Already familiar with the "bfi" letter? Then,
skip to the letter's link below this
"easing in" material. Below that link, I've added (here) some new
thinking aloud about systalk from an August 2004 eletter to Kirby
Urner. -g.f.
In June of 1996, I sent Jamie Snyder, Bucky Fuller's grandson, a
twenty-two page letter. Actually, I sent this to Jamie and to all
the other people at The Buckminster Fuller Institute when it was in
Santa Barbara. After it left Philadelphia, it migrated through
several southern California locations and finally, this century, has
settled farther north at Stanford University. BFI "housed" Bucky's
archives. A "core" of the archives is his Chronofile. I am linked to
Bucky's Chronofile in a way that is as mystifying to me as it is to
others. My letters to Bucky from 1965 to 1969 were gathered as a
separate binder (or box) and marked by Bucky, apparently, as
important. The Stanford Website lists this item as special. In the
Eighties some of the workers at BFI contacted me. And recently
(2003), a member of a Seminar on Bucky at Stanford did as well.
I wrote letters to Jamie in BFI's early days, usually in response to
things I would see in TrimTab, a newsletter published by BFI. From
the late Seventies, through the Eighties and on into the nineties I
wrote many letters to Kirby Urner and, in the beginning, to Bucky
(who died in 1983) about what Kirby dubbed my systalk. From
the early sixties, I'd watched Bucky with his d-stick systems
modeling the "interior structure" of the temple-opaque
tetrahedron (and other polyhedra) enchanting children. I
thought those names, intriguing and binding to (some) grown-ups
didn't lead, didn't hook the "experiential learnings"... and I
tentatively played simply with translations to get the numbers into
English, at least. By the late Seventies, I wanted considerably
more. I wanted all that Bucky's geometric explorations cast before
me to be in those names, not by association, as much later
naming C60 buckminsterfullerine accomplished, but
directly. English numbers in the names would be only part of a
solution. The Greek names misfocused attention, kept the
entities opaque, "solid". A mistake had been made.
The Greeks, some of whom were serious geometers, named these objects
by the number of faces. This was not necessary. Hold a crystal
between the sun and light-colored dirt or sand (at an ocean's edge)
and you see, projected into a 2D plane, a structure of lines, bound
together at their ends, with shading to define overlapping faces in
projection. Handling Bucky's d-stick systems, I could see the
objects out of projection in full space (we call it 3D, usually).
The material "making up the system" (whatever it was actually made
of in different manifestations), was those "lines", the joining at
the ends being "a binding dance", and the faces, bases or spaces
being resultant areas. What we had, the whole that's more than the
sum, was a system (using Bucky's definition). The
tetrahedron? Well, six "framers" (which is what I called
those lines, trajectories, sticks, energies) defined the system. The
system itself could be called a sys, the plural syses.
No need for a "poly-". The tetrahedron became a
sixsys. Information directly in the name? In this system, we
know we have triangular faces. Each face has three edges. There is a
face on each side of a framer. Six framers give us twelve edges.
Three to a triangle. We have four triangles. The full name of
the tetrahedron is the sixsysthree. We immediately
discover more. The cube and the octahedron are both
twelvesyses, a twelvesysfour and a twelvesysthree, a pair.
You can see where this is going.
In June of 1996, I started a letter to Jaime. I was going to re-tell
the tale of the syses, of course, and another tale I'd been dreaming
that, in this letter, I labeled numerography to play off
Bucky's numerology at the end if Synergetics. Many
looked for some joint birthing of number and geometry.
I'm convinced the secret is in the human hand, rooted in the complex
art of pointing. Even trigonometry (and the sextant) lie in the
hand. The Web version of this letter has a graphic.
As I began thinking aloud, a Bucky-habit, through my fingers and a
keyboard, in the context of having just re-read Bucky's
Cosmography and Ed Applewhite's Cosmic Fishing, the
letter wove in much of that context. I did not include any poems, a
way I have of doing much of my thinking, but I see in retrospect
that I used all my tools as a poet. A brief example, because I just
wove it into a current letter.
I mentioned above writing to Jaime in response to TrimTab. At that
time TrimTab often had news of exhibits of Bucky's work in various
venues and even talk of a group in San Diego who planned to build a
Bucky museum or what later might have been called an Exploratorium.
In a section of the letter labeled "some ups and downs", I focused
on those "exhibits" and about three paragraphs into this thinking, I
wrote this paragraph...
So my grumbling and nudging was always toward showing the trick of
forcing viewers of an exhibit into conceiving what they saw.
Not easy, of course, not even easy to contemplate trying to do. The
exhibit-designer must think in terms of "talking" to those coming
by, as Bucky always did, but without walking out on a platform. It's
more like a puppet show. But a very extraordinary kind of puppet
show. There's the stage. But no puppets come onto it. Rather, the
parts of it turn out to be..."puppets" of a sort. Of course they
live only in the viewer. The designer can't be hanging around. You
see, it's not the puppets that are missing. Or their strings,
really, though those are missing in the sense of being, as yet, only
"implied." The puppet-master is missing, not to be replaced by
motors. The designer isn't the puppet-master after finishing his
designing. The kid who walks up to the exhibit must be awakened from
his or her thrall...to become the puppet-master. But I don't want
to get into those ancient nudgings here, lacking time for it and
contact with your current doings. And having a purpose already for
this letter.
In today's other letter, I followed that paragraph with this
comment...
"But I don't want to get into those ancient nudgings here...". I've
planted a seed (where seed is a past-participial form
of "see"). A gardener puts the seed in its hole, furnishes any
nutrients that might help and replaces soil, waters it initially and
later, and leaves it alone ...to see what sort of
understanding or substance might flourish. It's not
all in the seed. The soil is live. It's mostly in the soil
and what the soil does. Exhibit, inhibit ...it's all in and out....
No letter is ever really finished....
22 page letter on a single Web "scroll"
This recent (August, 2004) thinking on systalk skips over a
lot of letters and eletters over recent years, but shouldn't be to
difficult too follow.
. . .
If I'm a poet, and that means bringing something useful to any
exchange on synergetics, what I bring can't come out of my having
any glimpse of synergetics that's been missed or any expertise
accumulated in my skulletarium. It's got to be that I'm doing
something different or differently.... You've given me a clue here.
Not an answer, but a "net" to catch and grow a new model. A
different understanding of how systalk (your name for my
collection of names) came to be.
I was "open sourcing" concepts, or taking open source privileges.
Doing what I did was using source. Talking about it was "opening"
the source for anybody who wanted to take a swing at it. What's the
"source" of a concept? How it's put together-would be my guess. In
the sixties, when Bucky was apparently keeping my letters (though I
knew about only one 1967 letter he kept, and asked me to read aloud
to him a few months before his death), and I knew he liked talking
to children, and he'd even asked me to build some words (to replace
sunrise and sunset), I suggested decoding the Greek
names into English. Of the tetrahedron I said, many times in
many ways, "...it's one thing with four aspects, catch the
singleness with, say, bod suggesting, but not falling into,
body, and translate tetra as four." Why? Use a listening
child's whole cognitive innards, waken the live writhing of
cognitive "'branes" gathered through the vast, if new, experiential
learnings from day to day being. It's not even harmful if the quiet
one at the rear of the group hears forbode and feels a cool wind
in thinking about this "thing" held in the palm of a hand.
Dazzling the child gives way to implanting some organized knowing
into the forming knowing that will be the child's future. Sure, that
occurs no matter what you call anything or how you present it. Live
minds feed on what's there and grow anyway. I guess what my being a
poet was built of, if anything, was this sense of fitting
experiences into a listener's, or listening reader's on-going
and cumulative experiences.... You asked, probably more than once,
in our long conversations about the syses, "Why not just call [the
polyhedra] what we've always called them?". I could not, then or
now, present any good reason for not doing that. And surely no one,
assuming they hear or read one of my rants, will ever use the
names I build and juggle ...or fiddle with some namings of their
own, certainly none undertaken in this way. Open sourcing concepts.
Isn't that tinkering with Universe? Or reality? Sure.
Conceptualizing is the primal "fine art".
In the eighties, Bucky's shortened decade, I wrote him some letters
again primarily to talk about the syses. After several letters with
sections on this, Bucky asked me not to include these sections, to
put them in a drawer until I could see something he was working on.
Fortunately, I did not have to wait ten years for Cosmography to see
Bucky's tetravertexion.... Anwar Dil published in 1983 Humans
in Universe, a book of conversations he and Bucky had. One of those
conversations was about the tetravertexion. Somebody who'd
written a biography of a pope wrote a book about Bucky. He included
the 1967 letter I'd written when Anne was hurt. This author had
rewritten it in nice periodic sentences. But it was
incomprehensible. I saw it in a public library in the seventies at a
kind of low (and disconnected) time. I thought what I'd written was
incomprehensible and cringed, like you do when you remember
something embarrassing in public and undo it. Dil's book had the
letter accurately reproduced.
Why would Bucky move from tetrahedron to
tetravertexion (as one of my kind of guesses, of course)? If
you move your imagery from the large models with polygonal surface
sections to space-filling and small scale modeling using, perhaps,
marbles ...well, of course your attending moves from those easily
noted vertices packed in. You're still stuck with that four
given the tetrahedral. And given these two names, you run into rough
seas (confusion) when you advance to the next pair and octa and hexa
get reversed. In any case, you've lost the "one thing" quality first
grasped with bod. And you continue to mask the observation (that
Yasushi's work on dodecahedron collapse shows) that six is,
in the minimal system and all others, the defining number (of
Euler's three). We could have a handy trinity with a tetrahedron, a
tetravertexion, and a hexaedgion and ...be "OFF to see the wizard,
the wonderful...!"
So, let's go back. The bod, the "one thing". Say a whittled
tetrahedron that can sit on a desk. Like a painting, it'll lead the
vision of a knowledgeable viewer, or a guided one. The newbie
viewer will see the four faces, or using what e's (he's or she's)
got, a three-sided pyramid. Four-faces is immediately graspable. No
guidance. Little guidance needed to get to the pointy things because
they and the faces are "welded" into the teepee shape.
Either...or...both. Nothing to think about. Edges? Sure, the angling
of faces. But to see the "one thing" it's the so-called edges that
hold apart and gather together the vertices, where edge-ends gather,
and define or frame the faces. Pick up the whittled "one thing" and
look across one of the edges and the tee-pee disappears. It looks
strange. Now, you're dependent upon those "edges". Even at a small
scale, modeled with marbles, bondings and intervals and such are
more fundamental, and the creation of structure, than what's bonded
or intervaled. If we get down to a realm (of pure conception) where
there's only n-dimensional vibratings, there's seemingly nothing
else.
Bod was a kind of asteroid, suitable to throw into a child's
cognitive innards. Around synergetics, though, I figured sys
as a nickname for system was a far, far better thing (than either
kingdom or horse). A few years later, of course, when ad-people went
high tech sys showed up in all sorts of names but in my quiet
realms of thinking that presented no problems. The "universe of
discourse" is a protective buffer. So we have our syses. This
minimal system is the sixsys. Those six whatevers, with their twelve
face-edges bound together with twelve whatever-ends. We know another
thing or two about those six ...well, I call them framers. The
six of them frame the system and three frame each surface section,
with two sections partially framed by each framer. The "source code"
for all three concepts is coming out clearly in this one.
We can use a suffix to add in the section framing. We have a
sixsysthree (6sys3). We don't need to use it. But, for the next pair
we do. We have a twelvesysthree and a twelvesysfour. Since we bring
our source code, our way the concept is put together, out into the
open, we can use it to compute. How many faces and vertices do we
have? Six framers, two section-edges touching. We have twelve
section-edges and three of them to a section. So, we have our four
faces. We had to see the three frames framing the trigon to get our
three and then we computed the four of them. A more complex
seeing to get the vertices and, then compute (twelve ends divided by
three) the number. We see at any corner two framers coming together.
We know there's another three sided section beyond each and another
framer beyond each of those. We guess those far-framers are the same
framer. So, three. Twelve divided by three is four vertices. Insert
another corner out there and we're on our way to modeling the
twelvesysthree.
THAT'S HARDLY THE CONCISE FEW SENTENCES I'D HAVE LIKED, but it's a
minimum to have systalk even hovering anywhere near our
conversation... And it is about the closest I've come to saying
anything "in" or "about" synergetics. I can't dabble in the grammar,
or syntax, of synergetics or of mathematics or computer handling or
the tropes of English majors, since I'd have to look up "tropes" to
even know what that'd involve. I've no training in the psychologies,
either, that would offer support to my notion that it'd make a
difference to a young child, an unrecountable difference, to be
sure, if instead of tetrahedron e (he or she) was introduced to a
fourbod—with just a tiny comment on why bod.
Actually, the child might fill in the sense of body without
the nudge, or with the "one thing" talk as the nudge. Anyway, I've
only the "felt beat" to justify putting this forward ...and, as a
poet, I don't have to defend that, where I might have to otherwise.
Poets are assumed to be weird. Then, I built my edifice from there.
Maybe it's an essay on naming and tying naming to comodeling.
. . .
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