. A temperament that found such precepts congenial was just right for working with Bucky, who needed to write every word of the book himself—if he hadn’t it’d be a pointless paste-up, so personal is his vision—but also needed to have some consistency forced upon his tendency to leave last night’s brainstorm incompatible with last year’s recycled lecture. So Applewhite patiently gathered and cross-indexed 22,000 extracts of Fullerian dicta on every conceivable topic—and many inconceivable—out of which he could usually, as he puts it, ‘‘confront Bucky with himself.’’ Fuller, who generates utterance at the rate of 7,000 words per hour and has been doing it much of most days for the past half-century, could thus be contained at will in a kind of mirror-house, and persuaded either that he’d already said today’s say a good deal better, or that on the topic of the moment he generally said something quite different. Such confrontations never stopped him and weren’t meant to: in a mood somewhere between exasperation and ecstasy he would summon his full powers to trample contradictions into an ultimate synthesis, thus achieving some of the big book’s most dazzling passages.
9 With the undercover man’s predilection for invisibility, Applewhite was also quite willing to let Bucky mistake him, much of the time, for a typist, an ideal cover since he does type fast and accurately and the book had to be typed anyway by someone who could read not only the author’s scrawl, even when it happened to be on a paper napkin, but also his multicolored marginalia and the marginalia to the marginalia, invariably crowded onto the one sheet however much the expansions might outnumber the original words because Fuller finds the pressure of limits stimulating (see again page 104).
10 He is also stimulated by clean print on a clean page, and a secret reason for Applewhite’s care to keep the triple-spaced foolscap drafts immaculate was to tempt Bucky into messing them up. This was partly a way of getting him to clarify the over-compressed or the hopelessly obscure and partly a quixotic effort to absorb as much of his revisionist fervor as possible before printer’s proof offered him more expensive temptations. The latter effort, to no one’s surprise, failed miserably, and after the whole book had been typeset once it had to be reset from beginning to end at the author’s expense, the work of union operators at their multi-million-dollar machinery having been treated as just one more interim draft.
11 During most of the Synergetics period Applewhite wore a moustache. Subsequently, he confused acquaintances by doffing it, and set a bland new face away from tandem-work with Bucky toward original composition. Cosmic Fishing makes manifest what correspondents have long guessed, that Ed Applewhite is a born writer, was in fact a writer all along though he pretended to be a lot of other things. In finally blowing his cover he has given us a privileged, endearing look at one of our natural resources and written the unique inside narrative of how a strange world of words was conquered. If only Herman Melville had had such an aide!
12 Hugh Kenner