Preface
1The form and the language levels of this book are fitted as closely as possible to their subject; and this subject is a protean maverick. Buckminster Fuller sees global economic patterns where others see nothing more than the tracks of migrant birds, and he finds the autograph of the universe wherever paths of energy interlace.
2 It is a difficult matter to interpret Bucky. He has the genius’ constant onrush of dream flow and dream logic. And he is graced with the quality now known, in cybernetic circles, as positive feedback--- mirror-multiplication of the information communicated. Each thought that Bucky expresses feeds back into his mind, there to generate families of fresher thoughts, broader in scope and more intense.
3 Bucky has never been easy to understand--- even by those best equipped to grasp his meanings, and those who know him best and love him most. The reason is both psychological and semantic. He overloads the channels of communication. He is ever ready to give too much of himself too spontaneously, too richly, and too quickly. The simplest question evokes a torrent of insights. And these he expresses in an incisive, private argot, resplendent with word coinages, hyphenated Latinisms, and tropes.
4 Although his cardinal ideas have about them the skeletal simplicity we associate with the best Greek thought, they sometimes come through to the casual listener as a cascade of ambiguities. And this only because there is too much. You would not expect to take in the first six books of Euclid at a single hearing, nor without a reduction of text language to conversational level. Yet with Bucky, the equivalent of this technical richness is offered untranslated, at each meeting. His conversation, thus, is always a subtle form of flattery. It implies that he believes you are at ease in all the areas of his talk, and that you can with equal agility go ‘‘second powering,’’ ‘‘tetrahedroning,’’ ‘‘inwardly-outwardly-to-and-froing,’’ or go bouncing on a four-dimensional pogo stick down the slopes of Parnassus.
5 This book reflects my impressions and interpretations of Bucky’s life and work, and my deep affection for him --- after almost 18 years of close friendship. And it is my view, biased perhaps by personal warmth, but tempered by hundreds of hours of hard talk, that there is no man in America today who makes as much sense in such a fundamental way.
6 R.W.M.
7New York City
89Buckminster Fuller—you are the most sensible man in New York, truly sensitive. Nature gave you antennae, long-range finders you have learned to use. I find almost all your prognosticating nearly right—much of it dead right, and I love you for the way you prognosticate. To address you directly will be a hell of a way of reviewing your book—I know. I should write all around you, take you apart, and put you together again to show—between the lines —how much bigger my own mind is than yours and how much smarter than you I can be with it and leave the essence of your thought untouched.
10But I couldn’t do it if I would and I wouldn’t if I could. To say that you have now a good style of your own in saying very important things is only admitting something unexpected. To say you are the most sensible man in New York isn’t saying much for you—in that pack of caged fools. And everybody who knows you knows you are extraordinarily sensitive….
11Faithfully, your admirer and friend, more power to you—you valuable ‘unit.’
12Frank Lloyd Wright
13Taliesin
14Spring Green, Wisconsin
15August 8th, 1938.
16 Excerpt from a review by Wright of Fuller’s book, Nine Chains to the Moon (Lippincott, 1938). The passage quoted was published in the Saturday Review of Literature, September 17, 1938.