3 Starting From Scratch

2WHEN I WAS ASSIGNED to communications duty in the Navy in World War II, friends felt sorry that I had drawn such a routine billet, regarded as lacking in luster, but, as it turned out, I liked the work. For one thing, so much of war is just waiting, so I welcomed the mechanical diversion of codes and ciphers. I even liked the crude systems of strips and dials that we had to employ with small vessels and landing craft—more fun than crossword puzzles. I was fascinated by the pink pages of the cypher books supplied by the Royal Navy; they were bound with lead covers for emergency jettison. Best of all, I liked finding out what the classified messages —ranging in degree of exclusivity from restricted to confidential to secret to top secret or even ultra or ‘‘magic’’—actually said as line by line would roll up from my typewriter. The work was largely rote but entertaining, and I often wondered why the duty was reserved for officers.

3 It was strict fleet communications doctrine that we were not supposed to break messages not addressed to our ship or command, but in the long night watches I would scan the logs for messages intended for higher commands or other ships and, if we held the right code or channel, I would decode the message just to see what was going on over the horizon. This practice was frowned upon as snooping, reading other people’s mail.

4 A good naval despatch has a great economy of style and a nice regard for distinction of subordination and prerogative; the personality of the commander always comes through the operational and tactical jargon. The ultimate satisfaction was recognizing that an urgent or operational immediate despatch was of sufficient import for me to take it directly to the captain, or the admiral, with the certain judgment that I was correct in having the orderly wake him. I would then bear back their always blunt and terse replies or orders with a flourishing ‘‘Aye, aye, admiral.’’ (I was 22 and zealous.)

5 At the height of the German U-boat campaign against the lifeline convoys to Britain in 1942, I was transferred as assistant communications officer to the then top-priority fleet task force known officially, even extravagantly, as Commander Aircraft Antisubmarine Warfare Development Detachment Atlantic, or more frugally, as ComAirAsDevLant, and even irreverently as HalfAssDevLant. We reported directly to Admiral King in Washington. Our job was to assess the latest tactics and hideous devices of Admiral Doenitz’s U-boats and to develop strategies and test countermeasures against them. It was a sophisticated contest with very high stakes as any new weapon or tactic had an operational life of only about six to nine months until the other side caught on and devised defenses or evasive action against them. We had every kind of plane, submarine, and patrol craft at our disposal as well as a concentration of technical talent, military and civilian. Among the latter were Starling Burgess (who designed the America’s Cup defenders and had worked with Fuller on his Dymaxion car in Bridgeport in 1933) designing underwater gear like torpedo decoys, and Roark Bradford (the southern novelist) writing crash-deadline training manuals for the Navy pilots. At that time the convoy losses were almost sinking Britain and we felt it was up to us to save the day.

6 Every day, fair weather or foul, ComAirAsDevLant staged elaborate drills and exercises in the Atlantic off Newport. After dusk, when the last patrols and planes had returned to base, the exhausted operations chiefs and engineers and technical specialists all assembled for the nightly meeting to assess the day’s findings which they were obliged to detail in a summary despatch to Washington. Most of these cables that I had to set up and encode for transmission seemed unduly hasty and prolix. In the isolation of the code room, I started to reorganize the messages and try to simplify them—really just to save time in transmission and processing. This was not strictly the function of an assistant communications officer, but the talented operations and technical officers were overworked and they welcomed any help they could get in what they regarded as their most onerous task: trying to get it all down on paper at the end of the day.

7 After a week of my re-editing their drafts when they had reached the code room, they asked me to sit in on their sessions while they were still sorting out the instrument read-outs and significance of the day’s events. About halfway through each nightly session, when I could first sense a consensus emerging, I would sneak off to my trusty Underwood radio typewriter (it was all set in caps with no lower case; the radiomen called it a ‘‘mill’’) and type a first draft despatch with half a dozen carbons for the chief experts. I knew nothing of mathematics or engineering—not to mention the arcane acoustic and electronic subtleties involved. I found that even with only the dimmest grasp of the matter, I could summon some deep structure of organization and at least get the issues down in some sort of sequence on paper. They always found it easier to work from and correct my first draft, however erroneous, than to start off writing from scratch.

8 Starting from scratch is the hardest part of writing. So, after my first session with Fuller in Sarasota, it was much in the spirit of those high-pressure critical days in World War II, and dealing with a subject at least as complex and unfamiliar as antisubmarine warfare, I started to see if I could provide him with first drafts of the synergetic geometry. I knew that it would be easier for him to rewrite than to write, and once Synergetics was on paper again it would be easier to engage his daily attention and energies.

9 By this time my abstract files were so extensive that I found I could not only put together the first drafts, but that I had enough material at hand to put most of the first drafts in his own words—often verbatim but seldom seriatim—as most of those words were recorded over a period of decades. For instance, in Sec. 642.01 ¹ the first sentence is from the transcript of a lecture at Eugene, Oregon, of 8 July 1962; the second from a lecture in Carbondale of 21 October 1965; the third from ‘‘Omnidirectional Halo’’(1959); the fourth was written by Fuller on the manuscript on 2 June 1971; and the fifth is from a lecture to NASA in June 1966. Sec. 440.05 is another example of a paragraph composited from sentences drawn alternately from lecture transcripts: 11 July 1962, June 1966, and 13 November 1969. In cases like these Fuller invariably adopted the sequence I had proposed in the first draft and added minor embellishments and modifiers in the gaping margins. Two years after we started working together, Fuller and I finally got around to a written agreement on the project. We signed a standard ghost writer’s contract in which he granted me a minority participation in the royalties and subsidiary rights and I conceded his sole claim to authorship. Quite aside from the contract and far more helpful as a guide to a collaboration, we agreed from the outset on four explicit understandings or guidelines:

(a): all the geometry is to be expressed in words, in writing;
(b): I was not to be a co-author;
(c): all text was to be in Fuller’s phraseology; and
(d): our writing would make no attempt to conform to technical textbook or academic standards.

11 One of the first questions I asked Fuller was whether he felt the whole of his synergetic geometry could be expressed through the written word. Could it all be explained without pictures, models, mathematics, or symbols? Over the years an enormous amount of illustrative and graphic material had been accumulated, several filing cabinets of photographs, models, drawings, diagrams, and charts. Chief among these were Fuller’s own drawings and his own photographs of models he had made—highly concentrated displays of closest-sphere-packing geometry, marvelously executed and densely captioned. (These were all too often executed on the most convenient material at hand—old shirt boards, ruled legal pads, even laundry lists and envelopes.) There were also beautiful drawings by Duncan Stuart and more conventional drafting by Shoji Sadao, Robert Brooks, and Peter Pearce.

12
13RBF: Stuart’s drawings were redrawings. Brooks and Pearce were paid for the work, which was to make clean India-ink versions of my original sketches.

14 In fact, the earlier collaborators on synergetics had contributed mostly in the form of graphics, with only superficial attention to the text.

15
16RBF: They made only larger models or cleaner graphics. Their attention to text was limited to phrasing and syntax.

17 Much of the original text was in the form of captions to illustrations. Captions are a literary device in which Fuller delights. In The Dymaxion world of Buckminster Fuller [MF60], which he wrote with Robert Marks, some of the meatiest matter is presented in the form of captions.² (This practice was probably exacerbated by Fuller’s wanting to add to the text after the book was well along in production.) The set of one hundred or more master synergetics illustrations was constantly being rearranged in new sequences, each with its own rationale; but aside from the captions, there was no narrative connection or attempt at systematic exposition other than the disembodied, overlapping, and not specifically referenced lecture transcripts. My concern was that so many of the pictures were neither self-explanatory nor otherwise explained.

19 There would clearly be no contribution for me to make unless help was needed with the text. I cannot draw. I had studied no mathematics beyond highschool geometry and algebra, which I loved; but I had no stomach for trigonometry as I was—even then anticipating synergetics—uncomfortable with the notion of ratios between angles and edges; this was something I could not conceptualize although I could accept it as a convenience producing useful results. My favorite courses in college were philosophy. I dropped chemistry when everyone in the class except me seemed to understand the concept of valency. Later, in the course of editing Synergetics, I reschooled myself with my son’s physics textbooks. I did not consider that my mathematical innocence should disqualify me from collaborating on this kind of a book on geometry; far from it. Since my mathematics was so rudimentary, I would have less urge to correct my mentor, and I knew that this temptation had been the undoing of some of my predecessors. In my case it took less daring to be naive. What I could do—and did—was to track down every word Fuller had written or said on a given topic, rearrange those words in what seemed an orderly sequence, and thus confront him with every word he had said on the subject.

20 Fuller assured me that while the pictures could illuminate the text and greatly facilitate comprehension, everything in his geometry could be put into words. This simple proposition epitomized our collaboration. As a discipline, we agreed to try to put the geometry into words in such a way that the total system could be understood if read aloud to a blind man. This had some occasional virtuoso results, like Sec. 506 which, without pictures, describes how to tie a knot. I wonder how many people have tried to do that before. In adhering to the constraint of trying to put the whole geometry into words, Fuller was conscientious if not exemplary. He has a propensity for tape recordings. One of the troubles with tape recording Fuller’s talk is that so much of the message is conveyed in body English—-hips twirling imaginary hula skirts of ball bearings, hands describing the coupling of universal joints, elbows pumping precessionally as pistons of an internal combustion engine. Often when he was dictating to me, or rather sharing an articulated stream of consciousness, he would become exasperated when I would not look at what he was doing with his hands. I would have to tell him that this was deliberate, that I was not looking on purpose. I would say we are writing a message to be found in a bottle; the reader won’t be able to see your hands. On these occasions he was not so much writing a book as just explaining the math to me. His sole concern seemed to be that I should understand. Anyone who has ever talked to Bucky has had this experience of his intense desire to explain a process for its own sake. I was no different, just the ordinary village listener; he would be oblivious at such times of what should go into the text or of the business of writing a book.

21
22RBF: I often would talk to you in sort of personal asides of free association. I had no idea that you were putting everything down. We didn’t start off that way or plan it, but it ended up with what I called cosmic fishing, where the intuitive asides become the main account. The effect is precessional.

23EJA: Maybe that is why I never like to have a tape recorder around when we are working together.

24 Our verbal discipline reached its purest form over the telephone when I really couldn’t see his hands. He would often call up whenever an idea came to him or to refine some statement that lingered on from our last session working together. Yet even when calling from overseas, he was always punctilious about never getting me out of bed. Many passages that survive in the book were dictated in this way, not just from Carbondale or Philadelphia—where he later moved—but from La Jolla, Tokyo, and New Delhi as well. The only time he called collect was from Windsor Castle—Fuller is an exemplary house guest.

25 The second crucial understanding was that I was in no sense to be considered a co-author. Though the final publishing contract eventually described the two of us as co-authors, Fuller accepted my assurance that as far as I was concerned the book had only one author, and he was it. The entire content and substance of the work is his; my chief function was that of eliciting the material, organizing its presentation, and policing it for consistency of style—not matters of essence. Even though I did virtually all of the first drafts, they were derived from what he had first said to me or others, or were developed from material implicit elsewhere in his work. I did suggest some words, such as ‘‘epistemography’’ for Fuller’s concept that knowing has shape. In the process of eliciting, I explored certain geometrical relationships and implications which were unfamiliar to me and about which I was curious, but I claim no original proposals or discoveries. Moreover, there are to this day certain passages in this book that I would be hard put to explain to someone else, and for this reason alone I could not assume the responsibility of co-authorship. (I find certain passages sublime, others that verge on madness.)

26 As the book took shape, it became more and more, apparent that it was totally different in form from Fuller’s other writing. There was ineluctable evidence of the work of an alien hand. Thus we agreed at the time of completion to put my name on the title page, in smaller letters and with the designation of ‘‘editor.’’ After page proofs were completed and the book was ready to go to press, one of the publishers’ perennially new editors ruled that my designation as editor would have to be stricken. He said the word ‘‘editor’’ implied that the work was an anthology. I argued in vain that the simplest glance would reveal it was not an anthology I was sorry he was so adamant, but in retrospect I can see his point as most books with credited editors are indeed anthologies or compendiums of some sort. There were only two options open: I was to be listed as co-author or my name was to be dropped. Either course would involve deceit. After much painful negotiation between Fuller in Maine, our publishers and attorney in New York, and myself in Washington, a compromise was agreed on: the title page would read ‘‘in collaboration with E. J. Applewhite,’’ in the same smaller letters as before. This also prompted the drafting of my terse and virtually unqualified disclaimer following the title page. It required the better part of two days and a dozen drafts before Fuller and I finally agreed on the wording of that note. It reads:

27
28The discoveries, concepts, vocabulary, phraseology—every word—and entire writing style of this book originate exclusively in the mind of R.

29Buckminster Fuller. My role has been strictly editorial: identifying, sorting out, and organizing the presentation of five decades of Fuller’s thinking, continually confronting the author with himself.

30 E.J.A.

31 That note incorporated the third ground rule of our collaboration, that I would never write a word for Fuller but would present him with his own statements in what seemed a logical arrangement. The first drafts would often contain non-sequiturs and apparent contradictions which I would leave verbatim and starkly unresolved, but watching him like a hawk, confident that rewriting would restore consistency. It almost always did, and the effect was totally synergetic. If we have anything at all to contribute to the history or technique of joint composition, it could be summed up in that phrase: confronting the author with himself. That was the law and the prophets.

32 My growing file of index cards contained extracts, cited by date and source, of every topic I thought appropriate for eventual inclusion in Synergetics. Thus, in drafting the definitions that introduce every chapter of the book, I was able to draw upon variations in their restatements over a period of decades. On legal and aesthetic grounds we had agreed to abandon the anthological character of the original manuscript. By breaking the earlier writings into pieces and redigesting them, it was our desire to present their themes without doing violence to their integrity as already published works. Self-plagiarism within the law.

33 This modus operandi was completely congenial to me; where Fuller is always synthesizing, my temperament is analytic. His whole strategy is that of ‘‘starting with Universe,’’ going from wholes to particulars. My reflexes are always trying to identify the parts and give them names so they will be at home in my more conventional cultural landscape. Though the result was synergetic, it was at the price of ending up with a book that Fuller has a little trouble finding his way around in. This is not too much on my conscience. His original conceptions are omnidirectional, but a book is inescapably linear. He has found a way to ‘‘unwrap the orbitals’’ on a linear reel, he says, but it involves substituting a tetrahedron for the IBM golf ball on the typewriter.

34 The fourth imperative of collaboration was agreement to disregard conventional standards of technical or textbook exposition; I was unfamiliar with them and he abhorred them. Our unfortunate use of ‘‘vertexes’’ instead of the comelier ‘‘vertices is a dead giveaway of our amateur standing; no pukka geometrician would ever employ ‘‘vertexes, which I chose simply because it is listed first in the dictionaries.

35 There was the goal of getting the book correct and the goal of getting the book exactly the way Bucky wanted it. These two goals were often in happy coincidence, but when they were in conflict I had no question about which course should prevail. Fuller’s poetic expressions and his standards of measurement often departed widely from conventional descriptions of physical and chemical functions; when they did, the license of the poet was always honored. The result is that Fuller has a remarkable confidence in the integrity of the text as saying things in exactly the way he wanted to say them. (This applies to the wording of the text in contrast to its organization.) Each successive draft was painstakingly dated and documented at the time it was superseded; no pages were cut up or re-pasted. No draft page was ever destroyed. Every manuscript page was authenticated—where not indeed obscured—by his holography.

36 There was a final implicit premise of our collaboration that had the greatest potential for discord but seldom resulted in open conflict. For Fuller, the overriding imperative in the book was to achieve perfection. For me, it was simply to get the book out, and in his lifetime. I had no interest in unpublished perfection. He was urgent to get his message into the public domain and into the hands of eager young adherents, but his zeal was tempered by thoughts that once it was all in print and bound between covers there might be loss of control. I was eager to see the bird fly the coop, little suspecting that he would keep it tethered like a falcon.

37 I knew it was not within the nature of things that I could give Bucky assurance that Synergetics would have everything in it just the way he wanted it. His travels were so constant and the manuscript was so voluminous that he had no familiarity with it and no access to it except for those few crowded days a month when we were working together in Washington. Thus he was extremely dependent upon me for the organization of the text and the illustrations. He was particularly pained—but most reasonable and resigned—about having to drop so many illustrations, especially photographs, due to the constraints of budgets and production. The chief promise I made him was that the book would contain no text that he had not, at one time or another, wanted included in that specific form. This commitment was honored. At the same time, I warned him that there was no practical way to insure that everything he wanted in would get in; and of course it didn’t.

38 Within a month of publication he was adding inserts in the margins of my first copy and has been doing so ever since. For most of us, the act of publishing is irrevocable. But for him, not quite; he has never been deterred from rewriting a book just because it has been published. Not any more than he will stop rewriting a letter just because it has been mailed, or even because the letter was written by someone else to him, or even because the person to whom it was addressed or from whom it came has since died. He often speaks of his mother, and even my mother, in terms revealing that for him the dead are never quite departed. In speaking, as he often does, of I-they and we-me, he creates new burdens for hyphens. This tendency to merge pronouns relates to his psychological geometry compounded with a fractured sense of identity. For him, individual and group consciousness are inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon. The relationship between self and otherness is, of course tetrahedral. I have the feeling that in the ultimate refinement of his psychological geometry he will arrive at some kind of prismatic Golden Rule—going St. Matthew one better by putting pronouns out of business altogether.