4 A Peculiar Accuracy
2AT THE END of World War II, Bucky invited me to join his new firm building mass-produced aluminum dome houses in the Beech Aircraft Company plant in Wichita, Kansas. I had just completed a three-year tour on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific and part of the charm of his offer was that Wichita is within a few miles of the furthermost point from salt water in the United States. Fuller was chief engineer and chairman of the board; I was to become personnel manager. The spectacular failure of this project has been well documented by Alden Hatch,1 but it was attracting nationwide attention at a time when both the unions and Wall Street investors were eager to support the conversion of war plants to peacetime production, particularly in a field like housing with its five-year construction backlog. I remember one day being sent out at the last minute to the airport to greet a prospective investor, a man named Giannini; it was only some time later that I learned he was actually A. P. Giannini, the founder and head of the Bank of America. While Fuller regretted the fiasco, he did not regard the venture as a personal failure. He knew that the dome house as an artifact was ahead of its time, but it was a satisfactory industrial model not just as an end product but for the implicit new distribution and service patterns involved. It was the same with his Dymaxion car in 1934. He still smiles when people tell him they are sorry for him that only three of his three-wheel cars ever got built—that it never got into production. But he was only trying to build a prototype, he was not trying to get into the automobile business.
4 During the Wichita period Fuller had little time for working on his geometry and mathematics. Of course, the drawers and shelves at his house and in his office were full of the familiar closest-sphere-packing models glued together in a great variety of pyramids and tetrahedra. But he only got time to break them out late at night or on weekends. Their significance to him could be observed, but not shared, as he was chiefly engrossed in his industrial philosophy and its engineering applications—what he calls ‘‘design science.’’ During the winter of 1945--1946, he presented long talks at least weekly, explaining his industrial strategies to the new engineers huddled intently over their drafting table. The design offices at Fuller Houses, Inc., often took on a pedagogical character—a sort of technological Chautauqua—with which these young draftsmen from Chicago and Detroit were quite unfamiliar.
5 Though it was not related to my office responsibilities I would record and transcribe these talks. After half a dozen had accumulated, I prepared a composite version which the company printed up in a 42-page pamphlet under the title ‘‘Designing a New Industry.’’2 Fuller did not rewrite or edit the piece and he barely found time to write a brief introduction. Fuller signed the introduction: my explanatory note is anonymous. With my penchant for taking things apart and analyzing them, I prefaced the pamphlet with an elaborately detailed topical outline of the composite lecture with the sequence divided into 12 main headings with three levels of subordinate description. In preparing this summary version, I attempted to translate Fuller into plain speech by shortening the sentences, avoiding the nonce words, and substituting a more conventional vocabulary. I thought I could do it the way Reader’s Digest does. But in the process my effort to preserve the spontaneity and personality of the speaker was unsuccessful. The flat statements survive, but all the sound of his essential Bucky-ness is muted. It does not soar; it reads as if it had been written with gloves on and then corrected by a grammar teacher. When I first started working on the synergetic geometry—some 23 years later—I was tempted to try the same pedestrian approach, but I found that it couldn’t be done. The strategy of Fuller’s idiom is too subtle. If you tinker too much with his sentences, they just turn into pumpkins.
7 A lesser man might have been discouraged by the Wichita experience, but Fuller’s resolve was unshaken and the next several years—spent between Anne and Bucky’s apartment in Forest Hills, Long Island, and at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina—were among the most productive in philosophical and design breakthroughs of his entire career. Less than a year after Fuller Houses went out of business, he threw his energies into compiling a detailed recapitulation of all published references to him and his work—a sort of bibliographical stock-taking that he had printed up as his ‘‘Dymaxion Index 1927--1947.’’ He sent me a bound copy at the time, inscribed in his hand on the cover:
89To ‘‘Uncle’’ Edgar Applewhite, able custodian of my own incoherent items on this list, who will some day clarify whatever may be worth clarifying in these items.—Buckminster Fuller
10The reckless combination of modesty, faith, and prophecy is characteristic.
11 Fuller’s primary vocation is as a poet. All his disciplines and talents—architect, engineer, philosopher, inventor, artist, cartographer, teacher—are just so many aspects of his chief function as integrator. When he was appointed to the Charles Eliot Norton chair of poetry at Harvard in 1962, he described the word ‘‘poet’’ as a very general term for a person who puts things together in an era of great specialization when most people are differentiating or taking things apart. Poetry, for him, is a calling to which the individual may aspire, but which he may not profess a poet who succeeds in his function may be recognized only by others—and then only in retrospect. For Fuller, the stuff of poetry is the patterns of human behavior and the environment, and the interacting hierarchies of physics and design and industry. This is why he can describe Einstein and Henry Ford as the greatest poets of the 20th century:
1213RBF: I am enthusiastic over Emerson’s definition of poetry as saying the most important things in the simplest way. You couldn’t say anything more important in a simpler way than to say E = MC2. That is why artists and the young people really go for that equation—even without knowing too much about it. And Ford was an artist because he painted a world-embracing scenario—an interaction of all the resources and all the people.
14 The language of Fuller’s poetry, his diction, deliberately tries to avoid the connotations of our cultural, sentimental, or traditional heritage—or with what other people often mean by poetry. His writing—or at least the aim of his writing as he sees it—has nothing to do with aesthetics and ethics or artistic and literary traditions. Those are all words that he does not even use. We were fond of quoting Barnet Newman: ‘‘Aesthetics is for the artist what ornithology is for the birds.’’ Though Fuller would reject the classicism of Joyce’s allusion, he would share his view of Daedalus: that the walls of the labyrinth are religion and nationalism.
15 Culture is of interest to Fuller only to the extent that its artifacts are instructive of man’s relationship to his environment in the larger biological or evolutionary sense. In his lexicon, most of our common appreciation of history, art, and literature are just so many highly conditioned—often impeding—reflexes that do not necessarily represent any net gains or useful insights (1066 and all that). Rather than try to learn from the past, we will do better to try to start ab initio.
16 Shelley may have been the first to herald the sweetness of the unheard song. Fuller not only agrees, but has enlarged the dictum to celebrate the power of the unseen picture. He is forever reminding us that 99 percent of physical reality—all of nature’s energy—operates at frequencies too high or too low to be tuned-in within the limited range of human visible or audible scanning. So for him, any theory of art, or poetic function, can be only partial—indeed fractional—if it treats only within the limits of what we can see and hear.
17 If Fuller’s ultimate aesthetic is invisible, so is the music of his poetry virtually silent. There is no song or rhythm in his verse. There is no rhyme. The cadence is liturgically repetitive. For him the artists are philosophers in cry, and thus his verse is inevitably programmatic and polemical. He writes primers of new-fashioned Mother Goose tales…like choruses from blueprints. The metaphor is not so much in phrase as in a pattern of myths retold and of technology made graphic—as in ‘‘…the echoed voice of a poling raftsman to the forwardly informative radar manipulations of the stratojet-piloting airman.’’
18 He avoids the term ‘‘20th century’’ because he regards it as anticosmic, reflecting a myopic and parochial time-accounting derived only from the recent religious history of a minority group of humans on Planet Earth. For him, engineering is poetry, and he says he would not be surprised if some day it were proven a law that the better the science the better the poetry. No wonder his style is peculiar, his vocabulary strange to the ear, his syntax so remote from common expression. It is no accident: in fact it is a great deliberate effort to enter the avenues of the listener’s mind without tripping the familiar and comfortable reflexes. How could one better dispel dreams of marble halls—or better epater le bourgeois—than come up with a phrase like ‘‘dwelling machines.’’
19 Fuller is not only noncultural, he is nonpolitical. He has a manifesto, but it is strictly technological: do not reform man, rather reform his environment. He foresees for us a new world in which houses are not only dwelling machines, but ‘‘environment-altering valves.’’ Government and politics have nothing to do with it. Politicians are merely accessories after the fact. Socialism is merely ‘‘a boring way to speed up the mess.’’ The intent of all his writing is polemical, but in the last analysis it is the artifact that will save the day. Society will only take on the new, he says, when nothing else will work. ‘‘You can’t better the world by simply talking to it. Philosophy to be effective must be mechanically applied.’’ I had read somewhere that a similar message could be found on the grave of Karl Marx. I was skeptical of this, and on a recent trip to London I went out to Highgate Cemetery to read the inscription for myself: ‘‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.’’—from The German Ideology
20 In March of 1970, Buckminster Fuller spoke before a great—and some witnesses say, restless—throng in the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, London. The following week the Times Literary Supplement reported that ‘‘the audience seemed numbed both by his convoluted rightness of detail and by the basic simplicity of his moral beliefs…Fuller himself is seldom thought of as having any literary importance, but he has meditated deeply on language and uses it most distinctively—not lucidly but with a peculiar accuracy.’’ I thought the remarks lacked charity and took umbrage at their condescension of tone, but I concluded that his ‘‘peculiar accuracy’’ is what an editor must preserve at all costs.
21 In referring to his ‘‘moral beliefs,’’ the TLS employed a phrase that Fuller—in his striving for accuracy—always avoids. ‘‘I don’t believe anything,’’ he says. A proposition is either experimentally demonstrable or it is not. A generalized principle is either discovered and proven or it is not. He doesn’t need beliefs any more than he needs preachers or leaders. He considers most of our notions of good or evil as so many cultural or popular reflexes. He does not use the term ethics and does not tend to think of a world of good and bad. An electron is not bad because we give it a negative sign. The world is not getting any better—better understood, perhaps, but not better. ‘‘Shame is related to the words we’ve invented, but evolution has her own accounting.’’3 His search for this kind of idiosyncratic accuracy in speech is one of long standing. In the 1930s, Fuller was one of the first enthusiasts of I. A. Richards and Basic English, a language purged of cultural nuances if there ever was one.
23 My conviction that Fuller is untranslatable was reinforced by Reyner Banham’s argument in Arts Magazine, London, October 1963, that it is almost impossible to write for Fuller or even about him except in his own idiom: this is because ‘‘his creative thinking does genuinely seem to be done in the grammar and syntax he uses when speaking. Problems are simultaneously bulldozed frontally, undermined termitically, and outflanked by relative clauses lasting up to six weeks.’’ (I could put italics on ‘‘or even about him.’’)
24 An earlier draft of Sec. 223.01 had one sentence that ran for four manuscript pages; here was a lawyer’s instinct for having all the conditions equally and concurrently qualifying. (Interqualifying, Bucky would say.) His language does reflect the way he thinks and in that strange idiom he declaims to physicists as if they were eight-year-olds—and confides to eight-year-olds as if they were physicists.
25 In February 1973, we were going through our third draft of Sec. 1009.68 when I looked up and said, ‘‘Bucky, you know people are going to wonder what the hell Fuller means with all this talk about ‘intertransformabilities.’ …They’re going to say that’s just so much horseshit.’’ He agreed instantly. ‘‘Yes, that’s right. That’s just what horseshit is, a beautiful example of intertransformability.’’ Fuller never uses barnyard language except explicitly. He was amused two years later when our friend Bill Marlin, as architectural critic at McGraw-Hill, told us that one of his colleagues, a biophysicist, on first examining Synergetics marveled at the book’s innovation but deplored its lack of disciplined scientific discourse—‘‘being undisciplined, it all comes out like horseshit. But it’s the very highest grade horseshit, like methane in the biological cycle.’’ In passing the comment along, Marlin added that nothing could be richer than compost. When Macmillan demoted the book from a full-page and cover feature of its fall list to a half-page on the spring list, Bucky was happy to share the page with Compost Gardening.
26 Getting back to intertransformability, I had written a memorandum to the publisher describing Synergetics as ‘‘a book about models.’’ When Bucky read that he agreed, but added:
2728…conceptual models, lucidly conceptual models, primitively simple models; and the primitively simple numbers uniquely and holistically identifying those models and their uniquely intertransformative number-value accounting.
29Let us take the phrase ‘‘intertransformative number-value accounting’’ and try to explain it in plain English. If I were a teacher at the blackboard I might write ‘‘energy’’ and say that the finite physical Universe consists entirely of energy. The energy is in two forms: associative as matter or disassociative as radiation. Both forms are intertransformable, one with the other. I might go on to say that proton and neutron are intertransformable because if one transforms, the other does likewise, hence intertransformative. Similarly, number-value accounting is just a way of measuring energy where the geometrical units and the numerical units are intertransformative. In synergetics, number is not an abstraction: each number has a geometrical identity as well as a numerical identity. The two are intertransformative so that the number measurement of areas and volumes always comes out even, without fractions or odd numbers left over. No pi; nothing to the right of the decimal, Q.E.D., perhaps; but having said all this, the teacher is apt to be left standing at the blackboard long after all the students have gone out to play. Better let Fuller say it his own way.