Part VI
Summary and Reflections
4 The children spent three days with Bucky, over the space of two years. The results of those sessions have been distilled in the pages you have just read. I guess that leaves me with the final word.
5 The most obvious difference between the first and later sessions was in the attitudes of the children in the moments before they rang the bell at Bucky’s house. Prior to the first session, the children were nervous, self-conscious, feeling burdened by a sweaty-palm-instilling sense of being responsible for ‘‘making good.’’ In the moments before the second session, the children were eager, playful. Indeed, they formed a three-member chorus line as they trooped through Fuller’s door, each sporting a piece of impromptu ‘‘geodesic’’ headgear.
6 Bucky had become a friend.
7 Before the first session, each of the youngsters had spoken of ‘‘Mr. Fuller.’’ Before the next two sessions, it was strictly ‘‘Bucky.’’
8 If there was a single moment when their common love of learning shattered the barriers between Bucky and the children, it was when he proved to their complete satisfaction that ‘‘there is no such thing as a square.’’ It was this one point that the children discussed on the drive home. They had become common conspirators with Bucky, aware that the emperor---geometry as they had learned it in school---had no clothes. From the moment of that awareness, Bucky was assured of his audience.
9 Bucky was hard of hearing and would strain to catch each word. The children often had to repeat their questions, gradually gaining the confidence to speak up as the sessions progressed. Between question and answer, Fuller often paused, sometimes closing his eyes as he waited for his thoughts to form.
10 Some of the questions were quickly answered; he had been asked them hundreds of times before in a life punctuated by encounters with curious and intelligent listeners. Some of the questions were more provocative, demanding longer reflection and often raising a smile at the unexpected delight of hearing something new.
11 Bucky imparted a tremendous amount of information, particularly in the first part of the initial session. ‘‘Don’t worry if they don’t seem to get it all now,’’ he advised me at the end of the day. ‘‘They’ll find it for themselves when the time is right.’’
12 I agree.
13 I know that the children received two precious gifts during their sessions with Bucky. First was Fuller’s acceptance of each as an equal, as a person just as gifted, unique, and worthy as himself. (To Fuller, each child is a born genius, and innate brilliance is diminished only through the imparting of erroneous information.) The second gift was his deep sense of trust in their own intuitions. ‘‘Listen to what your inner voice is really telling you,’’ he seemed to be saying. ‘‘What you feel may really be true, despite all the world’s noisy arguments to the contrary.’’
14 The sharp black-and-white of the printed page can never capture all the character of the encounter between Buckminster Fuller and his newfound friends. From the transcript may spring the impression that Bucky treated Benjamin and Jonathan a bit harshly, especially concerning the word ‘‘belief.’’ But Fuller’s voice was never raised; indeed, he seemed to be offering a midstream semantic guidance correction (as he might say), aimed at an erroneous thought rather than an erroneous person. Nonetheless, Fuller was distinctly taken with Rachel’s questions, and with the fact that she had told him she was interested ‘‘in everything’’---a comprehensivist, Fuller described her in subsequent speaking engagements and interviews. (Ben had mentioned an interest in magic, and Jonathan in electronics.) Bucky attributed Rachel’s broad interests to the fact that she was born after humanity had reached the moon, and the two boys were born before. It was typical of Fuller to find broad meanings in specific events; however, I think he may have overgeneralized here.
15 I believe Bucky has helped to inspire the children to persist, to test what the world says about each experience against their own intuitions. By his own example and his faith in them, Bucky imparted to each child the sense that he or she was as capable as anyone of offering significant gifts to humanity. And he offered a healthy antidote to the self-obsession and jingoism that seem to have infected American culture in recent years. Help others, he urged, and you’ll find your own needs taken care of.
16 It’s my own conviction that the life of each child was deeply and beneficially touched by these unique encounters and that more ‘‘education’’ took place in those few hours than in years of conventional schooling. Ben Mack in particular was enthralled with Bucky’s synergetic geometry, so much so that he began large-scale model making and has perfected his own connecting system for octahedrons, and invented a new connector for assembling geodesic domes. His mother has told me the encounter has imparted new purpose and focus to his life.
17 Bucky inspired me, too.
18 Long before our first meetings, I had been following his life. I was fascinated by his inventions and discoveries, and even more by his ideas. But most of all, I was inspired by his vision of humanity and of the immense potential of each individual.
19 As a journalist, I concurred wholeheartedly with his desire for precise use of the language. Words, I knew, could obscure as well as illuminate; and it was the responsibility of the journalist to describe events concisely and dearly. I was particularly intrigued with Fuller’s insistence on banishing the terms ‘‘up’’ and ‘‘down’’ from everyday language. These two erroneous terms, he declared, conditioned the very way we perceive ourselves and our relationship both to earth and to universe.
20 After the first session, I set out to prove for myself if it might be possible to experience myself differently if I looked at earth, sun, moon, and stars as Bucky urges---as a human looking out from the surface of spherical Spaceship Earth.
21 Repeatedly, on different occasions, as I gazed heavenward at the celestial orbs, I struggled to perceive myself as looking ‘‘out’’ instead of ‘‘up.’’
22 It worked.
23 Suddenly, on a drive in the Mojave Desert, there came a moment as sun and horizon began to merge, when I really was looking out from the surface of Spaceship Earth. I found myself feeling for the first time a passenger on a great sphere hurtling through the cosmos. Venus was just coming into view, and the nearly full moon was at the eastern horizon. Sun, moon, and planet described the great arc of the ecliptic. At that instant I knew the location of poles and Equator. I felt a sense of place, of proper relation, that I had never known before.
24 My awareness of the world, the whole universe, was revolutionized, transfigured, in an instant. For the first time, my felt experience of reality was coinciding with what my intellect had long known to be true. It was an initiation, a rite of passage. I felt for the first time a citizen of the cosmos. I was no longer tied to a language-conditioned flat earth.
25 And there was a sense of communion with all humanity, with all living things, in the knowledge that we were all related through one common center, earth’s center of gravity, all passengers on an infinitely precious star-faring vessel.
26 I know others who have shared the same experience. It is joyous, in that something old is suddenly seen in a new light. It is awesome, because it affords a glimpse at a reality far grander than we have been conditioned to perceive. And it is sobering, because it reveals how deeply conditioned (mesmerized, if you will) we can all be by habitual patterns of language and thought.
27 ‘‘I’m only a low-average human being,’’ Bucky professed. ‘‘The only difference between me and other people is that I decided to devote my life to discovering just how much a low-average human can do.’’
28 His conviction---and the challenge it implies to each of us---was (and is) sincere.
29 Time will prove or disprove the validity of Bucky’s theories and formulations. But his faith in the individual was transcendent and infectious. I saw him share it with three children, and each caught the spark of his vision.