8 Spontaneous Deputies

8  Spontaneous Deputies

2ONE OF THE original schemes for Synergetics was for it to be presented in two parts: the first part by Fuller and a second of contributions from his students and contemporary colleagues. The scheme was never abandoned, but it was only partially realized with the incorporation in Synergetics of the major contribution of Dr. Arthur L. Loeb. I was not qualified to edit any of the contributions and we were unable to find anyone competent and willing to prepare them for publication.

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4RBF: They didn’t need any preparation. I found them more fully prepared for the publisher than any of the manuscripts I have turned in.

5EJA: Probably so. But each of the contributions was prepared independently, with no reference to each other, with widely varying subjects, assumptions, technical criteria, academic apparatus, and illustrative approaches. None of them had specific references to the basic text—if only because no such text was available at the time they were prepared. Without some coordinating theme there would be little rationale for binding them between the same covers. Michael Burt’s contribution was over two hundred pages. Anne Griswold Tyng’s has since emerged as a doctoral thesis.

6 Fuller thinks I put too much stress on the need for an editor, but I felt the contributions could hardly just be wrapped up in manila paper and twine and sent off to a publisher. Furthermore, the book to which they relate had been completely transformed since the contributions were originally written. Some of the original student projects have been superseded by independent publications, notably Keith Critchlow’s  Order in space: a design source book (New York: Viking Press, 1969) and Anthony Pugh’s  An introduction to tensegrity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), both of them dedicated to Buckminster Fuller. All but one of these synoptic papers were from Fuller’s design students who had been inspired by his innovations and who had themselves contributed at least to the articulation of his geometry. In some cases—Kenneth Snelson, Donald Richter, Ted Pope —they had been responsible for further original discoveries. This is a phenomenon that Fuller has described as ‘‘coincidental articulation.’’

7

8RBF: Conceptual momentum.

9EJA: The interaction of the individual and the group…neighboring disclosures, spontaneous deputies, and coincidental articulations.

10 He felt a strong sense of obligation to see that their contributions got appropriate recognition at the same time his own major work would be published; he felt their concurrent publication would have an enhanced synergetic effectiveness. At the same time, he was concerned that his unique discoveries should not be released prematurely in the partial contexts of specialized papers with limited focus—and perhaps inadequate recognition of his central role. His assumption of responsibility for the publication of the papers had its preemptive aspects. It is significant that he refers to them as ‘‘neighboring disclosures.’’

11 Arthur Loeb was the only one of Fuller’s potential collaborators in the 1960s who enjoyed a widely recognized academic reputation. He had been an associate professor of electrical engineering at M.I.T. and was later on the research staff of the Kennecott Copper Company’s Ledgemont Laboratories in Lexington, Massachusetts; eventually, he joined the faculty of the department of visual and environmental studies at Harvard. Loeb’s principal work as a scientist is in the field of crystallography. He is also an amateur musician and past president of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. Fuller and Loeb first met under the fortuitous auspices of the Boston public television station WGBH-TV, where Bucky had often performed since the pioneer videotape programs of the early 50s and where Arthur was known as a musician.

12 Obviously, Loeb was never in the same category as the students described earlier. His completely independent stature derived from original research and publication.

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14RBF: Loeb’s original work had commenced, however, circa 1954—two decades after Fuller’s 1934 discovery of the convergent-divergent, rational-volume hierarchy of geometrical geosystems, commencing with the tetrahedron, which Fuller had first published in 1944.

15 Fuller’s preoccupation with priorities causes problems for his many friends in academic life. Arthur Loeb has written me, ‘‘What was momentous about our meeting was that for entirely different reasons and working with structures differing in scale by a factor 10¹⁰, we should have hit on the same natural forms…The forms have been known for eons; it was what both of us have done with them that is significant. In the same vein, I was indeed surprised that Buckminster also knew the 3:1 ratio of the volumes of a parallelepiped and the inscribed tetrahedron. Whereas I had calculated the ratio for myself, I was under no illusion that this was in fact an original discovery. I just knew that these fundamental relations are in these times not part of our ‘lore.’ ’’

16 That Loeb’s contribution survives in the published version of Synergetics is a tribute to his commitment to Fuller, his forbearance with interminable delays, and his willingness to venture so far beyond the academic precincts.

17 While spending the New Year’s holidays with his daughter Allegra in Pacific Palisades, California, Bucky dictated to Anne a letter to Loeb inscribed by her with firm cursive characters in black ink. (Both Anne Fuller and Arthur Loeb are accomplished calligraphers.) The letter, dated 6 January 1967, says in part:

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19Dear Arthur—
My thanks for your letter and your report on the vector equilibrium. I am simply delighted with it.

20I am also delighted that you will do the preface for my book. That is well underway at last. I have gotten a Graham Foundation grant…

21As well as your preface, my thought is to have colored pages, or a separate typeface inserted throughout the text where you will want to make a comment. You will have the completed manuscript at the earliest opportunity so that you may digest it before your writing.

22There is excitement in the air as we undertake this last phase of a fifty-year search for re-bridging the gap between Science and the Humanities…The world of science…is not going to take quickly to our new tools—so you are the bridgebuilder from me to the rest of science. I would like you to say what I say…to the scientists in their language. Our terms often coincide but are ambiguous, and, at times, contradictory. I think you can smooth out the differences.

23I am full of joy to be working with you!

24 My very best to you,
Buckminster Fuller

25 The plans were refined to have Fuller’s words printed in red, and Loeb’s in green, or vice versa. Perhaps anticipating the vicissitudes that Synergetics still had ahead of it, Loeb managed to organize his contribution for easy reference without the close integration that would have been preferable and would have accorded with the original design. It was impracticable to provide Loeb with a firm copy of Fuller’s text until it was in galleys. These problems would only have been compounded if we had tried to give comparable treatment to the neighboring disclosures from the students.

26 One of Fuller’s most endearing traits is a genuinely gregarious disposition and his spontaneous outreach for companionship. If he is going out to lunch, then the more the merrier.

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28RBF: Not so…But I am continually being asked by my friends if I would mind if they brought so-and-so along, and because of my wish to sustain the friendship I say ‘‘yes’’ and being brought up as I was, I say it as though I were enthusiastic about the idea, rather than condescending.

29 And so it is in writing: he likes the idea of people working together as a group. Thus Fuller regarded it as highly auspicious that we had scheduled a joint working session at his beloved Bear Island for the third week of August 1971. There is no question that he finds Bear Island the most congenial and stimulating place on earth; the sentiment of the family traditions, the nearness of the stars, the daylong racing in the sloop, combine to afford Bucky an annual psychic rendezvous of intimacy with the universe. I had brought up a hundred pages of manuscript and my portable typewriter with some misgivings—because I knew there is never any privacy on an island—but with curiosity in seeing how we could function in what he regarded as such ideal circumstances for writing together.

30 The first night everyone, even Bucky, was exhausted after a day of sailing.

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32RBF: After half a century of having the slowest boats in Penobscot Bay, Intuition’s winning the crown of Penobscot Bay sailors—including the nation’s ‘‘best’’—was a very special event. Anything but daily routine.

33Your description of my sailing gives the impression that I am just a philanderer and pleasure seeker. That was a very unusual week of the New York Yacht Club races culminating in the annual race around Deer Isle. The N.Y.Y.C. was ending its summer schedule in East Penobscot Bay, where I had raced all my life but only with makeshift, not really competitive boats. This was the first time in my life that I had a first-rate competitive racing machine in Intuition. It was the only week I ever did any racing at Bear since I got Intuition so you give all the wrong impression.

34EJA: Of course, Bucky, you are right. Not being a sportsman, I even meanly forgot to say who won the race. Everyone on Bear that night was thrilled and talking of nothing else. It’s just that I am trying I write a book about writing, not racing.

35This recalls your distress when you saw the first proofs of the dust jackets for your book, Intuition. There was a color photograph of the bow of the boat ‘‘crossing the finish line at New Bedford.’’ Nothing about who won. But you had added so much new verse to the book after it was set in galleys that they had to add 30 pages and thus raise the price. For this reason they had to discard the first run of jackets and I was able to get the caption changed to read ‘‘first across the finish line at New Bedford.’’

36 I suggested that we should wait until the next day before trying to get any work done. But he wouldn’t hear of it. The kerosene lamp was turned up in the Eating House and as I spread the manuscript pages out on the dining-room table the crowd began to gather round. The Fullers’ handsome grandchildren, Alexandra and Jaime Snyder, crewed the sloop and spent the whole month on the island; with them were an equally attractive group of about a dozen high school and college classmates comprising Los Angeles’ easternmost suburb. They were fascinated to See Bucky Write. He held manuscript and pen in hand, but it was the irrepressible flow of talk that had the young people entranced. His discourse had only the most oblique relationship to the problems of the chapter on which we were working, and when the young people brought in pancakes at midnight, I was no doubt unduly concerned at syrup getting on the canary yellow pages.

37 Bucky was presiding among the people he loved best in the close and heated atmosphere of an English coffee house. To him it was the supreme act of writing, the verb, the event. I had heard Hindus describe how the act of sweepers ineffectually combing the temple steps with thin straw brooms was more significant and moving than whether the temple was actually clean. With this thought in mind, I tried to see the act of writing in a new light.

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39RBF: Quite the antithesis of my concept. You know I work and rework until I have become certain that I am both comprehensively and incisively at the condition which defies further inclusive and synergetic significance-harvesting. When the kids came to the Eating House to watch me write they were always very respectful and just sat in silence. You say I am gregarious…Well, okay…but I am used to being very alone in a crowd. I like to know that I am related to humanity while I really concentrate, so that’s why they gather with me in the Eating House and they just sit really quietly.

40EJA: Well, no two witnesses see an accident the same way. I certainly do not suggest that Bucky is playing idle games or being a dilettante. For Fuller, having the young people around him and talking about synergetics is like giving a lecture, an essential stimulus and an end in itself. But for me, with my single-minded concentration on the manuscript, the words of the text, any session like a group discussion or a lecture is a waste of time if it does not result in new material for the book. For Bucky, these group sessions were very hard work, worthwhile in themselves because they brought to his creative self-discipline the energy of a public act.

41 For Bucky it must have been a great disappointment that I was so oblivious to the charms of the place. In fairness I must confess that I am a confirmed claustrophile: urbanite at heart, sedentary by nature, a lover of the great indoors. I could not understand how an island of 15 acres

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43RBF: 87 acres

44 could afford no privacy where we could work alone. Bucky could not understand why I wouldn’t want all the rest of the people to join in and help us with our book.

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46RBF: I did not assume any help to be forthcoming.

47 It took me two days to slip away with my typewriter and papers back to the mainland,

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49RBF: Deer Isle (five square miles) with causeway to smaller island and bridge from latter to mainland.

50 as I had neglected one of the cardinal precepts of an earlier training: Never get on another man’s island without your own boat. There was a family house on Deer Isle which, aside from telephone and running water—unavailable on Bear—afforded some quiet and comparative freedom from distraction. I decided to wait there in hopes that a stormy day would keep Bucky off his sloop and give us a chance to stay indoors and work on the book. One of the regular old Bear Islanders whom I had never met before came to Deer Isle the next day with a message. He said, ‘‘I don’t know what your relations with Fuller are but unless you are prepared to be totally independent of him in the future, then you sure better get the next boat back to that island.’’ I did go out to see Bucky to explain that I didn’t mind hanging around on Deer Isle, but that it seemed hopeless to get anything done in the consuming pattern of family life on Bear. It was all amicable. All we had to show for the week was two brief work sessions at the Deer Isle house, rewriting about four manuscript pages. We could have done as much by telephone.

51 The fiasco of Bear Island did not mean that Fuller had abandoned the lure of group composition.

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53RBF: No! I don’t have any thoughts of group composition. I never wanted to even try group writing. I just wanted Arthur Loeb and the others to help articulate my half-century of exploring. I’ve always been so busy that I’ve never had enough time to do everything myself, so I wanted them to take over…but I wouldn’t expect them to do any of the writing.

54EJA: Fuller is right in objecting to my phrase ‘‘group composition’’ because he did not necessarily expect his collaborators to put words on paper. Getting things on paper is not one of his major preoccupations. He does like a collaborative team for mutual stimulation and for the talents they could bring to bear—whether as people well versed in physics or chemistry, as draftsmen or mathematicians, or merely the attentive and curious young. Fuller wants such people to help him refine the statement and exposition of his philosophic and design concepts—but without the expectation that they would sit down and write a report like a committee. Anything that had to be written, Fuller himself could write: all he lacked was the time.

55Most of our working sessions would begin with just talking about synergetics; since I wasn’t a group I could do a first draft and Bucky would rewrite it.

56 Far from it. The woods were full of potential collaborators. There was a bright and beautiful girl in Montreal named Michele Cuevas, and he wanted me to get in touch with her as he was sure that she would be of great help to both of us in writing the book. Tony Huston was in London working on passages from ‘‘Numerology’’ and the Naga theme; his talents should be brought into play. Brendan O’Regan had studied physics in Dublin and tentatively joined our writing project, but he was highly itinerant and contributed mostly by correspondence. Only the cruel circumstances of chronology prevented his grandson Jaime from playing a more prominent role in the book that he might have done had he been through college.

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58RBF: This is misinterpretation of my thoughts and words. I did not seek out these people. They sought me and I thought of them only as being Spontaneous Research Associates.

59EJA: I have failed to interpret RBF in a way that he can recognize. Perhaps part of the problem is that for RBF—ideally if days were a week long and if he could start all over again—it would all be one single book; the dome engineering, the Naga theme, world game, cosmic accounting, geometrical hierarchies, they are all integral, one of a piece; only the rigid, arbitrary, and accidental restraints of publishing economics seem to have forced publication of the books as separate packages.

60 A year after our Bear Island workfest, he received in his Carbondale office three curious and unsolicited letters from graduate students in widely separated institutions. They dealt with unorthodox modes of geometry and suggested certain correlations with Fuller’s synergetics. He dictated a letter to me about this in the St. Louis airport, dated 17 October 1972:

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62Then we had to move down to the gate, and Bucky continued dictating, this time speaking directly to you…

63The arrival of all three of these papers in my hands simultaneously points up very powerfully the need for having Arthur Loeb almost continuously in close association with us for reading and correlating our work. I do and will continue to think extremely well of Brendan, but think Arthur is in a maturer position and if the two could work together this would be highly synergetic.

64The moment we have funds, the institute should go into bringing these two together. In due course, I would like to bring Ed Schlossberg into the intimate relationship with them. I think they are all capable of spontaneous cooperation with each other as well as myself. I am eager for you to be thinking about this and for you to be ready to take constructive measures in those directions when the opportunity arises. It is truly thrilling to see the book taking shape at last.

65 The receipt of such broad marching orders on the third anniversary of our collaboration might suggest a certain fragility in the tandem character of our working relationship. The obvious goodwill and enthusiasm of Bucky’s proposal for a renewal of group articulation (since I may not say group composition) led me to suppress my practical objections to it. I did not share Fuller’s sublime indifference to the constraints of earning a living, and I could not invite others, however willing and talented, into arrangements for which I saw no prospect of financial support. Meanwhile, volunteers would always be welcome.

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67RBF: Sonny, by this time—1972—I had written and published ten books and thousands of articles. In none of them did I employ any group writing technique and I am confident that I have never conceived such a phenomenon to be possible.

68What I have cared about was the cultivation of artists who showed any comprehension of synergetics. I have had a half-century of little or no comprehension of en-syn-geom…and I had a strong intuitive urge to hold these people’s interest.

69It is necessary to think about the half-century of the synergetic-math search for nature’s most omnieconomical coordinate system…The original discoveries of finding them years ago…Then the counsel by Thornton Wilder to hold off publication…And then the sudden rushing in of the students with their impatience to publish. …I was dealing intuitively with nature’s coordinates and I did not know yet what shape the reduction-to-practice might take. I was trying to forestall further publishing by others, such as Critchlow who, despite the dedication to me, did not say that I had taught him the whole idea of the rational hierarchy, etc.

70EJA: Bucky’s affinity for artists and his encouragement of allies are both testimony of and compensation for his loneliness—a loneliness resulting from the failure of others to understand synergetic geometry. Fuller’s objections are reinforced by three of his ardent convictions:

(a)

that the decision to postpone the publication of his synergetic mathematics entailed great risks but was fully justified;

(b)

that the impulse of students to rush into print with only aspects of the geometrical hierarchy was subversive of his highly self-disciplined strategy; and

(c)

that his timetable of philosophical exposition would have been better served if all the original spontaneous deputies had continued to stay on the team to function as a collaborative group dedicated to the original RBF strategy.

71 If Fuller had the means to underwrite his ideal of group cooperation, I could envision a permanent floating newspaper city room—like The Front Page. We could all function as what he calls ‘‘spontaneous deputies,’’ writers with green eyeshades and sleeve garters, physicists with pocket calculators, and artists over drafting tables, all untrammeled by sordid thoughts of personal by-lines or Friday paychecks. Fuller’s ego does indeed have this plural aspect congenial to the prospect of lieutenants overcoming all the frustrations of the things he never has time to do himself. His role would become partly that of the mythical figure of the Great Pirate—dividing and conquering, dealing with each individual talent on a one-to-one basis—and partly that of Danny Kaye as Walter Mitty with hints of megalomania.

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73RBF: Just not so.

74EJA: I have sketched what Fuller calls a ‘‘cartoon.’’ The trouble with spontaneous deputies is that it is hard to sustain the spontaneity. There is a point at which the Critchlows and Snelsons wander off the reservation. This is what I am trying to suggest.