11 A Game of Cosmic Solitaire

2ONCE Synergetics was published, Fuller’s feelings about it were ambivalent. Relief and fulfillment were diluted by a sense of loss that the bird had flown the coop. He had completed his ultimate artifact in the service of humanity, but his temperament was too restless to admit emeritus satisfactions.

3 Shortly after he had rewritten the last of the galleys, he telephoned me from La Jolla, where he was in a seminar at the Salk Institute, to express an unfamiliar anxiety. He said that for the first time he felt disoriented. Consummation was apparently less congenial than the habitual compulsive race with destiny—to get it all on paper before he died. What would happen, now that it was all down on paper? He was, of course, enormously gratified at seeing all of his formulas, tables, drawings, and models in print, but nothing would take the place of his psychological imperative to recapitulate the geometric concepts from the beginning, the graphic process of generating systemic conceptuality out of stark space-nothingness. Happily, the period when the first appearance of the book constrained him in these tendencies was very short-lived.

4 For me, the chief satisfaction of the book’s publication was at last being able to share the whole elaborate design with others—though at the price of having robbed Fuller perhaps of a certain privacy. His geometry remained difficult, esoteric—even hermetic—but it was no longer inaccessible, no longer embedded in untranscribed tapes and scrawls on the backs of envelopes. I had felt that up until this time artists and scientists could be excused for not listening to Fuller; now if they chose to ignore him, it would be on their conscience, not his. Nor mine.

5 The reaction of many first readers was one of incredulity that Fuller’s imagination could function in such total oblivion of the scientific conventions and the cultural traditions of Western civilization. His philosophy was homemade, do-it-yourself, ab initio—as if Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle had never existed. It seemed barely possible that Fuller could start from scratch and still tackle the perennial philosophical paradoxes: how to differentiate and relate

the ideal and the physically realized;
the container and the contained;
the one and the many;
the observer and the observed;
the human microcosm and the universal macrocosm.

6 If Fuller ever made use of what the greatest minds had had to say on these subjects, no one ever caught him peeking at their texts. What they had pondered and taught for centuries had become an intrinsic part of our heritage. But not for Fuller; it was not that he was unwilling to bestow them a low bow or even a slight nod, it was just that he felt he had to start from scratch—as he presumed they had done. Had he unlearned what they had taught? Or simply never listened to begin with?

7
8RBF: I don’t want any credit for having such wisdom as the ancient philosophers. I was just lucky enough to have been so busy in my youth as an accountant and as a mechanic, never to have learned about them.

9When I entered Harvard, I had all A’s in mathematics and I took some more advanced math, so I was able to catch on to the whole idea of geometric proofs. But I had the good luck to be insulated from all philosophy and such formal knowledge. They didn’t tell you anything about Plato at Milton Academy. The nearest we got was the Platonic solids in geometry.

10I knew Shakespeare, and the Faerie Queen, and Thackeray and all about the kings in history: who beheaded who and who put someone in a tower. I had the battle stuff okay…But all I knew about the Greeks was what my mother had taught me, like the Spartan boy who brought in the fox to eat all his guts.

11 How had he come to focus on the same antique issues if he was so unfamiliar with their writings? His concerns were simply the coincidental results of his synergetic strategies, of commencing with wholes—not parts, not anyone else’s building blocks. Fuller was not interested in learning about the great absolutes as derived from what the great minds before him had to say. He is not anti-cultural; he just regards being non-cultural as itself the highest of disciplines.

12
13RBF: Culture means just getting things stewed up…like growing algae or microbial broth in the laboratory, keeping the light out.

14Culture is purposeless to-ing and fro-ing, back-burner steering. It is moody drifts, flotsam and jetsam. Culture is flotsam saying to the jetsam: I think we ought to have a law against any waves.

15 So he had to do it all for himself. He neither affirms nor rejects Plato’s allegory of the Cave; he merely submits the tetrahedron as the sole and proper path for its exit—for escape from nonconceptuality to the first stepping stone of Scenario Universe. And he observes the Platonic obligation to return to the darkness of the Cave to describe to the bound prisoners the dazzling sunlit truth of geometric reality.

16 For me, the book is as much of an enigma as it ever was. I know that when you create a new philosophical universe—in your own terms and with your own rules of play—the resulting edifice may be logically irrefutable, but not necessarily deserving of scrutiny. But I have no doubts that Fuller’s scheme merits the most minute examination. (The substance of the text is his, but certainly it was not my practice to try to persuade him to popularize or sugar-coat the language. My rule was to omit no thorny detail that might conceivably trigger the imagination of any future student raveling his way through the labyrinth of mathematical intricacies.) Only by completely abandoning the static frame of reference of conventional measurement could Fuller devise his new starting point for ‘‘getting nature in a corner’’—without blackboard, paper, or two lines crossing. His ambitious goal of integrating all the disciplines—all of them from sociology and psychology to electromagnetics and crystallography—in one grand geometric vision will continue to outrage, stimulate, and ultimately instruct, many generations to come.

17
18RBF: You say it was my ambition to integrate the disciplines in one grand system. I did not have any ambition about it. I simply assumed that the operation of Universe is integrated and you can’t understand it by isolating any of it or taking it apart.

19 With its finite discontinuities, its three-way great circle grid, its 60-degree coordination, and its tetrahedral matrix, synergetics mathematics suggests many analogies and correspondences to recent observations in the physical sciences. Viral structures reveal themselves as geodesic. Geological studies in plate tectonics invite polyhedral analysis. Ancient monuments enshrine ratios from closest-sphere-packing hierarchies. Such vistas are always tantalizing, and sometimes exhilarating. Even in the absence of such lofty confirmation, Fuller’s geometry remains a towering intellectual achievement.

20 As any devotee of Fuller’s lectures knows, the great spiritual climacteric of his life was his crisis of 1927 when he was living in Chicago at a level of bare subsistence, when he resolved not to utter a single word until he could define it to his complete satisfaction. The result was many months when he did not speak at all. His speech today is now purged of many words from his earlier vocabulary—our common social idiom—which did not survive the testing of that period. This rendezvous with first principles and retreat into silence was an episode of intense trial, withdrawal, and torment. His listeners are vicariously compelled to share the lonely experience of his self-examination, a metaphor for the source of his commitment to humanity. Somewhere in the course of this transcendent spiritual crisis it is certain that Fuller visited a past or future landscape of astronomically remote philosophic distance.

21 It has always been my suspicion that some part of him remains in that alien country of his self-discovery, that he has never fully returned. During the long months of silence, his continuity of mundane physical existence was so tenuous that he seems barely to have survived the re-entry to fulfill his allotted life span on earth. This alien passage is the source of his loneliness and of his fractured sense of identity. (In addition to his office and home telephone numbers Fuller has always kept—in Carbondale or in Philadelphia—an unlisted telephone number. Conversely, over these same decades he has maintained an overt listing in New York’s Manhattan telephone directory linked to an answering service in Flushing. He is obsessed with both self-isolation and the need to leave out the latchstring for some wayward stranger.) Here is a man who invariably shares with his lecture audiences the disturbing thought that no man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went earlier to sleep. He still yearns to reduce the sense of loss and isolation. This is why he responds so to the innocence of children. This is why he feels so at home in metaphysical companionship with the yogi.¹ Being alone was the original price; loved, he says, but alone. Fuller has to keep constantly reminding himself that he has completed the journey back to earth from the intellectual orbit; unlike other mortals who have ventured less far, he has to keep pinching himself for reassurance that he has returned to, and still inhabits, the familiar physical persona. (When I asked Bucky what it was like to come back to earth, he confirmed my description and confided to me that all the good part of him—‘‘all that my mother would like’’—came back from orbit and only the bad part was left behind.)

23 Here was a bourn from which not only had traveler returned, but returned with a kind of cosmic zip code by which he could continue to receive messages. Here, at least, was a way of accounting for a recurring phenomenon in the course of writing Synergetics, when Bucky would say that he felt as if he were an agent for some transcendent or supernatural source of inspiration, as if he were merely an interceptor or transceiver of messages originating elsewhere. It was not like a trance or automatic writing, but there were many occasions when he could not provide a rational accounting for what he had just written or said—nor did he even pretend to recognize its full significance. The thought had its own integrity independent of the thinker, and we respected it accordingly. ‘‘The thought,’’ he says, ‘‘does not belong to you.’’

24 Of course, Fuller has always maintained that he does not invent his thoughts, that he merely separates out some local patterns from a confusing whole—confusing just meaning ‘‘untuned’’ or unfused. In his world, thoughts are a priori, having a reality independent of, and antecedent to, the thinker; the individual thinker becomes merely their vessel. He has always suggested that our intuitive thoughts may be simply remote cosmic transmissions. This is how he can play his game of solitaire without the hint of arrogance. Solitaire is a game that anyone can play; that no one else appears to have played this particular kind of game is regrettable, but he is sure others will learn.

25 Twenty-three years after the Chicago crisis of 1927, Fuller was addressing a group of design students in Raleigh, North Carolina, and told them

26
27Energetic geometry is a game of solitaire I started playing in 1917. …I assume that what I began to discover in the game was territory that had been well covered by students long ago. In some instances that would seem to be the case. In other instances it would seem that we have rediscovered arrangements of phenomena that, if they have been known to man, have long since been forgotten.

28I must say that when you play a game like this you get a strange feeling when you come into view of arrangements of components of your energetic Universe with which you are not at all familiar and which you are quite sure men have not seen recently. Yet you have the astounding feeling that someone was here only seven thousand years ago, or something like that. You get the feeling of a close kinship to the intellectual speculation of all time. You sometimes feel that this time you can make it stick.

29 When Fuller first saw the great hexagonal court in the ancient ruins of Baalbek, he said, ‘‘The Phoenicians knew my principles.’’ Broadening the theme he wrote in Intuition (1972).

30
31Certain it is on my own part
That I have made several mathematical discoveries
Of a fundamental unexpected and unpublished nature.
As I realized my discovery
I always have had
The same strange sensation
That this newly realized conception
Previously unknown to terrestrial humans,
Had been known
To the human mind
Sometime vastly long ago.

32 Thus his mathematical discoveries may have been known since the distant past, but not necessarily on earth. He dismisses the conventional accounts of the history of scientific discoveries on the grounds that they are too limited to the narrow and peculiar circumstances of Western civilization. All of the knowledge in the universe may have been known to various people at various other times. ‘‘However distant or remote any information signal is, it has to just go on forever unless it is intercepted. I look upon myself as an agent,’’ but, he adds significantly, ‘‘all of us are.’’

33
34RBF: The information in Universe has always been there. The total information is always there, but it has been deployed into generalized-principle increments of cosmic tunability.

35The information signals are forever bouncing electromagnetically about the Universe, every so often impinging on celestial entities and being either tunably received or bounced off to travel elsewhere.

36If we fail to catch a cosmic fish it may be a trillion years before the opportunity comes again. It will come…but it may not be in this Galaxy. Sumtotally, all the fish will always eventually be caught and rebroadcast, but not all at the same rebroadcasting stations.