1 Argument of the Book
2ON MONDAY, 20 October 1969, I was sitting at Buckminster Fuller’s desk in his second-floor office (conveniently above a travel agency) in Carbondale, Illinois, when a college girl who helped his secretary with typing brought in a stack of letters for him to sign when he came to the office. She had spent much of the night retyping the final clean versions which he had rewritten many times since first dictating them. Some were in the fifth or sixth draft, the earlier versions covered with elaborate handwritten additions, outlined as balloons or wedges in the margin, inked sausages running down to the bottom and up to the top again. There are very few scratch-outs: no canceling of first thoughts, just additions of new thoughts. Most of the write-ins are expanding modifiers, refined nuances of meaning or apposition. The sentences grow organically as Fuller crowds on more sail. Dependent clauses overflow into the margins and seep down the stairs again like the flood on the Sorcerer’s Apprentice—all without violence to the original syntax, which survives intact despite the burden of additional compounds and complexes.
3 What Fuller loved best as Distinguished University Professor at Southern Illinois University was lecturing to large and youthful audiences: this was his preferred method of teaching. The profuse marginal outbursts of Fuller’s letters and manuscript pages are the graphic counterparts of his spontaneous thinking-out-loud manner of lecturing, except that the written page affords a literal record of his actual thought processes. His style is peculiar because, while the pages are flat, his thinking is—as he says—omnidirectional, like blowing up a balloon.
4 The typist feels put upon; she tells me, ‘‘Every time I get them all neat, Bucky messes them up again. Why can’t he say it all the first time? But I’ve got it licked now. I’ve typed these almost to the edge of the paper and he won’t have any room. That ought to fix him.’’
5 Of course it didn’t; he just got a finer pen. I knew it was a lost cause. The margins were often the best part, the icing on the cake.
6 No one in the office hesitated to call him Bucky, but I suppose few would have had the temerity to sit at his desk and read through his mail. I had known him since I was fifteen—his first teenage disciple. My family called me ‘‘Sonny’’ and that’s what he and his family call me, too. Whenever I have visited him over the years, he has shared with me his wonderfully wide-ranging correspondence, everything from girlish fan letters on pastel writing paper to cranks, mendicants, Montessori teachers, Jesuits, and papers from Nobel medalists. So I sat at his desk reading his mail and waiting to talk to him about writing Synergetics, a project which, as it turned out, was to become the exclusive preoccupation of the next five years of my life.
7 The enigma of this man first emerges when people ask: Who is Buckminster Fuller? They may know that he has written a dozen books—or even that he has the longest entry in Who’s Who. But what is it that he does? What does he profess? What does he do for a living? Is he an architect or an inventor? A teacher or a poet? Engineer or artist? The strategy of his life and his creative energies embrace all these fields and many more. He confounds us at the outset by refusing to be labeled, by affronting our natural propensity for placing him in a familiar pigeonhole. How can we deal with a man who evades every attempt to stamp him with a single tag ending in an ist or an er or an or?
8 If you ask him, he will explain that he is really a comprehensivist. (He likes to use terms that defy quick reflex and dismissal.) His most certain identity—and his most beguiling self-description—is that he is a ‘‘terrific bundle of experience.’’ It is no use asking whether he is a tinker, tailor, merchant, or sailor; if we insist on a category, he will force us to create a new one—and we would be hard put to find a single contemporary to share the label with him. We end up exposing our predilection for what he calls ‘‘categoryitis.’’ Perhaps this was what he had in mind all along; like all good teachers he has a flair for gently letting us know when we have asked the wrong question.
9 Fuller has always been controversial. Shortly after World War II, at a meeting of the editorial board of the American Scholar (the journal of Phi Beta Kappa), the astronomer Harlow Shapley, proposed that they invite Fuller to write an article for them. Shapley had said, ‘‘I suppose Bucky’s the brightest man alive.’’ According to the presiding editor, Hiram Hadyn, who is our authority for what occurred,1 the proposal was defeated in a chorus of protests in which Fuller was dismissed as a ‘‘crackpot’’ and ‘‘eccentric.’’ Shapley said so were Jesus, Galileo, and Einstein, but the rejoinder was unavailing until two decades later when the American Scholar got around to printing Fuller at some length. For me, the dilemma of placing Fuller in the proper niche, of establishing his role in the world, was a question of little moment. (Even had I the qualifications or urge to serve as his apologist, he would disdain the function.) What was it then that brought me to Carbondale on that October morning in 1969 to embark on a five-year commitment to help him write a single book? …a project of intimate collaboration, symbiotic interdependence, fine-tuned articulation between the two of us, and painstaking labor. I think the answer can be put in one word: curiosity.
11 All my adult life I had been—as in fact I remain—insatiably curious about a single aspect of Fuller’s work: his philosophical geometry or his geometrical philosophy—you could describe it either way. Of course, he does not use the word philosophy, because that invokes again the pernicious pigeonhole notion of an academic specialty, an arcane field of study with special rites of admission, the misleading assumption of mental compartments. Instead of philosopher, he says ‘‘thinker.’’ He feels that a Department of Philosophy is a particular absurdity because it presumes to preside over a faculty to which every man has innate access without benefit of academic license. Thus the subtitle of his eventual book became ‘‘The Geometry of Thinking,’’ expressing the unconventional—even outrageous—proposition that our thoughts have shape.
12 Cartoonists often draw thoughts as clouds or balloons or even light bulbs, with a curving line to the thinker’s skull. But for Fuller, the thinking process is not a matter of putting anything into the brain or taking anything out; he defines thinking as the dismissal of irrelevancies, as the definition of relationships—relationships that are inevitably geometrical, and just as inevitably tetrahedral. (The familiar Egyptian pyramid has a square base; a tetrahedron may be thought of as a pyramid with a triangular base.) It is his original conviction that thoughts not only may have shape, but that they must have shape. The essence of Fuller’s synergetic geometry is to advance a single model to describe the shape of the physical universe, the shape of energy’s behavior, as well as the shape of metaphysical universe, which is the shape of our thinking. He had proposed all his life to write a book attempting to describe all physical and metaphysical experience in terms of the tetrahedron. What I proposed was to help him complete this task and to discover whether I would become a convert in the process. If the notion of measuring all experience in terms of tetrahedra seems unduly perverse and abstract, it is really no more so than our familiar and unquestioned employment of the cube for the same purpose.
13 For two thousand years of Western civilization and for all the achievements of modern science, the cube has served as the basic model of geometric and volumetric measurement. The cube has come in very handy as the basis of the metric system. The three XYZ coordinates—the height, length, and width of conventional three-dimensional measurement—are part of our unconscious cultural heritage, and we tend to identify reality with this intrinsic cubical way of describing the physical world. Centimeters, grams, and seconds (the CGS system) are accounted in linear or square or cubic modules, and the rules all work with sufficiently exquisite accuracy for man to have reached the moon and returned.
14 Why then isn’t Fuller satisfied with the metric system in the face of its towering pragmatic accomplishments? He concedes that the square and the cube do work in their awkward way, but he argues that their adoption as modules was misguided and erroneous because they have nothing to do with nature’s own coordinates. Height, length, and width simply do not exist for him independent of the observer. Thus the observer always inadvertently provides the fourth (or tetrahedral!) point of reference. In his synergetics, height, length, and width exist only as aspects of polyhedra.
15 With the cube and the square the ancient Greek mathematicians entered the world of nature by the wrong door, eschewing the more elegant triangle and tetrahedron which were so easily available and have been so ignored.
16 Fuller regards the XYZ-CGS-metric coordinates as the accidental result of man’s choosing the wrong tools for calculation, spawning irreducible fractions and irrational numbers like pi—with unresolved odd numbers to the right of the decimal point. The advent of the computer has meant that the irrational factors are much more easily dealt with, but in so doing the computer further obscures recognition of the XYZ system as an aberration of man and not as a reflection of nature’s own most economical coordination, which is in triangles and tetrahedra rather than squares or cubes.
17 Though the substitution of the tetrahedron for the cube epitomizes Fuller’s major claim in his life’s work as a philosopher and mathematician, he had never formally published the entire scheme of his argument for academic and public scrutiny. The landscape of his writing was littered with landmines in which he had encapsulated only obscure clues to his geometrical formulations. He had produced many artifacts, but few handbooks. His triangular and great-circle tactics were incorporated in his geodesic domes. His tensional integrity structures—what he calls ‘‘tensegrities’’—forsake the compressional bonds of conventional engineering. His many patents in these fields were manifests of his original intellectual strategies. (His philosophy was never a rationale for the domes, rather the domes were an attempt to explain his philosophy.) But nowhere was there a systematic and exhaustive exposition of his claim to have discovered no less than the coordinate system of nature.
18 Fuller claims not only to have discovered nature’s coordinate system—to which all history up to now has been blind—but to have revealed how Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics can be demonstrated to popular understanding in simple geometrical models. In his system, the mysterious fourth dimension is no longer relegated to the unseen manipulations of abstract mathematics; the fourth dimension became visible (to him, if not to me) in his topological accounting. With him, geometry had become polemical. The physical universe is composed of matter and energy. His new models promised to make it possible to observe and measure the forms and energetic behaviors of the universe without pi, fractions, or irrational constants. Here was an approach quite unlike that found in all the textbooks and conventions of Western scientific teaching. A claim at once so naive and arrogant boggles the mind. If Fuller is right, can everyone else be wrong? Is this not the classic description of paranoia? Or could it be rational after all. Or self-demonstrably omnirational, as he would say.
19 When I left my home in Washington, D.C., to visit the Fullers in Carbondale, my thoughts were full of what I would do if I decided to retire at age 50 on the completion of 25 years of government service, mostly in intelligence work in Washington and abroad.
20 My musty college yearbook records my apparent intention of going into the advertising business after graduation. But World War II intervened, and I never got to wear the gray flannel suit—just five years in navy-blue serge picking up lint. After the war I went to Washington and joined a small and obscure organization then called the Central Intelligence Group. I was aware of alternate and perhaps easier ways of earning a living, but I was insatiably curious about the world abroad, and what really won me over was that I couldn’t bear for anyone to have any secrets I didn’t know about.
21 I was less committed than most of my generation to the foreign policy of the cold war, as I regarded anti-communism per se as an insufficient strategic program. In Washington, then, this was almost like being a skeptic among Jesuits. My sense of detachment was reinforced by a not-generally-shared perception that many of the functions of sovereignty were on the verge of obsolescence. It was happily too late to re-Balkanize the world for anyone’s game of nations. As it turned out, my sustained curiosity was adequate compensation for what I might have lacked in political fervor. I have no regrets. Our military budgets were to continue at grossly overblown levels, and I felt it reasonable to spend at least a fraction of a percent of those billions in keeping an eye on what the other side was up to.
22 Some secrets are kept merely because their revelation would be embarrassing, or disappointing, or both. Most of the secret projects in which I was involved were intrinsically interesting. There must be few people who had more secret clearances than I accumulated in a varied career. When I was detailed as intelligence assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, I ultimately got access to just about everything in the book, including the ‘ghastly particulars of our own order of battle. The clearances often had meaningless names, striving for, and achieving, banality; others verged on the poetic; my favorite was called Cosmic. I did not jade easily; at least it was a long time in coming.
23 I had raised a family in Germany, Lebanon, and Washington and had approached the limits of a profession that no longer afforded the charms it held out to me as a young man. I wondered if I should now at last embark on the new adventure of working with Bucky in a way that I could never have afforded to do while honoring the obligations to family and the conventions of earning a living in the real world of politics and government.
24 I was not sure. I knew that any day spent with Bucky was always full of surprises and excitement and great intellectual stimulation and pleasure in the poetry of his communication. But the two of us were so very different: he had at great cost totally freed himself of all the conventional cultural attitudes of which I was such a happy prisoner by both education and temperament.
25 Fuller claimed people did not understand science because science—since the advent of thermodynamics—no longer used models and because the original Greek mathematicians had made the mistake of opening the wrong door into physical reality. Well, I didn’t understand science and I didn’t understand Fuller either. But I had known him long enough and intimately enough to be certain that no man could be more earnest, more devoted, more impassioned with his absolute conviction that he had made geometrical discoveries of unparalleled significance. In fact, it was in the nature of his discoveries to dismiss parallels altogether.
26 Our familiar three-dimensional reality is figured in parallels and perpendiculars, the XYZ coordinates. But Fuller always puts ‘‘three-dimensional’’ in quotation marks, because he says that what we really mean by physical reality is four-dimensional. He dismisses all the parallels and perpendiculars of conventional measurement as just a squinty-eyed, special-case, funny, Greek way of looking at the world. He says the trouble was all compounded when people tried to model dimensions exclusively with perpendiculars. Three dimensions can be modeled with perpendiculars in the cube. Four dimensions can be modeled with equiangularity in the tetrahedron. What the three axes of the cube do for three dimensions, the four axes of the tetrahedron do for four dimensions. The tetrahedron provides for the convergence and divergence of four centrally-coordinate planes. He says it is erroneous to describe time as the fourth dimension (which I had never really understood); he says that all dimensions require time. This was not at all clear to me.
27 I was intrigued at exploring whether Fuller’s geometry could make sense to me; he claims that it can be easily understood by any normal child of nine. (Part of his point here is that it is even easier to understand his ‘‘natural’’ coordination if you don’t have to unlearn the arbitrary systems now taught in our schools.) If I could master his mathematics—or synergetics, as he calls it—I might perhaps go on to make some sense of modern science in the process. My zeal was tempered only by skepticism. In the last analysis, I think what I really found intolerable was the notion that Fuller could assert such sweeping philosophical claims while having only found time to back them up in piecemeal and cryptic expositions. To me, this was the essence of the challenge. Was there a way he could lay it all out from scratch in a way that even I would understand it?
28 Only a few seconds after Fuller had got to the office his devoted secretary, Naomi Wallace, had brought a cup of steaming tea to his desk. He was wearing his customary plain, gray-oxford suit that barely contained the bundle of physical energy in his stocky frame. Even at his desk he talked with his whole body, his elbows and fingers dancing a counterpoint to the torrent of commands and questions with which he was starting the day. Wasn’t I thrilled by the excitement of the past days’ mail? People seemed to be really coming into phase with him in their letters. He seemed to be as keyed up and dependent on this constant stream of written communications as any actor is dependent on response from an audience. As he questioned me about myself and my family, his incredibly soft eyes would fix themselves on me through the thick lenses of his glasses. The temples were secured by an elastic band in the back of the head. His large head, barely fringed with a neat, white stubble, is prominent and arresting, conveying at once a sense of great gentleness and great strength, childlike and patriarchal, cherubic and ancient of days. The pupils are enormous gray sea anemones; you can’t begin to gauge their depth. His speech is ebullient, utterly spontaneous, and devoid of cliche—except for frequent ‘‘darlings’’ and ‘‘for heaven sakes.’’ He talks with total focus and concentration on the listeners at hand, modifying his discourse as he intuits their response, drawing on tireless reserves of psychic energy.
29 He was in his office only a few days of every month and the number of projects competing for his attention ran into the dozens. Including part-time student volunteers, there were about 30 people working on his staff. As Bucky and I talked, there was a constant stream of young people coming and going in what the uninitiated might have regarded as interruptions. His office door was always open and there was always some delegation or another waiting for their turn in his presence. Michael was in charge of the research files and craved 15 minutes to brief Bucky on some exciting new development in physics or chemistry. Tom was waiting to get approval of a new agreement on the S.I.U. (Southern Illinois University) Library’s custody of Fuller’s voluminous archives. Shoji Sadao was Fuller’s architectural partner with offices in Boston; he was calling that morning with questions about a Fuller dome to be erected at the S.I.U. Edwardsville campus. Dale needs guidance about map sales and new reprints of Fuller’s speeches. Don wants Bucky to address a national conference on nutrition in Washington the next month. Herbert calls about scheduling a marathon filming of a World Game Workshop in the New York Studio School. Naomi wants to know when Bucky can attend board meetings at Temcor in Los Angeles and Bangor Punta in New York. A half a dozen of us would tag along to the Little Brown Jug for an early lunch after which Bucky was scheduled to talk (for hours) to Perk’s design class.
30 At the end of the day, Bucky and I drove the few blocks from his office to his geodesic dome house on South Forest Street for dinner with Anne. The house was a microcosm of Fuller’s universe; spherically coordinate, uncompromisingly simple in design, and at home in its environment. Its scale and weathered-wood framing were quite in harmony with the conventional houses with front porches and side yards that composed the rest of the elmshaded neighborhood. As you enter the house the first impression is the absence of the familiar four-square cubical framework of rectangular floors and straight walls. The effect is totally disorienting to our reflexive assumption that rooms should be shaped more or less like shoe boxes. The result is that Fuller as an architect has created an artifact—like all of his inventions from the Dymaxion car to the vast dome at Montreal’s Expo ‘67, an artifact intended to instruct. You cannot enter the house on South Forest without receiving a lesson on how we might organize our environment with spherical and hexagonal economies simply not available in a structure where all the rooms have to be cubes. The dome leads our eye in, out, and around—not up and down like the box.
31 The interior walls of the house are a complex of prisms in which the living room shares a high dome with a curved balcony containing a library. Wide glass doors open on a hedged backyard. The abstract unfamiliarity of the design is tempered by the coziness and comfort of the family’s furnishings: a ladder-back chair from Bucky’s great-aunt Margaret Fuller, big blue antique China dogs from Anne’s grandfather, a new telescope, an old barometer, a modern metal network sculpture by Ruth Asawa, an old African carved stool, a Japanese electric clock with an airplane on the sweep second hand—here is a very American blend of the innovative and the traditional, modern technology and fine old craftsmanship, a fitting home for the intermittent residence of a man who says that in this jet-age century for the first time everyone’s backyard has become the whole earth.
32 I first met Bucky and his wife Anne Hewlett Fuller after my sister married a cousin of hers—it was sheer happenstance. Anne is a tall, beautiful woman of regal bearing and always impeccably tailored.2
3435RBF: That Anne gives the impression of being tall is really a great victory for her. We are both short by 20th-century dimensions. She always said that she was taller than I, but—being only five-feet-four inches to my five-feet-six inches—she managed to appear so only because her slimness was augmented by putting on three inches of heels. That she always appears—as you say—regal is a matter not only of self-carriage, but of her unselfish tranquility as compounded with her utter confidence in the creative integrity of the mystery of life.
36 Although fiercely loyal to her idiosyncratic husband, she is quite a sovereign personality in such matters as her independence of literary taste and her kind but uncompromising judgments about people. Anyone who works with Bucky is in Anne’s debt for her unsparing generosity in sharing him with others.
37 Anne’s family was a large tribe, three generations of which lived in and around Hewlett and Lawrence on Long Island’s south shore. In the 1930s, Bucky and Anne had a small but high-ceilinged apartment in Manhattan’s East 80s. With them in town was their only surviving daughter, Allegra, then a teenager in the Dalton School and a talented student of both dancing and ice-skating. On Long Island, the family life centered around Martin’s Lane, a rambling sort of manor house near Lawrence, sheltering Anne’s aunt and bachelor uncles all week and easily accommodating the second and third generations who flocked out on weekends. (For some reason I recall that the Sunday ritual usually included lawn bowls, applejack and ginger ale, and an enormous roast of rare mutton.) As I remember it, there were always parties. The Hewletts were talented, versatile, and articulate; it seemed only natural that they should be entertained chiefly by each other. One of Anne’s sisters once declared to me that she had no desire to meet anyone she didn’t already know: this was not snobbery; she was merely defining an area—new to me—of social self-sufficiency. Food and drink appeared effortlessly and abundantly. They never went to bed, or at least stayed up to all hours. Among them, family songs and family games came close to an art form.
3839RBF: Anne was the eldest of 10 children. The uncles still lived in the adjoining house, Rock Hall—the finest 18th-century house on Long Island—that had sheltered 10 generations of Hewletts. The Hewletts had their children much younger; they had 10 generations in the time it took the Fullers to have eight. Anne’s forebears on both her father’s and mother’s sides had been the original European settlers of Long Island. They had all that land but they never made any money out of it and just had to sell it for taxes. And when we got married the New York papers looked up and found an early governor of Connecticut in my family so they described the marriage as a wedding of ‘‘mothball aristocracy.’’ The Hewletts were a lovable family and Anne’s father, Monroe—I loved that man to pieces. He had built his home, Martin’s Lane, on the Hock Hall property—it was formerly Rockaway Hall, named for the Rockaway Indians who occupied the western end of Long Island.
40 Bucky managed to revel in the high-spirited life at Martin’s Lane; he was as amusing, as sentimental, and as fun-loving as any of his perhaps more worldly in-laws, but without ever compromising his more serious devotion to design, engineering, and the life of the mind. It must have galled him that the rest of them never took any of his ideas seriously.
41 In those days, what Bucky did more than anything else was talk. This was in the late 30s, before lecturing had become his chief form of self-expression. His informal soliloquizing with family and friends would take on a more earnest tone as the hours went by. I had never heard such abstract and uninterruptible discourse. Where I had thought that the industrialization of America was drab, sadly inevitable, and inhuman in scale, he redescribed it as an exciting and epochal evolutionary adventure. Where I had thought that geometry was all very good but irrelevant, he was saying that you could not explain life without it. Whatever question we started with, we always ended up with geometrical models of foldable circles, or closest-packed spheres, or tetrahedra. Fuller seized on the closest packing of spheres not as the abstract formulations of the crystallographers or molecular chemists, but as the most elemental expression and arrangement of nature’s energetic forces—of matter. In Fuller’s matrix, the direction from the center of a closest-packed sphere to the centers of its neighbors is 60 degrees, not 90. The simplest arrangement of closest-packed spheres is the four whose centers define the tetrahedron. In those long nights when I was young, I first learned that the tetrahedron was the initial conceptual reality to which Fuller’s entire philosophical career has since been in homage.
42 What Fuller was articulating then was his absolute conviction that physical experience cannot be considered separately from our metaphysical experience and that they both have behaviors described by the same geometrical models. Energy has shape; thoughts have shape; conceptuality organizes itself systematically in separating the relevant and the irrelevant from the observer and the observed. The description of energy quanta and of abstract thought as tetrahedron opens up a radical shift in our philosophical perception of reality.
43 There are no 90-degree angles in nature, Bucky said then as he says now. There are no square snowflakes, trees, leaves, nuts, fish, or planets. His lifelong campaign against the instability of the cube was beginning to get into high gear. Hugh Kenner, Fuller’s biographer, ascribes his devotion to the tetrahedron as a recognition of stability incarnate, a nest of principle.
44 When Fuller first tells people that there are no right angles in nature the notion strikes them as plausible—such is the force of the context of his argument and his tone of conviction. When I tell my friends there are no right angles in nature they are highly skeptical. People find it very comfortable to see the world, to experience reality, in square modules, and they find it disturbing—indeed threatening—for anyone to question squareness. They do not like to hear that rectangularity may not be innate; they do not want anyone to invalidate their scorecard of orthonormality. We measure land as if the earth were flat; we count cords of wood in square piles and the volume of a balloon in cubic feet; we even measure a test tube of blood in cubic centimeters. People yearn to identify the XY Z coordinates of geometry, the modules of calculus, and the cubic lattices of crystals with physical reality—as if Eden had been laid out on graph paper. My friends are sure that I have been hopelessly misled. Every time they come across something square in nature they hasten to reproach me with the evidence, not realizing that even ‘‘artificial’’ right angles like an I-beam or the true cross are held together at the microscopic level only by an interlacing network of triangulated structuring. One friend insists that I come see the absolute 90-degree branch of an oak tree on the ninth hole of his golf course. Every time he plays the ninth he is reminded that his friend Eddie is a nut and that Fuller can’t possibly be right.
45 The Hewletts were prone to conspicuous skepticism about Bucky’s unfamiliar way of looking at the world—such as his substitution of the tetrahedron for the cube. But Anne was staunchly loyal and shared none of her siblings’ misgivings. Her example—and that of my mother’s devotion to Bucky’s bright new picture of the world—made it easier for me to become perhaps his youngest disciple at that time. Fuller was always relentlessly earnest about everyone understanding his message, and though I was just starting off to college, he always treated me—and everyone else—as utter intellectual equals. He describes conversation as the most generous of the arts, and indeed it has always been so with him. I never knew what a tetrahedron was before those summer weekends on Long Island, but I have never forgotten since.
46 We have seen the advent of adversary urban planning, adversary architecture, and even adversary theater. In Synergetics, with its celebration of the tetrahedron, we seemed to have the advent of an adversary geometry. At least in the process of writing about the tetrahedron and synergetic geometry, exposition and program became inextricable. The tetrahedron was also the model for Fuller’s psychology, the relationship of self and otherness. He describes the universe as a ‘‘scenario of otherness and self.’’ The intention of the work was to present a mathematical model of reality and to redefine the finite physical world in a way that could only improve the human predicament. Improvement of the scenario was to become our banner Excelsior.
47 So 33 years after those first summer weekends, I found myself in Carbondale about to quit one long career and casting about for another. In our conversation over dinner, Bucky invited me in his generous way to share his entire domain. He suggested that perhaps I could move from Washington to his S.I.U. headquarters and take over the management of his multifarious business and design projects. (I recall a fragment of dialogue that went something like ‘‘Bucky, if you were willing to do the kinds of things I would recommend for you to do, then you could easily make enough profits to more than afford what you would have to pay me…But since profit is not one of your interests, and since it would be completely out of character for you to divest control and compromise the integrity of your work, you had better continue to manage things for yourself.’’)
48 There were other noncommercial projects we talked about such as his World Design Science Decade Inventory and his World Game studies on which more willing hands were needed. He said he also had more lecture invitations than he could fill; perhaps I could take substitute assignments on the lecture circuit. (Of course I knew that the notion of anyone’s substituting for him on the podium was preposterous—but so are some of Fuller’s best conversations.) Synergetics remained largely unwritten and certainly unpublished. He suggested that perhaps I could work a little on all these projects at the same time. But as the evening wore on, we agreed that I should try to help him with the book—and only with the book.
49 Fuller’s other books—at that time, nine—contained only hints and glimpses of his philosophical geometry. His attempts to present it all in Synergetics had engaged the imagination, if not the contractual services, of half a dozen other collaborators before me, people of conspicuous talent, designers, artists, or scholars in their own right.3 Despite documentary evidence of intense effort and industry, these earlier attempts at collaboration had all fallen short of fruition. Perhaps their talents were too conspicuous. I wondered whether an obscure layman like myself might succeed where they had failed. My chief credential for the project was my profound curiosity about the metaphysical system which he had been hinting at and partially describing for decades, and yet never really presenting in any comprehensive way. I had long been frustrated by this paradox. Our writing together, moreover, seemed the only form of collaboration that would not compel me to move to Carbondale or become unduly a hostage to his unremittingly itinerant lifestyle.
51 The geometric concepts of Synergetics had been gestating in Fuller’s mind since his days at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1917, but the original written disclosure, the first documentation, dates from the period during World War II when he was working for the Board of Economic Warfare in Washington. It was in the form of a blind letter dated 14 March 1944, signed and copyrighted by Fuller with nine pages of text and seven pages of diagrams, and captioned ‘‘Dymaxion Comprehensive System: Introducing Energetic Geometry.’’ All the essential elements were set down in this enigmatic memorandum, an intensely concentrated blend of prose and symbolic exposition, quirky, dense, and cryptic. Here was the moment of Eureka. Here was the implicit revelation, the geometric lineaments and paradigms later to be made explicit in greater detail in Synergetics. Carlson had not then given us the Xerox, and Fuller had 200 blueprint copies made to send to scientists and libraries around the world. My copy was inscribed ‘‘To Sonny Applewhite: This has many unedited errors but was a first sticking out of the neck, Bucky.’’
52 If Fuller’s genuine intention was to convey the nature of his geometrical discoveries to his contemporaries, his strategy with this document was unsuccessful. I have yet to learn of anyone who understands that paper. I have always suspected that its chief function was to establish the priorities of Fuller’s claimed discoveries in a kind of private memorandum to posterity—a Rosetta stone of geometries and numbers by which the true significance of his proliferating models and artifacts could eventually be deciphered. The paper attempts to reexamine elementary geometry in the light of Einstein’s relativity. He accuses the Greek geometricians of fashioning a cubic block which could not exist in the reality of physical time as described by Einstein. He charges Euclid with a ‘‘double foot fault on his first service’’ by failing to accredit the surface upon which he was inscribing. It is an extraordinary and provocative paper which still awaits evaluation by competent authority.
53 In Bucky’s hypothetical system he treats geometry and number as identical and congruent aspects of all physical phenomena. I had to take this on faith. I recalled that Admiral Byrd had once kept a journal of his thoughts while in isolation at the South Pole. One of his characteristic aperçus was what a great thing it would be for all of us when they get around to setting poetry to music. My own appreciation of the relationship of geometry to number was at a comparable level of innocence.
54 In a lecture at the University of Oregon on 6 July 1962—one of a series of lectures on nine consecutive days whose transcripts provided a substantial source of expository text for Synergetics—Fuller explained to the students: I was urged by a life fellow in chemistry at Oxford University, Sir John Wolfenden, to publish what I called my energetic-synergetic geometry and I published 200 copies of it…He said you will get no credit for this whatsoever and it ought to be in the record because everybody is working secretly [This was in the atmosphere of the intense security surrounding the development of the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project in the midst of World War II.] and they will use what you have. If you could only be accredited in the other things you are saying it might be more valuable. And yet you are a rank outsider: You are not a physicist or chemist; you don’t belong to any society. There are no papers you can publish…Then I published the paper and sent it by registered mail to 200 scientists and that gave me the right to copyright it in the Library of Congress. And so I did.
55 Inadvertently perhaps, Wolfenden provided not a bad description of the function of a poet: You are a rank outsider. You don’t belong.
56 Since that letter of 1944, a manuscript of sorts had accumulated erratically, partly as lecture transcript and ephemeral writings, partly the work of other hands. This collection of putative chapters was sequestered in a handsome, black-leather briefcase with the initials ‘‘B.F.’’ stamped in silver. It was protected in close custody, never sent by mail, never checked when traveling—but curiously neglected as undone homework. It was called ‘‘Energetic-Synergetic Geometry,’’ abbreviated as ‘‘En-Syn-Geom,’’ and so pronounced. Fuller has a penchant for abbreviations and initial capitals.
57 One of Fuller’s great close friends in the 1930s and 40s was Thornton Wilder, who was an amateur mathematician as well as a novelist and playwright. Wilder anticipated that Synergetics would be Fuller’s major work, but he urged him to defer its writing and publication until after he had reached the full maturity of his lifetime of geometrical explorations.
5859RBF: When Wilder was encouraging me about my mathematics he used Newton as a model. He said, ‘‘If your math is as significant as I think it is, you have the most important book in the field since Newton’s Principia.’’ He said, ‘‘You don’t often get a chance to do a new ‘Principia,’ so you better hold off until you are sure you have everything you want in it.’’ Later, I showed him my ‘‘Motion Economics’’ report for the Board of Economic Warfare—but it was just too much for him. My global analysis of the practical effects of synergetics seemed to him to be a virtual indictment of humanity at large…a statement that everyone else was crazy, with which Thornton could not go along. He felt more comfortable with my math because—even though it was just as radical—in mathematics you don’t say that everyone else is crazy.
60 It is, of course, not unusual for such ambitious projects to have a long period of gestation between the original idea (Fuller would say ‘‘conceptioning’’) and ultimate publication. In this case it proved to be a period of 61 years since the first formulation, 31 years since the first written notes.
61 During this visit in Illinois in 1969, we did not hammer out any modus operandi. There was the manuscript, but Fuller was dissatisfied with it and seemed to want to start again from scratch. As the most recent of the long succession of collaborators, Edwin Schlossberg—then studying English and physics at Columbia—had been working on the manuscript that spring and summer; but his work, too, got laid aside during the family’s annual August vacation at Bear Island, Maine. Without examination of the manuscript material, and without further discussion of its deficiencies, it was agreed that he and I should begin to collaborate on Synergetics, the book that was eventually published in 1975. My first immediate tasks were two that I could embark on without taking up any of Fuller’s valuable time. I would try to launch negotiations with the publishers for a larger advance on royalties so that he could devote more time to working on the text. And I would exhaustively screen all of Fuller’s published and unpublished writings, letters, and tape transcripts to identify, excerpt, and index his every statement relating to synergetic geometry.
62 One of the most puzzling aspects of Synergetics is: Why did there have to be any collaborator at all? Fuller is a man with poetic gifts of expression, extravagantly articulate, industrious, and self-disciplined to the point of compulsion—passionately dedicated to the importance of putting on paper whatever of his thoughts he feels may be of benefit to others. He was accustomed always to having competent secretarial assistance available on short notice and at whatever cost. When he worked at Time and Fortune he came to rely on the very bright young research assistants to verify exact dates and figures. Why should he ever need anything more than technical or clerical assistance?
63 Fuller’s most successful books, moreover, were those in which he had had no assistance whatever. His most effective writing had been that which he turned out in longhand when utterly alone with his thoughts. (His two finest essays of this type are ‘‘Total Thinking’’ and ‘‘Omnidirectional Halo,’’ discussed in chapter 5.) If the completed Synergetics could have been the unfettered product of a single artist, would it not have been a finer work? My answer is that as the product of a single genius it would have more closely approached a work of art. But other answers crowd in. Most importantly, there would probably not have been any such book at all. He would simply never have found the time. And much of what is in the book now was elicited, to use a word with ulterior overtones from an earlier calling.
6465RBF: About why I never got around to writing the book. My data was just so voluminous…I don’t think that even you have seen all of it. Just books and trunks of it. And my traveling has been so great. I have always felt that my thoughts didn’t belong to me. And here I had entered into one of God’s rooms—a whole treasure house that could really be an enormous resource for humanity.
66All that science does is to find out that the physical universe is technology—that it is the multioptional intertransformabilities of the complex of generalized principles governing the eternal integrity of ceaselessly regenerative scenario universe.
67I thought that Synergetics might allow humanity at large to discover what its options really are. And I had that kind of responsibility.
68EJA: And, Bucky, I think that part of the problem is that a book—even a big book—is not a natural way for you to express yourself when you are trying to deal in such large patterns. I think that for you a book is no more relevant than, say, a vase. For the Greeks a vase was very important when they had no other way to keep their wine and their oil, and a lot of their art went into craters and vases that are now only just in museums. Well, for you, a book has only such a temporary cultural relevance perhaps only for a few recent centuries, but for you—and thinking about a thousand years from now—a book is just a temporary convenience, like the Greek vase.
69RBF: Yes, that’s what a book is: it’s just a tool. A book equals a vase…equals a lever…equals a tool, a potentially catalytic tool.
70 Anyway, nothing could restrain Fuller from rewriting the book from the moment it was in print. We can hope that he will continue to restate all the Synergetics themes in ever fresh literary forms. The major task of detailed geometrical exposition has been accomplished, and this may make it easier for him to enlarge the scenario. This would be my hope. At the present writing, he is restating his synergetic geometry, both graphically and verbally, working with Tatyana Grosman in West Islip, Long Island, in the form of a nursery tale parable called ‘‘Goldilocks’’ on 44 stone lithographs with captions and drawings wound on a 36-inch tetrahelical spindle.