The World Is Round and Other Great Ideas of Western Man

At the ends of dirt roads, in old hayfields in Vermont and cut-over woods in northern California, the geodesic domes rise out of the ground, inside them, gazing up at the quilted triangles that form your roof, you feel good, as snug a feeling as looking down on your coverlet on an afternoon in childhood, imagining its patches to be fields— though the triangles are purely triangles, and that is their beauty: you are living inside an idea.

It is not always easy to live inside an idea. The geodesic dome is said to enclose more space more economically than any other structure, but there are difficulties with it: all that space is round. Tough on those who like rooms—studies, bathrooms, bedrooms. Is there an ideal use for a dome? Perhaps the storage of ping-pong balls. The domes were designed for an age of precision engineering—but dome-dwellers generally make their own out of lumber and plywood, and it is like making a house with a hundred ridgepoles. Each seam needs to be sealed, and tar paper will not do. The domes leak. And yet, if you are of a certain turn of mind, their impracticalities matter little, because the function of the domes—they are similar in this way to a saltbox house in New Canaan, or the palace at Versailles—is so heavily symbolic. The domes express a sense of communion between their occupants and the world: their lines suggest the globe, the sky, and you are at the center. They offer a resolution between forces that need resolution, between nature and technology. And they signify your allegiance to their creator, R. Buckminster Fuller, “Bucky.”

Domes are Fuller’s symbol, but his current force doubtless has more to do with ideas. He is widely felt to be the philosopher who can endow technological civilization with the will to go on. His wisdom depends on solid geometry. It is said that when he was in first grade he realized that plane geometry was a shuck, that it described an unreal world. He asks you to consider the resonance of the fact that the world is round. There is no such thing as a straight line. The fundamental building block of nature is not a cube but a curved tetrahedron. He asks you to say not sunrise and sunset but sunsight and sunclipse. He coins words: tensegrity—a combination of tension and integrity. It is the principle that supports his structures: they are held together by the force of their desire to come apart. He borrows an elementary fact of chemistry and elevates it to a central fact of life: synergy—“the behavior of whole systems, unpredicted by knowledge of the parts. . . .” He derives from this a sense of the infinite mutability and renewability of the world. He has given us the phrase “spaceship Earth,”a hopeful phrase in his lexicon. The transformation of the natural world into man-made artifacts is inherently beautiful to him. He has written some verse about this beauty:

in his operating manual for spaceship EARTH he has reminded us that each of four billion inhabitants of the planet has for his potential use 200 billion tons of resources. So we are not to worry.

A constant world traveler, he wears three watches, one that tells the time in the place where he is, one the time in the place where he is going, and one the time in his home base at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He stands five feet, two inches tall, dresses habitually in black suits and white shirts, wears thick glasses, is now seventy-nine. He was born with vision so bad that “I could see only large patterns, houses, trees, outlines of people with blurred coloring. While I saw two dark areas on human faces, I did not see a human eye or a tear-drop or a human hair until I was four.”

He was enrolled in the Somerset Club at birth, attended Milton Academy, and was thrown out of Harvard for debauchery. (He blew a semester’s tuition on a spree in New York, involving dinner for an entire Ziegfeld chorus line.) Once he could drink all night and work the next day, but in middle age he began to feel that people failed to take him seriously because they thought he was in his cups and he stopped drinking. He was a recluse for a year after the death of a daughter. and had a mystical experience on the shores of Lake Michigan, when he decided not to kill himself.

He lost money as the head of a construction firm and as a designer of prefabricated housing, and as the inventor-promoter of a threewheeled vehicle called the Dymaxion car. He became an engineer prominent enough to serve as technological consultant at Fortune, but his life by most reckonings was a failure until he was sixty and his domes began to blossom: bought by industry and the military, they brought him handsome royalties and fame.

Now you can reach him by cabling BUCKY, Philadelphia.

John Marquand was his cousin, and Fuller is a great-nephew of the transcendental Margaret Fuller. His biographer, Hugh Kenner, has pointed out Fuller’s affinities with Emerson: belief in the holiness of pattern, the rightness and order of all things, in progress and in technology. And, of course, a belief in circles.

Freed from the encumbrances of linear thought, and taking as his subject little less than the universe, Fuller sometimes lectures for four or even five hours. He is said to do a marvelous imitation of a tree, by way of dramatizing the hydraulics that allow it to bend in the wind without breaking, his arms waving, his body swaying, and Fuller talking all the while.

I have not seen him lecture, but it’s possible to get a feel for such an occasion from Fuller’s new, and presumably his ultimate, book, SYNHRGETICS (Macmillan, $25.00), an 876page explication of his world view. This is one of the few books in which one can literally turn at random to demonstrate its nature. I have just done so. Here is section 905.12: “The three-great-circle model of the spherical octahedron only ‘seems’ to be three; it is in fact ‘double’; it is only foldably produceable in unbroken (whole) greatcircle sheets by edge-combining six hemicircularly folded whole great circles (see Sec. 850). Thus it is seen that the octahedron—as in Iceland spar crystals—occurs only doubly, i.e., omnicongruent with itself, which is ‘quadrivalent.’”

A reviewer can say little more shocking than that he has failed to read all of the book in question, but I say that guiltlessly about Synergetics. I have not read The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary either (and I’d rather) but I am acquainted with it. It would be a labor of love or a stunt to read this book. It would deeply surprise me if any single person has read it, including those who wrote it—there are at least two authors, Fuller and his collaborator, E. J. Applewhite, who has no doubt drawn on tapes and speeches; some assistants are also acknowledged. It would have been madness not to divide the work. Norman Cousins calls Synergetics “The Compleat Bucky,” and Arthur C. Clarke says it represents “the distilled wisdom of a lifetime.” and Samuel Eliot Morison predicts that it will become one of the classics of science, along with Darwin’s The Origin of Species. None of these men claims to have read it.

Synergetics is not the book to read for a readily available window into Fuller’s world. The clearest exposition of his views that I have found is in the Hugh Kenner biography, Bucky (1973). And according to Fuller himself, his Ideas and Integrities (1963), while still heavy going, is more accessible than Synergetics.

And yet Synergetics may in fact be a more revealing book than Fuller’s earlier work or the interpretations of others. It reveals, for one thing, the grandeur of his ambitions, and of his self-regard, and makes plain that however intense his interest in tetrahedrons, his deepest concern is with the enunciation of grand philosophical principles.

If I could not imagine reading all of this book. I nevertheless read more than I expected, and found it oddly mesmerizing. One of the glories of Fuller’s writing is that no concept fails to fit into his personal system. Thus, wisdom; “The synergetic metaphysical effect produced by the interaction of the known family of generalized principles is probably what is spoken of as wisdom.”

And here is Bucky on love: “Love, like synergetics, is non-differentiable, i.e., is integral. Differential means locally-discontinually linear. Integration means omnispherieal. And the intereffects are precessional.”

And here is Bucks on divinity: “Little man on little planet Earth evoking words to describe his experiences, intuiting ever and anon the greater integrity, struggles to form a word to manifest his awareness of the greater integrity. His lips can express, his throat and lungs can produce, in the limited atmosphere of planet Earth, he may make a sound like god. . . which is obviously inadequate to identify his inherent attunement to eternal complex integrity.”

And here is Bucky on the hope of the world: “The youth of humanity, all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity. Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged. experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday.”

And here, unclassifiable in its scope, is my favorite sentence from Synergetics (it comes from section 981.00, called “Self and Otherness Sequence,”subsection .01): “Coincidentally synchronized with the discovery of self through the discovery of otherness and otherness’s and self’s mutual inter-rolling-around (see Sec. 411), we have sell-discovery of the outside me and the inside me, and the self-discovery of the insideness and outsideness of the otherness. The inside me in my tummy is directionally approachable when I stick my finger in my mouth.”

There is a pattern to this prose. Its uninflected, collagelike sentences are not random or accidental, nor (though Fuller may intend this illusion) do they take their cumbersome form from the complexity of the thought they contain. If Fuller’s world is round, his sentences are flat, but flat with a purpose. Their drone works continually to drain away the reader’s sense of value: everything is as important as everything else, the cadences say, and all can be contained in the hygienic, logical system of the mind that emits them. In the name of universality and wholeness. Fuller is one of the great reductionists. Depravity, greed, political lust fade from the memory of the listener who heeds him, and not just human frailty, but human feeling of all sorts. Not since Kahlil Gibran has there been such a master of the soothing, narcotic power of abstraction.

Fuller’s “significance” lies in the multitude of things he allows one to forget. Reading him, though, particularly in this extraordinary final book, I found myself thinking less about his effect than about the man himself, wondering what passion he must once have felt, to have fled from it with such energy.