8 Dialectic by Lake Michigan
1To Bucky, Allegra’s coming had seemed like a miracle, a second chance to prove himself. “It was a mysterious matter that we suddenly had this child again,” he said. “She was the inspiration for all the great resolves.”
2 Thus it had appeared as though Allegra’s birth would mark the end of the five-year-long nightmare that had warped Bucky’s soul and driven him to almost psychotic melancholia ever since the death of Alexandra. But just as he was regaining sanity the disastrous termination of his job with Stockade plunged him into a yet deeper pit. In order to understand his exaggerated despair one must remember that he was intensely mercurial, soaring to the heights on the frail wings of fantasy; plunging hellward when they shriveled in the icy blast of reality. There was also that inordinate strain of guilt, which had been everpresent in his mind since Alexandra’s death—sometimes pushed down below the surface, but always rising again to destroy whatever anodyne he found in alcohol.
3 Now his reviving self-confidence was totally shattered. Even Allegra seemed doomed; for he felt that he had brought nothing but tragedy to those whose lives he touched. Indeed, he came close to believing that the people who were blackening his character were right, that he really was a “bad man.”
4 “All these things happening when there was a new child and we were stranded almost penniless in Chicago…I said to myself, ‘I’ve done the best I know how and it hasn’t worked. I guess I’m just no good, people seem to think so; even my mother has always been afraid that I was worthless. I guess she was right.’ I really thought I was some kind of freak.”
5 At this stage, the very nadir of his life, which he once called “the critical detonation point,” Bucky walked out of their pretty apartment one night and down to the shore of Lake Michigan with the intention of throwing himself in and relieving those he loved of the burden of his presence. In that cold, windy place, he stood for many hours asking himself searching questions and answering them with implacable logic.
6 This apocalyptic debate between Buckminster Fuller and Buckminster Fuller—and Buckminster Fuller and the God of Things as They Are, revolved around what was best for Allegra’s future. That ineluctable sense of guilt sharpened it unbearably. If he came to the conclusion that he, in truth, was no good and a fatal influence on those he cared for most, then logic commanded that he eliminate himself before he ruined their lives. Though neither his family nor Anne’s were wealthy, they were fairly comfortably off. If he died, they would somehow manage to provide for Anne and Allegra better than he seemed likely to do, if he were truly unworthy. On one thing he was adamant: he would not himself go back east to beg the charity of his relations.
7 Thus the negative proposition was clear in his mind, but before he acted upon it Bucky set himself to explore the alternatives. The locale he had chosen was hardly conducive to accurate rationalization. The north wind swooping straight out of Canada, the sharp waves snapping at his feet, the tumbling wilderness of water beyond, and the sullen darkness of an overcast night were all inducive of despair rather than optimism. However, Bucky’s tremendous power of concentration, the irresistible force of his mind once set in motion, enabled him to ignore totally the external circumstances; he reasoned as lucidly as though in his own study. One can see him standing there, stocky and solid, unswayed by wind, unhearing the waves, totally oblivious to the elemental forces of his Universe in his total absorption in the invisible and metaphysical as he began the dialogue with his soul and its Creator.
8 “The absolute first big question I asked myself concerned God,” Bucky said. “I put it this way to myself; ‘You have been taught a great deal about God and Jesus Christ by people who love you very much—your grandmothers, your mother and father—and by the church. But now you must think for yourself. You have gotten into this mess by taking other people’s word for things—your family and your father’s friends who told you that your ideals were impracticable, that this was a tough hard world with not enough goods to go around, therefore you must get yours first and then perhaps you can afford the luxury of ideals. But, if I am to believe in myself and the validity of my own ideas, I must stop thinking as other people told me to and rely on my own experience.
9 “ ‘Now,’ I asked myself, ‘is there anything in your own experience that forces you to admit that there is a greater intellect operative in our Universe than man?’
10 “And I answered, ‘I am overwhelmed by the certainty that there is, because the principles of Universe, the exquisite design of everything from the invisible microcosm of atoms to the macromagnitudes of the galaxies, and all of them interaccommodating with absolute integrity, are intellectual conceptions whose principles can only be discovered intellectually.’ ”
11 Bucky therefore assumed a priori the existence of the Greater Intelligence, which in truth he had done for a long time. That being accepted, he now asked himself the next question: “Do I know best or does God know best whether I may be of any value to the integrity of Universe?”
12 The answer was that neither he nor any man knew; but “the faith you have just established imposes recognition of the a priori wisdom of the fact of your being.”
13 And he thought back on his life and the remarkably varied experiences he had had which were considerably beyond those of most human beings, due partly to chance and partly to the very “instability” which had led him into so many different occupations and areas of activity. He thought of his boyhood on Bear Island and the things he had learned about ships and the sea; of Harvard and what he had learned there, even though negatively; of the mill at Sherbrooke, and Armour and Company, and the Naval Academy; of the chance that had brought him to the frontiers of knowledge about aerodynamics and electronics; of his association with Mr. Hewlett and his artist and architect friends. Finally he thought of the last five years of involvement in the construction industry, which, with all its frustrations and anxieties and final catastrophe, had taught him so much about “the very stormy big patterns of industry in the way of corporations, lawyers, building codes, and unions” even if what he had learned was mainly how things should not be done. He thought of the people he had known, ranging from Admiral Gleaves to the mechanics in Sherbrooke, from J. P. Morgan’s partners to Al Capone, not for what they had told him but in terms of experience with human beings. He said to himself, “I am making the assumption that there is a greater wisdom which has arranged that I have this extraordinary number of experiences; and I am making the further assumption that my experiences are on inventory and of value to others.”
14 Then he said to himself: “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself; you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experience to the highest advantage of others.”
15 And he thought: “That is the thing I should turn to account, and if I should do this, I might be able to eliminate the possibility of other people going through the pains I have had. Perhaps I am part of the great design of things.”
16 In order to do this Bucky realized that he would have to devote himself completely to that supreme purpose. But there was the question of how Anne and Allegra were going to live. He was absolutely convinced that the necessity of earning a living had confused all his earlier endeavors. He denied the basic assumption that you have got to make money for living. He said to himself, “I don’t think that is necessarily so; I don’t think there is money between Mars and the sun. Furthermore, I think we are in an entirely new phase of man on our planet. This new technology and industrialism is something not understood by man, who is exploiting it and trying to make money. Rather, I think evolution is trying to do something very much else with these tools and this knowledge than what man is trying to do. I think that if industrialization were understood as an organic affair and part of Universe, it would be managed very differently, and I’ll try to understand it that way. I’ll try to employ its capabilities to produce as much of the new technical advantages of man as to make him the success that Universe intends him to be.”
17 That was when Bucky got the insight that became basic to his philosophy of action. All previous ideologies had been attempts to reform human nature; and experience made it obvious you can’t reform people. So Bucky proposed to reform the environment, not man.
18 But that still left him on the lakeshore with virtually no money and no prospects at all. What of Anne and Allegra? “I thought that if my daughter becomes as wonderful as I feel she is going to be—I see children don’t do things to make money; they don’t operate that way—so if Allegra grows up and finds that I have used my best endeavors just to look out for her in a world where people are really suffering, she would be sorrowful. She will only be really happy if I have been effective in trying to get things done for the total well-being of people everywhere. If she grows up in a world where all humanity is a little better off than they are now she will probably be happier. And I said, ‘If the intelligence directing Universe really has a use for me, it will not allow us to starve; it will see to it that I am able to carry out my resolve.’ ”
19 One is reminded of the Puritan saying, “The Lord will provide.” Strangely enough, He did.
20 So Bucky went back to Anne and told her of his resolve to dedicate himself to serving humanity without regard to making a living. And she accepted it.
21 The first thing was to get out of their beautiful, expensive apartment. Bucky combed the city until he found the very cheapest apartment hotel, which was also fireproof—for Allegra’s sake. It was dismal and rather dirty in a slum section of the city. The Fullers’ apartment consisted of one fair-sized room, with a sort of cubicle off it to store baggage in. There was a small window in this storage space, so they fixed it up for Allegra. There was also an alcove with a stove and sink where Anne did the cooking. “It was very tiny, but it was really all right,” she said.
22 Bucky said, “Of course Anne bore the brunt of it.”
23 The hotel appears to have been an underworld hangout. That was some time before the terrible St. Valentine’s Day murders. Anne said: “The place was swarming with gangsters, but they were really very helpful. One in particular, who lived in the next room, would come and haul the garbage out. I don’t think he took part in the St. Valentine’s Day thing; he was really very nice. But, of course, he wore all his equipment—two guns in shoulder holsters.”
24 In that apartment the Fullers lived penuriously. There was no more drinking—no money for that or need of companionship—and very little to eat. Much later Bucky made a rhyme about it:
2526Lady Anne went to the store
27To buy food for a week or more She bought an egg and half a roll And a nice red apple that she stole.
28 It was never as bad as that, but it is true that Anne frequently only had money enough to buy one slim meal a day. Still, Bucky’s faith in Universe was kept. With absolutely no means of support, visible or invisible, they managed. One or two people died and left them tiny legacies. A few old friends stopped by to pay forgotten debts—Bucky had loaned money to anyone who asked for it when he had it. You might say the ravens fed them.
29 Bucky realized that if he were to follow his resolution to believe only those things that he could verify from his own experience, he must clear his mind of everything he had been told. Many of these things had been contradictory, so that in trying to follow them he had arrived at what he called “a pinch point of pain.” Now he must unlearn all the things he had been taught. Eventually he called himself “The most unlearned man in the world.”
30 It seemed to him that all his troubles had begun with words—the most extraordinary tools evolved by man. But tools can be used in the wrong way, and he felt that he had acquired all the fallacious ideas and conflicting thoughts through words that had been spoken to him; and words that he had thoughtlessly spoken—“I became very suspicious of words.”
31 Very logically then, Bucky decided to take a sort of Trappist vow, to declare a moratorium on words. He would not speak to anyone nor allow anyone to speak to him until he was sure what words he wanted to use. He would force himself to really understand what he was thinking, not just parrot words someone else had said to him. Then he would be sure that, “When I made a sound, I really wanted to make that sound.”
32 Anne says, “Of course he did not seal up his mouth as his students now seem to think.” And Bucky agrees. “It was tough on Anne,” he says. “I did speak to her a little, but to no one else except Allegra. Anne made all my oral contacts with the outside world.”
33 Bucky’s silence lasted for almost two years. Part of what he was trying to do was to restore a child’s ability to tune in on the metaphysical aspects of Universe. “There is such potential in children. I wanted to see if I could regain the sensitivities I was born with, which all this good advice that had been given me had blunted, for I knew I was going to need them very badly.”
34 Bucky says that through many years, “I find that very gradually I have regained these precious childish sensitivities to such an extent that I really see and feel life very much as I did when I was a little kid.”
35 Without realizing it, Bucky was emulating the retreats from the world which, whether deliberate or enforced, have molded the spiritual crises and enlarged the wisdom of so many men who have made enormous contributions to mankind. Prince Siddatthu under the bo tree, Jesus in the wilderness, Cervantes and Gandhi in their prison cells, Franklin Roosevelt, a prisoner of polio, all had time for contemplation which Bucky took willy-nilly.
36 Think not that Bucky’s decision to meditate was received with acclamation by his family. They regarded it as another example of irresponsibility; a cop-out in the striking phrase of today. Woolly, now an engineer with the General Electric Company, wrote asking him to explain what he was doing. Bucky answered at great length, trying to describe his slowly forming philosophy of the relationship of man to Universe and his reasons for his seemingly unreasonable decision. The answer apparently only confused Woolly, who wrote saying in effect, “Won’t you please write me something definite, not all these complicated words and this esoteric philosophy?” Woolly was not interested in philosophy; he was, in Bucky’s words, “a very good engineer and absolutely precise.”
37 So Bucky wrote again, this time using very explicit engineering terms, “a nice, clear piece,” though far beyond the conventional scientific thinking of the time. It seemingly infuriated Woolly, who replied sharply that this stuff was absolutely no good, “I don’t understand you. It’s nonsense.”
38 Bucky says: “It was very sad to have my brother say that my ideas were nonsense and imply that I was crazy or no good. There had always been absolute love and devotion between us…”
39 Bucky was so deeply distressed and so badly shaken that Anne felt she must do something. “I’m going to write to Woolly,” she said.
40 Bucky did not see how that could do any good. Anne’s devotion to him was absolute, but though she listened attentively to what he said when he was trying to clear his mind and formulate his thoughts by speaking them, he was convinced that she did not understand a word he was saying. She lived in her own world, a world of books and poetry and music, quite apart from his. He thought that she believed in him not from understanding, but in loyalty and blind faith.
41 When Anne finished the letter she showed it to Bucky. “To my amazement,” he said, “the letter she had written was a most extraordinary one explaining what I was doing so clearly that Woolly understood it perfectly, and our differences were resolved. That was the only time I had seen her show that she understood what I’d been thinking. And all the time it was buried quite deeply in there.”
42 While so many people thought that Bucky was just frittering away his time, he was, in fact, working harder than most men ever do. The compulsion, which drives him still, was there in full force. One thing that bothered him was the time lost in the mechanics of existence, eating, getting places, sleeping—especially sleeping. He devised a regimen for himself to reduce those five or six lost hours of sleep. Each time he felt his concentration slipping because of weariness he stopped abruptly and took a half-hour nap.* He would wake to find himself fully restored. In this way he found he could do with only two or three hours sleep out of twenty-four.
43 Out of this intense period of silent thought emerged in embryo most of the great philosophical and mathematical innovations that have made his fame and moved the world forward a little.
44 Bucky’s determination not to accept anything but his own experiences as a basis for his philosophy did not apply to books, provided they were about facts—facts of history, facts of mathematics, facts of physics—but he reserved the right to reevaluate them in the light of his own experience, and mostly he did so drastically. He did a great deal of research in the public libraries—presumably he had to speak to the librarians—very briefly. This disposes of the canard which one of his relations put out that “The only books Bucky ever reads are his own.” However, one could definitely say from that time forward that the only thoughts Bucky has thought have been his own.
45 The first thing he had to do was to learn how to think. He decided that experiences are finite, they begin and end; so he tried to catch himself thinking in terms that did not have to do with experience. When he could not, he was satisfied that he was thinking only in terms of his own experience.
46 Central to his developing philosophy was the fact that everything in the universe was constantly in motion, atomically if not visibly. A boulder, seemingly immovable and dead on a mountainside, is in fact a seething mass of energy. That is the triumphant difference between Newton’s static universe and the new revelation of Albert Einstein’s intuitive Theory of Relativity, which was even then just being confirmed by pragmatic experimentation. All the opposing forces throughout this kinetic picture are always in neat balance, and everything invariably moves in the direction of least resistance. Therefore, Bucky decided,
47 * Thomas Edison did the same thing when in the midst of an experiment. the history of man’s creative endeavor is the story of his effort to control direction by eliminating resistance. To the degree it is controlled the course of society can be better charted.
48 Then Bucky considered the dramatic acceleration of Universe alterations brought about on earth by the very swift progress of the industrial equation in his own lifetime, from the first American automobile in his birth year, 1895, to Lindbergh’s flight across the ocean in 1927, and all the enormous forward progress in every phase of man’s inventiveness in between. To make these advances clearer for study he worked out some mathematical figures. He imagined a globe twenty feet in diameter and representing earth and considered how long a man on foot would take to circumnavigate it if there were a dry path around it. Then he gave the man a horse and that reduced the size of his sphere to a six-foot diameter. Providing man with a clipper ship—a large industrial tool—brought it down to the size of a basketball, trains and steamships reduced it to a baseball. Later, when jet planes were invented, the comparative size of man’s negotiable earth on Bucky’s scale was slightly larger than a pea. All these steps except the horse were due to tools created by industrialization.
49 Therefore, Bucky concentrated on the great advantage man had, gained by the employment of tools created by industry. And he realized that if they were used properly and further developed at an ever-accelerating rate, the glimpse which he first had at the Naval Academy in 1917, of the possibility of all the human race enjoying a high standard of living, with plenty of everything to go around for a hugely increased population of the world, was already within grasp or would be shortly. He became certain that with their environment changed by the elimination of the fear of scarcity, the struggle to “get yours first” would also be eliminated. To quote a favorite Kipling verse of his:
5051No one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame, But each for the joy of the working…
52 That was his first great intuition.
53 It was obvious that such a dramatic environmental revolution would only be accomplished by doing ever more with less. So Bucky set his mind to work, starting with the general principle and moving to a practical application as to how this could best be accomplished. Inevitably, he first thought of housing because it was a basic human need and the most backward of all industries, and also because he had the most experience in it. But he remembered his proposition that in order to avoid opposition from the entrenched vested interests connected with it, he must think and design fifty years ahead of his time. This he did.
54 In his engineering experience Bucky had learned that the strength of various materials was amazingly greater in tension than in compression. It varied from two to one in certain materials like bricks to as great as twenty to one in steel alloys. In other words, if a steel column of a certain diameter could support a load of so many tons in compression, it could support twenty times that weight hanging from it in tension. Houses had always been built by piling things on top of each other so everything was in compression. Obviously, the way to do more with less was to design a house that was suspended in tension which would then require twenty times less supportive material, and still less if the house were built of the lightweight materials then becoming available instead of the conventional bricks and mortar or concrete or wood.
55 Bucky began to plan along these lines, and to read about the latest developments in architecture. The most advances seemed to be taking place in Germany. Inspired by such purely functional American buildings as silos, factories, and warehouses whose clean lines had a pure functional beauty unencumbered by decorative frills, a group of German architects led by Walter Gropius had developed what appeared to be a severe, purely functional style of building, which became known as the Bauhaus International Style.
56 After studying it, Bucky totally rejected it because it only looked modern and was really a fake. All the old steel skeletons supporting the buildings in compression were still there, hidden by “suspended curtain walls.” The modern look was no more than a prestidigitator’s trick resulting in “faddish nonsense.” This attitude was the reason for Bucky’s later heated exchanges with Frank Lloyd Wright, the leading American practitioner of “modern architecture.”
57 As a basis for his own construction plans, Bucky became fascinated with the engineering of lighter-than-air dirigibles. They consisted of rigid frameworks of the lightest available metal alloys tied together by cables in tension. This framework was covered by a thin waterproof envelope within which were individual bags of hydrogen—or, preferably, nonflammable helium—to provide lift. The latest dirigibles were nearly a thousand feet long and capable of carrying fifty passengers and all their life-supporting necessities across the Atlantic. As designed by the Zeppelin works in Germany they were the strongest structures in the world for their weight.
58 Bucky began drawing designs for a building ten or twelve stories high suspended by cables from a strong central mast. The different floors were hexagon-shaped, in conformity with his discovery of the principle that the tetrahedron—a pyramid with four triangular sides—was the basic building block of the Universe because it had the greatest strength with the least surface of any geometric figure. Six tetrahedrons combined to form a hexagon. The life-support machinery was contained in the central mast.
59 One of Bucky’s strongest beliefs was that progress meant mobility. “Trees have roots; men have legs.” Therefore, men should not be rooted in one spot, but free to move all over the earth. So, he reasoned, should their shelters. For that reason his multiple housing unit was designed to be so light that it could be delivered anywhere in the world by dirigible. A foundation hole would be blasted out by a bomb; the central mast dropped into place and anchored firmly in concrete.
60 But, since tying up to sewers and gas mains or electric cables meant putting down roots, Bucky’s dwelling must contain within itself all these necessities. He knew perfectly well that the means of accomplishing this would not be invented for twenty to forty years, but he was deliberately following his principle of being fifty years ahead of his time. However, he did sketch in the systems and general principles by which it would all become possible. He named his invention the 4D—fourth-dimension—house.
61 One of Bucky’s inventive ideas was to be able to open doors and windows or activate other mechanisms by interrupting a beam of light with a gesture of the hand. He went so far as to write to Woolly to ask if General Electric was working on any device that would translate light into power. Woolly wrote back rather irritably that no such thing was in prospect, and why couldn’t Bucky stop fantasizing. Some time later Woolly handsomely sent Bucky an apologetic telegram saying: “you CAN NOW OPEN YOUR DOOR BY WAVING YOUR HAND AFTER ALL STOP WE HAVE DEVELOPED PHOTOELECTRIC CELL AND RELAY STOP SEVENTY TWO DOLLARS FOR THE SET. WOOLLY.”
62 Bucky intended that his dwelling should make it possible for men to live in formerly uninhabitable parts of the earth, in great cold or devastating heat. He discovered that much of the variation in temperature within a house was caused by its wind resistance, which creates a vacuum on the lee side. This effect has since been recognized and is now recorded in a wind-chill index that measures temperature plus wind velocity. To obviate this and conserve heating energy, Bucky designed a streamlined plastic shield to surround his dwelling in rigorous climates. Since neither plastics nor air conditioning had yet been perfected, he was still far ahead of practicability.
63 As Bucky had intended, his plans were so wild that they aroused no anxiety or opposition from the vested interests, who regarded them genially as particularly outrageous science fiction. However, they did arouse a certain interest among devotees of futurism. In 1928, the Chicago Evening Post published an article and drawings by Bucky of one version of his 4D living machine. This was the first breakthrough, the concrete expression of his year of intensive thought.
64 However, like the metaphysical universe, the most important results of his thinking were still invisible. Conceived or gestating in his mind during the great silence were such revolutionary ideas as his energetic-synergetic geometry; his theory of the origin of homo sapiens in the western Pacific, thereafter spreading around the globe by the sea routes following favorable winds and currents, which proved that there were no different races of men, but only one human race; his principle of the tetrahedron as the basic unit of Universe; the dictum that “nature never fails; it always complies with its own laws. Nature is infallible”; apparent failure is due to man’s knowledge being inadequate; life as a pattern in integrity; man as an essential function of Universe and the probability of the ultimate success of man as such; the concept of real wealth as the application of intellect to energy, which can never diminish but must always and forever increase; and the necessity for design science planning on a cosmic scale—that is not through specialization, because nature is never compartmented, but is one indivisible, exquisitely coordinated system.
65 This, of course, is a far from complete list of Bucky’s discoveries and intuitions during this period, many of which were embryonic and subject to development in later years. The point is that he emerged from it measurably closer to his ideal of the cosmogonal man, though still with a remarkable plenitude of human frailties.
