"One in ages connate poet" *

–R. Buckminster Fuller

Gene Fowler as Thinker

Robert Fay's Eikon, premier issue

Winter, 1967

Portsmith, New Hampshire

My book Waking the Poet (1981) has the above quote on the back cover, with others, under the heading "Of the author as poet..." Below that, under the heading "Of the author as thinker...", is only one quote, from this same article, "In all my life, I have met no more brilliant or naturally articulate thinker than Gene Fowler.". Considering who Bucky had met and my obvious ordinariness, this statement astounds and, I suspect, sometimes angers people. What can Bucky possibly be talking about? Even the most alarmed know that Bucky never talks about "nothing".

I'm writing the essays or sketches to which I will attach this "generic introductory note" in a particular context in the last months of 2003 CE and probably in the early months of 2004. I recently completed an eight scroll (page, if you like, though that applies to what is printed on cut sheets, each of my scrolls being quite a few pages if printed) e-letter to a student at Stanford. She is participating in a Seminar dealing with Bucky's Chronofile (now housed at Stanford). The Chronofile isn't limited to exchanged letters and it does not contain anybody’s letters as a separate "set". However, Bucky did include my letters to him from 1965 through 1969 under a separate cover. This, like the quotes I include above, has no doubt puzzled people who come upon these letters. It has, however, in the eighties and again this year, drawn a few into the letters. I have not seen any of the letters since writing them and know only vaguely what they must contain, which would be the "roots" of pieces of (perhaps) Bucky-like thinking, or thinking about Bucky-related matters.

The Stanford student found a current email address for me, and sent me an email. She invited me to come to Stanford and talk with the participants of the Seminar. I was, from the beginning, reluctant to venture forth or talk publicly in any situation. I also knew, as I wrote my letter, that I would not be bringing what they hoped for in any case. I had taken a quite ordinary sentence from this "Philosophy of Science" student's letter ("I am sure you have much to say about your influence on one another") and, leaning back in my chair (from the keyboard), I ventured into some very unusual thinking about the nature of influence, about Bucky's influence on my thinking and imagining, and about at least one instance of my possibly nudging his thinking and imaging into an altered imagining.

The "re-gathering" that follows sketches insightings (incitings ?) I've thought and imagined before, but now, apart from brighter resolution coming out of doing it again, I'm wide-open to the currents of in-flowing occurring from before 1965 and continuing even into this new century and millennium, much of it from Bucky. It's the "moves of mind" you'll want to sense and follow. Whatever "materials" I utilize or realize, you can get further details and comprehensive views from my other writings. I may, as in the Stanford letter, advance some of my thinking, imagining, and conceptualizing through poems. Don't skip these, but rather shake your scapulae—where unused wings lie, pressed down into your skin—loose to "catch a fiercing up wind" and take these vision flights with me...

The Once & Future (and Current) “Dark Ages”

“No mystery,” says Goldie (Goldilocks). “Everything behaves as carefully reconsidered experience says it does. Nothing is perverse except humans’ natural propensity for trying to explain dynamic interrelationships while thinking only of static models.”

Tricap 8 Stone 8

TETRASCROLL

GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS

A COSMIC FAIRY TALE

R. Buckminster Fuller

St. Martin’s Press

(1975, 1982)

In 1980, Alvin (and Heidi) Toffler published The Third Wave to set up a framework for organizing their observations of the goings on within the current “civilization” or, as they put it, the current clashing of civilizations. The idea of clashing civilizations accounts for the turbulence and seeming inconsistencies—assuming that even a “single” civilization would show consistency. Even a single human doesn’t do that. Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / I am large, I contain multitudes.”. It had long been common to talk of civilization as having an agricultural age and an industrial age and to assume a shift in civilization’s going forward. And in the seventies there was much talk of a post-industrial age. Agriculture and, absorbed culture, a growing complex, natural, and “growing” was the method. Industry and ...well, industriousness. Purposeful doings, and “building” was he method. Now, ...well, whatever characterizes the “emerging” age there’s no good sense of what it might be. The tries, even much later, boiled down to things like the information age and such. Nothing useful has surfaced yet, though we’ve rolled over into a new century and even a new millennium. Post-industrial? Many sense both a line (or “wave front”), a going-forward, building on what went before, and a circling back (“reflection”?) as the “third” age seems to show characteristics of the “first”, an alluring noble primitiveness amid the frenzy not yet attributed to clashing of different ages, since they are “felt” to be static and sequential.

What Toffler’s book bright in was the idea of “spreading” civilizations rather than static ages, each civilization (to sort them into layers conceptually) was a spreading wave of activities, ways, nuances and influences.... Waves clash and we get reinforcements and interferences, knottings, to catch all this up into some of Bucky’s sailor’s language and thinking.

I read Toffler’s book a couple years after it came out, and, being a poet and not a social, or other kind of, scientist, being intrigued by those looking into cognitive workings and writing about it, I saw in this “engine” in our innards the deep change of focus to match the previous ones. I used the –al ending to match “agricultural” and “industrial” and minted cognitional civilization, since Toffler’s waves had shifted ages into civilizations. Physicists were putting the observer and the measurer into their models and I saw that as getting the surface reflections of the deeper putting in of the cognitive apparatuses. I wrote Toffler and got a letter back. He didn’t comment on my suggested name for the emergent civilization or third wave, but he was glad I was interested and thinking about it. It doesn’t matter much, but as something helpful, should you want to know where some of my thinking and imagining in this paper comes from, it’s worth setting out here.

THE DARK AGES STILL REIGN over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear.

This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains or locks. Instead, it is locked by Misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand.

We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

Some concepts have been imagined by humans to be real: up and down, straight lines that extend to infinity, measurement based on squares and cubes *. For ages, humans have mistakenly thought that solids were truly solid and that several lines could conceivably pass through the same point at the same time. Humans have deceived themselves that the existence of one, two, and three dimensions is independently demonstrable and that there is factual evidence proving the existence of more than one race of human beings. .And further.... ...

...

Misorientation, wrong beliefs, and conditioned fixations are escapable only when that which is physically and metaphysically true becomes experimentally provable and comprehensible. The untrue is rendered spontaneously obsolete only by the demonstration of that which is true. It is here I am compelled to begin.

...

This book presents my individual efforts to escape the clutches of the Dark Ages, but in a larger sense it shows the beginnings of our species’ epochal rebirth, which I call the dawn of Einstein’s Universe.

pages 1-2

Cosmography

R. Buckminster Fuller,

Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Adjuvant

Macmillan

(1992 – nine years after

Bucky’s 1983 death)

In 1987, Doris Lessing (a British novelist) published her 1985 Massey lectures. I mention the book (the five lectures) here because the title: Prisons we choose to live inside. Quite a few people have “published” this concept, of course, in many forms and terms. Perhaps everybody glimpses, now and then, the apparent situation that the darkness, the imprisonment, however it got there, exists within us, however dangerously it is reinforced by things set up exterior to us, perhaps even dungeons with banished lighting. One of Lessing’s epigraphs (for the book) is from Friedrich Hebbel. “It would be a good thing if man concerned himself more with the history of his nature than with the history of his deeds.” Hebbel’s recognition is that human nature isn’t constant since it seems to have a history. certainly, our cognitive apparatuses, though rooted in hardware, or wetware, seem, in a basic sense, since they are our nature, to be shape-shifters. or “we” are.

I’ll take Bucky’s thoughts on the Dark Ages and his long effort to extricate himself and the others from them, as he put these down on paper literally “in his last days”. And I’ll think and imagine “out loud” taking off from various points in the above and elsewhere (in the paper) quoted paragraphs. I’ll plug in sub-headings to help a listening reader along.

Reification of any concept darkens Universe

Some concepts have been imagined by humans to be real: up and down, straight lines that extend to infinity, measurement based on squares and cubes. For ages, humans have mistakenly thought that solids were truly solid and that several lines could conceivably pass through the same point at the same time. Humans have deceived themselves that the existence of one, two, and three dimensions is independently demonstrable and.... [Italics added –g.f.]

Imagined to be real would be fine. Children birthe, maintain and expand their minds in let’s pretend and those not too seriously de-geniused will as adults engage in “thought experiments” and “scenario testing”. But, reification, a kind of ossification, develops when let’s pretend slips over into make believe...and a darkening enters into the mind-making of the victim who is actually made to believe unconditionally. Let’s pull two related items from Bucky’s list above and do a little reconsidering. The straight lines that extend to infinity and the “reified” independently (of us) demonstrable one, two, three dimensions. Bucky is going on, in Cosmography, to deal with a 4D (to replace our 3D) space, arranged sixsysally or tetrahedrally. And you likely already know he does not deal with “lines” as things that can pass through the same point at the same time or extend toward any undefined “infinities”. If the “line” is an energy-event traveling a great circle, it might travel for ...well, a very long time. But points with no extension, lines with no cross-section, planes with no thickness are, with Cheshire Cat grins, ...banished.

Let’s take Goldie’s advice and reconsider experience. Bucky defines his four dimensional space as involving 4 planes of persistent symmetry. The four planes are the four faces. They aren’t all grouped at one corner (a hub in our d-stick sixsys). This seems a bit unfamiliar not because we’re talking about four dimensions, but because we’re talking about planes rather than lines on which we note the shadows cast by the full-space objects or intervals measured. In our 3D space, we have the familiar “corner” made by, say, two walls and floor all meeting. Our planes are made by taking our three reference-lines two at a time. In one of those 4D corners (our hubs), we aren’t in touch with one of those planes. It’s off in front of us. In fact, our corner can go flying elastically through it, but that’s all down another rabbit hole. The lack of persistent symmetry in our 3D space? Well, if you shave a face of the sixsys the sixsys remains symmetrical, though scaled down. If you shave a face on your twelvesysfour, you no longer have a twelvesysfour, or a “cube”. Now, for a geometer and possibly for a builder, even a Universe builder, it certainly matters that things MIGHT be stretched in one plane or shortened in another, though if it’s only the “extensions” of the plane and not any “fabric” it likely wouldn’t make a detectable difference. You’d have to know (by feedback) that your space was not a “perfect” cube, but a stretched or squashed one.

Choosing the real:

The trouble with choosing which Universe is a better one to “make real”, is that, when we reconsider experience, we’re looking at measuring-systems and whatever comparisons we make, we should not be looking to choose a “best” and reify it, make it real. Engineers still use Newton’s, not Einstein’s equations because they “make better sense” in the situations where they are still used. That’s a bit deeper, too, than that they are simpler. And any equations give only approximations. The important thing is that we don’t reify our measuring systems. Of course, Universe, even if you don’t use Bucky’s formal definition (“...the aggregate of all humanity’s consciously apprehended and communicated (to self and others) experiences”), is, in most everybody’s definition or description, an interior construct. You could say, we should not reify any of it. We probably couldn’t coordinate our legs to walk if we didn’t make it somewhat real. And, like those engineers using Newton’s heuristics (“rules of thumb”, whether or not called “the system of the world”), we’ve got to use what works at the scale within which we live and what is thoroughly woven into the fabric of our conceptual and physical tools.

Let’s pretend:

You’d have a devil of a time walking around among those four planes even in a “let’s pretend” and, at best, would forget when to duck or how to keep track of measurements from that far off plane. But we’ve tied the 3D in with our personal coordinate systems, too, which is why Bucky thought up/down was “cubical” (it’s actually, by his definition, precessional, which also involves 90-degree shuntings). Bucky thought we could conveniently replace up/down with in/out. By reexamining experience, we find that we were ignoring our human skill at switching coordinate systems, cueing ourselves as to when to do that. As riders on this planet, we’re very much aware of cosmic or nodal coordinates (where your in/out relative to “centers” is useful), but as stretched out beings, we have personal coordinate systems that are better regarded as cylindrical. So, we’ve up/down, forward/back, left/right dynamics. In fact, this “shunting” system probably pushed us toward our “apparently” symmetrical (hence cubical) coordinates as reference-lines (directions) and, as we moved about, planes. The cylinder explains why precession, and not perpendicularity, (probably) led to our three-plane corner and resultant 3D-space. The cylinder is “circular” in the horizontal—all the way out to the apparent edge (it’s a contour) of our horizon disk. We’re sort of flat (well, curved) land “circle”-beings riding on a giant “sphere”-being.

3D-space and precession:

The cylinder explains why precession, and not perpendicularity, (probably) led to our three-plane corner and resultant 3D-space. This is a key sentence, or sentient-catch, in understanding how, in this new cognitional age, everything, however minor, however selectable, however anything, must be carefully reconsidered. And that doesn’t mean running through “old” thinking, or older “new” thinking, to see if it contains errors. It means getting along in a radically shifted contemporary context. Realizing (okay, that’s a way of “making real”) that we got our 3D space from a dynamic precession, not from a static but admired perpendicularity. How desirable could perpendicularity be, if it looms up in nature as a cliff you can’t climb (but can fall off). Anyway, I’ve a hunch the conveniently entered corner came first and the xyz-coordinates only later. We didn’t reify the system, but discovered it in (a static picture of) our pre-reified “reality” (experience).

Nature makes twelvesysfours or hexahedra with “variable” length “framers” and it does this, two, with sixsyses or tetrahedra, even if only because clumped matter-knots interfere with tensional tightenings. The geometer is fascinated by those “regular” (or perfectly tightened to snug, tuned)) systems and nature makes those, too, or close to them. In some “domains” they may become both more ephemeral and ethereal (or enspacialized, more “space” or “apartness” pumped in) and closer to the ideal—which likely means that the ideal is a limit approached as the “impurities” we call materials are squeezed out. One thing happening in our “spreading” cognitionally-based civilization, is that we’re becoming more and more aware that we’re full let’s pretend participants in all our conceptualizing and all our perceptualizing, too. We can’t watch our “cognizing” because it’s too fast and too complex, and, who knows, we may even repress (from our awareness) some of the goings on. Then, there is hardware, maybe even firmware, just plain not accessible whatever we do. But the simplest “reconsidering” here led not just to a reconciliation with Bucky’s interests, but an integration—through finding precession operative in our casting into Universe our 3D space-charting. An interesting thing to know about ourselves is when and why we switch coordinate systems (and are they systems in Bucky’s sense, in which a 3D-space would have to “complete” as a cube), how scale figures in, how, more generally, we cue ourselves to switch.

Planes and lines:

What about our plane in space, and the line extended to infinity. The plane is a board, a plank, and the line is thread or chalk dust or something laid down on it. Two lines can’t pass through one point (time has been squeezed out of these low-energy events) without intermingling some of their chalk dust and can’t at all if it’s threads. The plank has thickness. When we know that we’re working within ourselves, in a let’s pretend we can consider the plank and chalk or the plank’s “surface” and marks on it. When we do this, we can have Euclid’s geometry and even the fifth postulate. We don’t confuse it with even the piece of universe that is the plank with chalk dust on it (though we’ve only imagined, or pretended, even that). We’ve take off an impression as if it were a print made from a lithograph stone. We know what we’re doing. You have to know what you’re doing to ride a bicycle, even though we do most of what we do using trained-in reflexes. Thinking, imagining, and let’s-pretending should be related to as intelligently as bicycle riding. “Extending to infinity”? Extending beyond the “horizon of interest”. Given this, you can see why the fifth postulate was okay relative to available experiences, even after we found we lived on a sphere, not a flat. The scale on which we drew or imagined was such that Earth’s curvature didn’t enter in. People at sea of course would have gone to see where that tall ship seemed to be sinking. It was “going down” too slowly to have fallen over an edge.

Non-visual imagining:

I’ve added “let’s pretend” to “think” and “imagine” in my lists above. How does it differ from imagining? Most people who’ve done any serious imagining or tried to get others to do it as I do in my poems, do not hold their imagining to the visual, or mostly visual, perhaps with a sound track, when serious about it. People even ask one another, “Can you imagine what it felt like?”. But I want another “level” of full participation. Consider what I’m asking to sense in this second part of a poem about a A Day at the Beach.

ii     Playing Catch

i find pebbles
    in the wet sand
dark agates
veined in white
dull bloodstones
         blue green bits
of fossilized sea
smoothed glass
    taken from men
returned as pebbles
i grind my knee
         in the sand
a rough wearing
a sound of the sea
    an erosion
scrape knuckles
taking up pebbles
         the sea has left
i run heavily
    in the tight sand
kicking up foam
throwing the pebbles
         far out
to sea and waiting
for them to wash in

I’m nudging a listening reader as much toward tactile and muscle feelings as toward visual sightings.... After the “double” hearing of “the sea has left” (pebbles and departure),

i run heavily
    in the tight sand
kicking up foam

In the tight sand, not wet sand, as the water is sucked out of it by the returning underflow.... I didn’t know it at the time, but I was doing let’s pretend and the let’s is key, because I was reaching out to my listening (and hearing) reader to come play with me at the sea’s edge.... When Bucky set out to explain precession without being driven to quantum mechanists’ “equations” (a un-modelable balancing act), he took his listener or listening reader out onto the track and field grass and over to the hammer thrower’s circle and invited you to watch and then become the thrower, to feel in your arms, shoulders, back and legs the angular momentum you could generate using muscles you, maybe, don’t have. He then took you over to the campus machine shop to build a robotic hammer thrower out of whom would come first a flywheel and then a gyroscope, but for a bit there, if you were open to it, it was let’s pretend. No harm either, here, in letting it become make believe. It’s better than what you’ve got and it won’t “tilt’ you in the 3D space in which you live. Take Bucky’s hammer thrower, what you could feel in your arms, shoulders, back and legs as you threw that hammer with the thrower (and how’s that for physical empathy), and apply it to hearing my poem about, not “flights of fancy”, but, after unfolding wings left unused and bringing those wing-controlling muscles into play, vision flight....

VISION FLIGHT

All the crap falls
away -
sea weed tangle
sliding off a wet suit -
and the sea battered shaman
pulls himself ashore -

The wonderful wizard of All
ready to go for it
again -

Sniffs the air,
peels off the regulation
wet suit,
lets the invisible
tickle body hairs,

Spreads scapulae
to catch

A fiercing up wind.

Dark Ages camouflaged in “dark light”

In Cosmography’s second chapter, titled just Einstein, Bucky tells of how, in his first book, Nine Chains to the Moon, he he devoted the middle of three chapters on Einstein to starting with Einstein’s conceptual context, his experiences to the extent that they were public record, and working out how Einstein came to think as he did how he’d come to formulate his thinking into his relativity concepts and formulae. Einstein liked what Bucky put forward and approved the publication of the typescript. Early in the Cosmography chapter, Bucky retold a tale from that earlier Chapter 4, of how somebody makes a breakthrough but the academy holds back until there’s experimental evidence and only then does the discovery or concept appear in school textbooks. At that point the new concept enters the thinking environment of the everyday educational system. Technological innovators begin using this in their thinking about “old” problems. Following an invention of a new artifact, there’s a gestation lag until the invention is picked up by an industry. Only then do tools and good “springing from” the invention change the everyday socioeconomic “climate” and physical environment. After this...

Eventually, the altered environment induces everybody to think spontaneously like the scientist whose reasoning led to the original breakthrough.

My scribbled in marginalia beside that end-of-a-paragraph was “Altered conceptual environment”. Today, I might have written “altered cognitional environment”. I was happy enough with the idea that our use, and sometimes storage, of a concept was as buried, or partially buried, as we know our cognitive apparatuses to be. My original note does show that the changes in the apparatus are changes affecting the group in what we’ve got, considered apart from the apparatus, a “conceptual environment” which is pretty much the meaningfulness of our experiential environment or Universe. People extracting patternings from their experience and so taking in concepts not articulated directly for them may not notice, though when the concept is articulated for them, they will have a definite intuitive boost in “making sense” of it. If somebody is aware of extracting patterning and enters into some “on purpose” digging, e (he or she) may experience discovery on e’s (his or her) own. Of course, the patterning is in a chunk of pre-organized experience so the discovery can’t quite be called “original”.

Euclid’s “point”—has “heading”:

Bucky was a product of the spreading industrial civilization while I, to some extent because of my encounter with Bucky, am a product of the beginning to spread (accelerating) cognitional civilization. Bucky’s approach to understanding Einstein, laid out in Chapter 4 of Nine Chains, was that of a “third wave” (cognitional civilization) mind. He backed up into Einstein’s life and worked forward from there. Then, he went to his central point as the technologist. And he began producing artifacts at all conceptual and physical levels. He looked forward to the final stage, when ordinary folks in a car that could “turn on its heel”, so to speak, might induce a passenger to experience a zen-like “enlightenment” about the nature of turning.... Or, given the car, that waking soul might even make Seymour Pappert’s (turtle geometry) discovery that a point, yup, Euclid’s basic point, has not only position, but “heading”. Pappert’s book came out in 1980 and I expect I saw it in the early eighties because I was fooling around with programming using Phillippe Kahn’s (he didn’t write it, Anders Heilsberg did) Turbo Pascal and somebody, maybe Borland, gave away a Turtle Geometry program. It was only a few days ago that I found a used copy of Pappert’s Mindstorms in Black Oak Books, down the hill from where I live in north Berkeley. An intriguing look at non-degeniusing “teaching”. Previously, I’d only noted how his childhood play with some old gears prepared him to learn “simultaneous equations” in algebra class. In any case, I’d hit on the idea of a point having a heading. Probably in the seventies, maybe even in the sixties when Bucky was saving my letters, I looked at the (plane) triangle and that mysterious 180-degree “constant”. My context was Bucky pointing out that on Earth, a drawn triangle actually is two drawn triangles, one interior to the drawn gons and one exterior to it. Bucky mentioned, often, the 180-degree constant in the small-scale (relative to Earth) triangle.

Walking the walk * :

I was bothered by it’s having no meaning, making no sense. I could unhinge one corner of the triangle and lay out the three gons as one line and say the 180-degrees represented the “angularity” of that line, but it felt, as I said it, like a stretch. That line wasn’t the one walked off. The actual lines (three) were the gons and their extensions out beyond the turns. Bucky was talking about the interior angle at a corner as being theta and the external angle being 360 – theta. But that was the drawn triangle. How about the drawing triangle (dynamic)? I could ride the pencil tip like Einstein’s light beam, or simply “walk off” a triangle. So I stand at one corner, like a gymnast doing e’s “floor” routine. I walk down the first gon to its end, and I turn the necessary degrees to walk down the next gon to its end. If the interior angle is to be 60-degrees, my turn will be 120-degrees.The actual (unhinged) line, the gon, extended, is a 180-degree line and it bisects the 360-degree circle. Half the circle is gone as soon as I start walking. If we have an equiangular triangle, my three 120-degree turns add up to 360-degrees. I kept turning one way, left or right, and I come to my original corner, make a turn, my third, and I’m facing down the same “heading” as when I started. I guess in any triangle walked off, my three turns have to add up to that 360-degrees. Or any polygon. Unlike the original constant, this one makes sense. I’ve done a full orbital turn in three partial turns. It’s a 360-degree turn. I could have rotated (on my heel, as it were) and accomplished the same thing. But I’d not have walked off a triangle which I can then study. We still “think inside” our triangle, ignoring Bucky’s “other” triangle and my partitioning of its corner, so if you do this, you’ll likely think of the inside angle you have and do a quick 180 – theta to get your turn. and then you’ll think, “But I’m keeping track of theta, not 180 – theta...). At least, now, space seems to be thought of in a structuring sense. The exterior “corner” is structured and so more interesting.

You could say, the triangle we originally saw was seen in a “dark light”. It was clear, we could name parts and their relations, we could, generally, work on and with it. The “experience” was lighted. It was not left in the dark characterizing Bucky’s Dark Ages, but it wasn’t lit up as it is a few moments when we’ve walked it off and thought about structuring our sense of the space “around” it. So, it’s as if there is “no” light, “dark” light, and “bright” light, all being relative, of course, and in context. And the triangle seemed brightly lit enough. An argument can be made, that this new light brings up only distractions from the business at hand. What’s mainly changed is us.

An “altered conceptual environment”:

Remember the “altered conceptual environment”? We seem to have that, a little, here. Now, points, as Pappert put it, having “heading”. More fundamentally, points move, or you move them. Since a point is, in any case, a location, a result of a human’s pointing, and not a thing, any thing we embody it in will have to move. Pappert made a robotic Turtle (point) for children with whom he worked. They moved the Turtle on the floor before moving it on the computer screen. They didn’t observe the Turtle and extract concepts. They instructed a Turtle (point) and extracted relations between their instructions, the turtles actions and the results. This is different than (though not a replacement for) the phenomena Bucky saw as altering the conceptual environment. This is considerably more active. For all the light that’s been cast on points, in all the theorizing, the light cast didn’t suggest that a point might, as a built in potential, if not a manifesting action, have something called a “heading” or “facing”. So, again, we can say we have dark light. It’s not no light or dim light. It’s just dark light—and it’s what the once and future and current Dark Ages “are made of”.

Artifacts as schools:

Walking off a triangle instead of drawing it from “on high” can change the quality of the light, of “enlightenment”, which I’ve always interpreted as casting light into the dark, seeing what you could not see a year, or a week, or a few minutes earlier. But let’s go back to altering the conceptual environment in the sense that Bucky describes not for the discoverers, the enlightened, but for the general public as a result of seeing ,handling, using artifacts. After all, concepts, even words (or phrases) are artifacts actually embedded in the conceptual environment. The discovered concept is an artifact and so is an explanation, interpretation, teaching, whatever. I’m not referring to those things or the “shortcut” (secant line) passing from the cognoscenti to the unwashed, but to something very like a car that rotates rather than turns (or close enough) or a house that rotates or a sky-break bubble that ...well, delights the heart. I’m going to show you (and don’t say, “Ho. hum, here comes systalk again, because I’m only using the names here to talk about light) how a name is such an artifact, and how name-changing, like shape-changing can rebuild the light in the conceptual environment, in the cognitive environment, which is where we actually live. In the “preface” section of my 1996 letter to Jaime Snyder (Bucky’s grandson) at the Buckminster Fuller Institute, I said this about the upcoming sections on sixes and syses:

You can guess, probably, that I'm going to be talking in the main part of this seemingly "omnidirectional diatribe"...about some name changing. But under that will lie significant reconceptioning (rebirthing) and it is not the superficial business even the most interested have assumed, unremittingly, that it must, definitely must, be. I change the names following Bucky's rule: Don't reform people, reform the environment. Well, the names are the "interface" (Gawd-awful term, isn't it?) between a human and at least the metaphysical aspects of the environment. Hell, even dogs learn a few names, and dolphins more, to get close enough to our Universe to siphon some food out of it. So...I hope you don't groan and refuse to imagine on with me....

I put forward a new name in place of an old name, sixsys for tetrahedron. I’ve replaced one artifact with another. In doing so, I’ve changed what is extractable from the observed, handled and used artifact-in-use. An object is being looked at or called up in imagination. Both names are more or less meaningless syllables (for somebody in an English speaking country) on initial contact. But there is context. Somebody is going to be talking about the object and other similar objects, maybe how to take one apart or put it together, with some materials or in guided imagination. So, what the word and its parts mean will be told. And that invites, in this case, some structural information, a reference to the “detectable” parts, aspects, etc.. Hedron is face or base and tetra is the number four. The name, in English is four-face. The object has, as Euler noted, four faces or plane-sections, four vertices and six face-separations. Euler called the latter edges which is confusing, and so already a darkening of the light, because the four triangular faces have twelve edges. The “six” refers to “edge-to-edge” interfaces or framers. The tetrahedron, then, is an artifact from which, handling it, we can come to extract a sense of structure with faces in the foreground, face-corners meeting at vertices and edges sort of delineating it all. It’s well-lighted enough, but it’s dark light, and further darkening, as I said, in counting the meeting of two edges as a single edge. Faces are “central” and that fits well with our sense of “solids” and other opacities. This is definitely a Dark Ages artifact, this name embedded in our conceptual environment. Hexahedron, cube, ...it’s all “old” pre-Einstein world. Going outward from this name, even a geodesic dome can be a kind of solid thing—while a tensegrity-sphere cannot be if it’s been seen even once, even in a photograph.

Consider sixsys. I seem to have pushed emphasis from faces to edges, but right now you might be puzzled because I’ve already said that six is not the count of the edges given four triangles. You can extract the sense that I’m counting something separating those twelve edges (in pairs). Right away, a different sort of light is radiating. Something holds those edges apart and in fact defines the faces, perhaps as a by-product result of whatever “it” is doing. Just the six, in the context of my remark about the number of edges four distinct faces would have, and Universe has shifted a bit. Then, I’ve put sys in place of hedron (face). That’s not a move to edges or vertices. Bucky, at the end of his life (last year or two), perhaps prodded by my letters on syses, but not prodded all the way, because he was working on space-filling and centers, introduced tetravertexion (keeping Greek numbering). In writing about this, I added sixedgion to fill out the “set”. I did not use hexedgion because I insist on using the local language’s number to allow a child’s full complement of experiences to pump knowing into e’s sensing. No sys in that set. Honoring Bucky’s definition of system, I took what would be an identifiable (in and of itself) truncation of system which was sys. A few years later, this syllable became a fundamental part of “high tech”-sounding product names, but that’ll settle down in time. I name the entity and sort one from another by giving the number of framers or structural members (be those joined edges, sticks, trajectories of energy-events, whatever).

This creates more explicit information to extract, and cleaner light for viewing it even subliminally. And I actually throw one more piece of information into the name itself. Sixsys is a truncated nickname. The full name is sixsysthree (6sys3). You might guess, being at home with tetrahedron that I’ve brought solidity back, brought the faces back. I have not. A glance at the object cues the observer to know that every “edge” has a face on each of two sides (not truly opposites, though I usually write that, but there is an angle) has two faces “attached”. What that –three says is that three of our framers will have a given face on one side of them. Or that face, or hole, will edge on three framers. Given six framers, we have twelve edges. Three to a (triangular) face? We have four faces. We know we also have twelve framer-ends. We can see that we have three to a hub, corner, vertex. So, we have four of those as well. We can extract a whole lot of information from this name and, if we’ve come to know it, the name serves as a pretty good mnemonic device.

If we take the syses as a group, the light comes to have a golden hue and we see into the cosmic ordering of universometry. We have two twelvesyses, a twelvesysfour (hexahedron, cube) and a twelvesysthree (octahedron). Anyone who knew Euler’s equation knew of the relation. The cube had six faces and eight vertices while the octahedron had eight faces and six vertices. What binds them together, though, is having the same number of framers and using them in differing figure-shaping groups. In both we have 24 edges and 24 framer-ends. 24/4 = 6 square faces and 24/3 = 8 triangular faces. Interchange those to get the vertices, 8 and 6. The “regular solids” are a sixsys, a pair of twelvesyses and a pair of thirtysyses. Bucky’s Vector Equilibrium (cuboctahedron) is a twentyfoursysthree,four. In the latter, we have forty-eight “edges”. We have a square and a triangle on each side of a framer and so we have twenty-four edges of each. We have six squares and eight triangles, or fourteen faces. We have forty-eight framer-ends and if we observe that four go into a vertex, we can take 48/4 = 12 to get our twelve faces.

All that is extractable intuitively over time even if these calculations are not brought up in discussion, but only parts and angles and how to put together modeling materials. The numbers of faces, vertices, and framers, even if called edges, are present even no calculations are discussed and two of those numbers are in the names. It’s basic “grammar” school arithmetic. It’s in the cognitive unconscious and operative there all the time. The calculations and what they show will be hovering as almost-intuitions in the conceptual atmosphere. And geometric things, too. Those interchanged numbers in the two twelvesyses “suggesture” the presence of one’s vertices in the other’s face centers—sticking “through” the faces, of course. These are all things you can know about the tetrahedron, the cube and the octahedron, but not things you can actually extract from the names or even be reminded of by the names. You could say, all or much of this is, due to the Greek names, dark light camouflage for Dark Ages sensing in terms of solids, opacities, relation-less entities, energies and events.

Escaping from the Dark Ages

This book presents my individual efforts to escape the clutches of the Dark Ages, but in a larger sense it shows the beginnings of our species’ epochal rebirth, which I call the dawn of Einstein’s Universe. [ Italics added –g.f. ]

Bucky wrote this near the opening of Chapter 1, The Dawn of Einstein’s Universe. But, you really see how he went back and then forward into Einstein’s Universe in Chapter 3, titled just Einstein. And where he went from there through all the later chapters of this probably not easy to find book. The key concept here is individual efforts and it will take considerable individual effort to not just acquire information, even sensitively responded-to information, as you follow his tale,—because you want to follow shifts in his cognitive innards as he cumulatively gathered ...well, angular momentum of a cognitive sort. You can follow Bucky into and through this book and you can expand paragraphs or single sentences using his other books, such as Tetrascroll (particularly) and Critical Path and the older, sometimes difficult to locate, books. Synergetics I & II, completely integrated, are on-line. You’ll come out at the end with a jump-start on even trained, professional specialized thinkers on at least a rough conceptual “gist” of how Universe works. But, you’ve followed the tale of someone’s escape, and, if you’ve filled out the experiential sense of that following, you’ll have the feeling of escaping and of having broken into an outer cosmos. Maybe like Dave as a new-born in that bubble off-planet at the end of the Clarke-Kubrik film 2001. What about your own escape? And in this later cognitional civilization, overlapping but not simultaneous with the passing industrial civilization?

Here are two paragraphs from Bucky’s second chapter, Discoveries of the Human Mind (whose subtext might be Discovering the Human mind). I omit a paragraph between them and reverse their order.

To learn is to regain the cosmically comprehensive conceptual realization of our innate genius—to use our minds. [.italics added –g.f. ]

The greater complex is never predicted by the parts of the lesser complex. Therefore, I surmise that to learn anything you must start with the whole—with Universe. [ italics added –g.f. ]

The paragraph I’ve placed first here is the key. To pull up those connate waters, in the rock from its time of formation, the genius inherent on our human being, the capability grasping comprehensively patternings around and passing through us, use your mind, your cognitive apparatuses and what’s gathered, already, within them and by them. Usually, somebody’s said to be a genius in some area because e (he or she) is better at it than others who are very good. Genius is often considered out past the end of just talent. It’s pretty much assumed there is a break or leap. Like “enlightenment” in the East, it’s out there, and long and difficult work travels the path if there is a path, but the work isn’t focused on the outcome. that has to be a gift. We can see, however, in Bucky’s sorting out of what brain and mind do, which means what you can do with them, considering them as your closest in “tools”, that you can work directly at geniusing or minding. You can get the hang of it by observing, and thinking about, geniusing about, even, Bucky’s recounting of his escape—as he, back when he was writing Nine Chains to the Moon, observe and thought about how Einstein “got to” his revelatory geniusing. What’s important in this key is the definitely implied idea that geniusing is something that you do. We’ve been de-geniused by people’s, and events’, discouraging us from doing it.

What’s this activity we can undertake? All thinking, imaging, perceiving and behaving involves mind as well as brain and it’s only in thinking about it that we sort out “special case” and “inter-case pattern” thinking and imagining. But that’s enough to allow us to do more of the latter on purpose. We can look for inter-case patterns. We can play with them. Human development, a technical term for growing up, seems to be opening more to these contextual and cross-contextual patternings. This is why it’s said that children’s experience is more vivid than an adult’s. The child is far closer to the details, noticing each ...well, vividly. The adult is pumping more knowing into e’s (his or her) sensing. The more “gown” person is using e’s mind more and e’s senses not less but more as “background” processes, to borrow a bit of modeling from the computer I’m typing on. Someone who goes on developing, I’d guess, stays child-like in that e (he or she) can “zoom” in and out, broaden and narrow focus, hold a “sense” of vivid details and a sense of vivid patternings. I’ve seen (which means, I guess I’ve read rather than heard) discussions of this here and there from the fifties on, I’ve never seen anyone mention what “vivid” might be expanded to mean. The word implies live, but he suggestion is of color, brightness, visually detailed, colorful, animated. My discussion of Bucky’s hammer thrower above assumes that vivid detail is joined with when you feel, in arms lifting and hanging on, in back and shoulder muscles handing the pull back and forth among themselves, in legs bracing and balancing, being a human fly ...wheel. The more vividly you can experience in your mind’s body that hammer-throw, the more “deeply” you c’n understand the concept of a dynamic, energetic second-powering Universe. that, of course, is why Bucky begins with the hammer thrower, goes on to a mechanical hammer thrower, and only from there on into a gyroscope.

you have to understand, and imagine, through all your senses, through your full sensory apparatus, which, as you already know, is more than the sum.... You not only coordinate your various senses, but you hand pattern-detections across their boundaries as well. This is (partly) why you can best break the hold of a triangle’s interior on your sense of the triangle not by knowing there is a great triangle (on Earth) on the other side of the three gons, or even knowing there’s another angle (at least) out there, but by walking it off. Your three angles of turn are from lines “out there” and the three of them add up not to 180-degrees, but to 360-degrees and mean a full orbiting, equivalent in result to a rotation. No mystic revelation available only to extraordinary geniuses. Just employ a simple, human action in imagination or actual behavior and notice what you have to do to complete the action. I did this in the sixties. In the eighties, Seymour Pappert wanted to help kids learn math, and other things, the natural way they learned Piaget’s “conservatisms” in life in the natural way they learned a first language. So, he made a robotic “turtle” (later moved to a computer screen) to be a point. Unlike Euclid’s point, this one moved. And he found what I found being a human pencil-tip. A point does move and an integral part of it’s getting anywhere is that it has a “heading”, which, like its “position” can change. We are designed to discover this. We have a “facing”. We can “head” for a point(ing) down the “line of sight”. Degrees of freedom might refer to directions in which you can move, facing or not.

Before moving to Bucky’s second thought above, I want to I want to pull a couple thoughts loose from their paragraphs in George Lakoff’s and Rafael Nuñez’s Where Mathematics Comes From (Basic Books, 2000 CE). It has a subtitle: HOW EMBODIED MIND BRINGS MATHEMATICS INTO BEING.

The argument rests on analyses we will give throughout this book to the effect that human mathematics makes fundamental use of conceptual metaphor in characterizing mathematical concepts.

For the most part, human beings conceptualize abstract concepts in concrete terms, using ideas and modes of reasoning grounded in the sensory-motor system. The method by which the abstract is comprehended in terms of the concrete is called conceptual metaphor. Mathematical thought also makes use of conceptual metaphor, as when we conceptualize numbers as points on a line. [ italics added –g.f. ]

The care and feeding of wholes:

Moving on to Bucky’s second paragraph above, what about starting from wholes while using your “mind” tool-kit? Bucky, above, starts from Universe, seemingly as “whole” as you can get: “...that too learn anything you must start with the whole—with Universe.” I’ve leaned on a “the” in the quoted sentence. Bucky goes on through the book focused on Universe. This is illusory, of course. Universe, Bucky tells, or reminds, us is all our individual and collective “apprehended and communicated” experiences, since we can’t “see” anything outside ourselves directly. But, the Universe he takes as his whole while writing this book and for his astonishing and wonderfully visionary “whole work” is only the universe of Einstein, subsuming of course, that of Newton, Galileo and Kepler along with Euler, Gibbs, and many, many others. It’s a universe in our on-going three-rung circus, but only overlappingly (and non-simultaneously) in the center ring. He points out rightly that Galileo should be credited, as Newton actually is, with the inverse-square cosmological law, because his “falling body” was actually the intertensioning of two celestial bodies, one quite small relative to the other, when they are very close. That would make the “falling body” perception, along with the “up/down” perception and the “xyz coordinate” perception part of the Dark Ages Misorientation. Falling body “above” a surface? Or two celestial bodies gravitationally intertensioned, the smaller appearing to be “drawn toward” the larger? In Universe, whether or not you sort out three rings, or three wholes, both views are accurate and, more importantly, both are useful ways of perceiving the goings-on. For most of us, the latter is the more useful because it is woven into our whole sense of how to survive “on” this planet, or in “its” gravitational field or volume of whatever.

Loosening the hold of, not cutting out, our up/down double pointing:

Bucky explicitly lists the up/down in the quoted paragraph near the beginning of this article as part of the Dark Ages misinformation. In my sixties letters which Bucky kept with the Chronofile, I may have already have been discussing the usefulness of going beyond choosing the better between the up/down and the in/out coordinate systems. I keep getting, and writing, a clearer sense of what I’m finding intuitively right up to these papers and this very last one. From the beginning, I followed the language, being bothered, as others who apparently didn’t bother to think about it, by instairs and outstairs and the pilot “coming in for a landing”. The terms replacing downstairs and upstairs imply having to do with transiting the walls of the building while, being stairs, going up and down. And the pilot “coming in for a landing” is not headed toward the center of the planet, if he has control. He’s coming in toward a center that is a speck on the horizon. When he gets close enough to see a runway, he “sets it down”. Does habit only cause us to use up/down while out/in would be more enlightened? I sensed from the beginning that we needed to enlarge the whole we’re using.

Given Universe as Bucky, and others, describe it, you can’t start from the whole of it. And you don’t want to think bigger is better and try to grasp the biggest whole you can, because you’ll only dig a bigger hole to fall into. Mind’s greatest art is organizing a whole to work with. People have known this for a long time. One of the livelier images is the magus. E (he or she) creates e’s (his or her) circle and, then, consecrating or banishing potential inclusions. The circle, not the sphere, is fundamentally central to humans who, however it is shaped, live on a surface giving the horizontal priority over any treatment of the vertical, though the latter is key to perspective ...and the size of wholes.

Our horizon is a disc, and that, ultimately, defines our here as opposed to other “here”s, which are pushed off for consideration—using our definite article: The here becomes there. More importantly, the circle shows that even the xyz-coordinates come not from a love of perpendicularity or independence, but from of our real experience of precession. I developed this thought for the first time elsewhere in this paper. I’ll go back to up/down, first. Among celestial bodies (or networks) the spheres in space coordinates are best. Scale down to where we live, and it makes sense to use ourselves, basically cylinders, for coordinates. A horizontal cross-section is a circle. Our experienced “dimensions” are up/down, left/right and forward/backward. We turn, wheel, in the horizontal, throw our hammers and so forth. We build our martial arts on it. We use angular momentum, and in the three planes (take two of our three direction-pairs at a time) and our corner is action defined.

Depersonalize the corner and you’ve what appears to be the cube-corner. It isn’t necessarily and if it was, experience wouldn’t have to deal with system, with the fact that a cube’s face, shaved, would make the resultant outer shape a non-cube, it already not being a system. All of this, in the central ring, just isn’t relevant. Every whole we work with is, when you come down to it, a heuristic, a “rule of thumb”, something that seems to work, okay. When you talk about stairs, you’re not thinking of celestial bodies in space or better not be lest you stumble. You may be standing by the stairs, top or bottom, or just be referring to such a time. You walk up, or down, in reference to that shared experience. If you’re carried to the stairs on a stretcher, so you’re horizontal, you’ll refer to the general “up”, not to your immediate “up” which might pass through one of the bodies carrying your stretcher. We use the common experience of using the stairs and starting at the top or bottom. What about Bucky’s mentioning Kennedy or somebody saying, to an astronaut, “How is it up there?”? The astronaut was directly underfoot at the time. Still, both choices work. “How is it out there?” reminds a listener (this was on radio) that the astronaut is out in space, relative to both center and surface of Earth. But, “How is it up there?” made perfect sense to everyone, emphasizing height. And, since the “up” is relative to humans on or above, or even below, the surface where the spot on Earth lies that the astronaut is “above” doesn’t matter. Go to Bucky’s wall “spreadsheet” map and all the “up”s are “parallel”, anyway, and this reading is not a Dark Ages artifact resulting from failure to consider how Bucky’s map came to be on that wall. Context makes the “up”s, not a “failure to consider” the surface’s curvature.

Multiple coordinate systems and “switching”:

What matters in this imagining is that humans can keep both coordinate systems in mind and without any confusion and without much conscious thought, “switch” back and forth. Sometimes for humor, and always with wit, the unexpected one will be used so both are in a listener’s mind at once and part of what e thinks about is e’s expectations. Pulling “reality” out of our up/down (left/right, forward/backward) orienting actions would not prove useful or enlightening. Now, let’s look at precession, and our constant experiencing or it and use of it and how that yields the xyz-coordinates and the three-plane corner we so easily fit into and operate from. We constantly whirl and windmill to throw, hit and so forth—riding that tangent. And, given our heading, or facing, and our already built in 90-degree ordinates trained in by riding that tangent. Because the 90-degree figuring had this birthing, and not the usually thought one, it’s thoroughly woven into our “tapestry of words” or, more fundamentally, our “tapestry of concepts”. I bring this in not to defend its use because we’ve used it for a long time and its woven in, but to present a new sense of why we started using it in the first place, why it led to a coordinate system. Bucky provided the window I could see through with his hammer thrower., tennis player, baseball pitcher and batter. With dynamic action, involving humans and perhaps other “forces”, this 90-degree angle seems to be involved, while, when it comes to building, the 60-degree angle rules. Human kids like to cut across the corner, across the lot or lawn. Milton Erickson, when a child in Wisconsin winters, used to go out in the snow and look at the paths other kids made walking to school. They invariable found “shortest paths” and other kids would follow those, making kids’ thoroughfares of them. We naturally angle and, probably, look for the tightest angle within the given restraints. Considering, now, that we got our 90-degree perpendiculars, with their unstable square frames, from our dynamic precessing and riding the tangent, cutting across those lots and whatever else. One instance of sensing appropriateness might be to not keep to the 90-degree system for building. Don’t make square frames. Don’t use the square corners for cutting across a corner lot, but do use it if a building is there. That gives you a benchmark. You can see 90-degree precession in the sixsys or tetrahedron. Look across one edge and you see another edge, a far one, at 90-degrees. It’s like there’s a twisting torso here.

Scaling down to an older coordinate system—but “adjusting” it

to fit a more complex modeling and comodeling:

So, what is the Dark Ages if it’s not reifying these listed concepts like up/down or xyz-coordinates? My guess would be, it’s reifying any concepts, it’s pushing your concepts “out there” and making independent reality of them. In terms of the up/down or in/out, choosing between them seems is a case of wheel-spinning. We c’n use the in/out/around in our cylinder-being as well as in the cosmic bodies-being. that’s how we got our 90-degree coordinates. When you pull-down or pull-up an object, the pull is the “in” part and push-down or push-up and the push is the “out” part. You can move something or yourself. Drop down and do a pushup. Then, flop over on your back and push up a weight in a “bench press”. The wheel-spinning is how we maintain a dynamic Dark Ages mentality. The trick is to go from wheel-spinning to free-wheeling-in of concepts, cognitional operations, orientations as we need to in order to keep advancing our understanding of what’s “going on”, mapping as we go. When Bucky brought up the up/down reification in a lecture, he was operating within a context of the flat-Earth/Farmer’s sense of a rising and setting sun, a sun going “down” or coming “up” and the more general context of celestial bodies tensional linked and dynamically interacting. He was imagining two giants standing on a small Earth, their “up”s pointing in largely divergent directions (pointings). Moving to an out/in directing, a bodies-in-space, orientation seemed a healthy thing to do. Lecturing, he’s thinking of words in our tapestry of words, or “vocabulary” or general nomenclature. Playing, then, with pilots heard “coming in for a landing” and playfully inventing instairs and outstairs and going on. A difficulty rears up, though. What he has in mind warrants being taken seriously, and this dismissal of up/down, thoroughly woven, and usefully so, into the tapestry, plants real doubts in a listener because it’s patently wrong, not just unfamiliar, but the ends don’t tie back in, theirs a broken integrity. The breakpoint (dumping the listener who’s following out of the scenario) is at the present of those two giants. What Bucky builds from there and doesn’t scale down to where we live. Just scaling down pulls those divergent ups “into line” but we’re still left, then, sort of back in our Dark Ages, not because the “up/down” is wrong, but because we have not “adjusted” for the curved surface plus the awareness of scale as I did above in showing that Kennedy’s “up there” addressed to the astronaut over China. Bucky has had thoughts like that. Remember, he pointed out that The Greeks with their scribe, ruler and compass forgot the fourth tool, the surface they used for drawing.

Taking responsibility for our conceptualizing:

We’ve got to take responsibility for our conceptualizing, individually and ...well, not collectively, but interactively, in our communicating, influencing, interacting, comodeling. Of course, most people do not realize that they are conceptualizing and in the heat of the action it’s likely none of us do. Bucky can do so because of the work he’s doing, and working on the geometry of “natures coordinate system and building methods” his own reifying, or forgetting that he is conceptualizing, proceeds. When sunset pops into his head, he is immediately aware the conceptualization “in” the thought and the better one he has at hand. We’ve all heard about his two years of not talking. We can put it in context, here. He says, often, that it was to catch what he would likely spontaneously say and see where it came from, who was in fact thinking. In the paragraph’s context, we can see that, in the flow of talking to people, he might look out the window and start to comment on the sunset. Letting it go, he’d be contributing to others’ imprisonment and weaken the effect of his public speaking in which he commented on the poor MIT scientist who just wanted to enjoy a before dinner cocktail on his terrace in the evening. A “conceptual stutter” during a transition (learning) period would be an impediment he could not afford, given what he was setting out to do.

Sunrise and sunset, sunsight and sunclipse, suntake and suncut ...evolving concepts:

I can use the sunrise/sunset concepts to show both the nature of the transition Bucky’s intentions caused him to want some new concepts and, to, how they put a brake on how new. In the fall of 1996, Bucky told me, and Hilary Ayer, the woman I spent the sixties with, as he drove us up toward Sam’s in Belvedere, that he wanted me to participate in a context. The winner would receive the 1966-7 Dymaxion Award (which included a cash award of $500, a couple months shelter and food for Hilary and me). As it was a context, I assumed a few other people whose interest in word-handling, even word-making was more than casual received the same invitation. He wanted the post-Copernican reality “within” the concepts “in” the words. Bucky, remember, is a product of the industrial civilization and I, with no awareness of such things at all, was a, well not quite product, but living, by quirks of chance and reading, in, perhaps, the primitive phase of the cognitional civilization, which so far I’m the only one who’s even come up with the (conceptual) name. I did what Bucky wanted but I didn’t stop with what he wanted. I won the award, but Bucky did not use or, so far as I know, ever mention to anyone, the concepts I created. I didn’t know until this year (20003), when I came upon a 1999 anthology of people writing about Bucky and Bucky’s writings, that he developed his own terms. One of the writers mentioned them. He used sunsight and sunclipse. fits the celestial-bodies framework nicely. He gave me the Dymaxion Award because he liked he way I thought (he said that) and, I suspect, because I went not just post-Copernican, but, considering the year, post-Einsteinian, what with (to use Bucky’s term) “scenario Universe”. The original concepts were not just Flat-Earth. They were concepts that made sense to the ubiquitous, in the agricultural spreading wave of civilization, “farmer”. E (he or she) gets up, crosses the field, and, colloquially in English, anyway, sets (or settles) on the porch at the end of the day. It’s like comforting to see the One God, the sun, behave similarly. Except for children. The relative movement of the sun to a walking child is undetectable. So the mother who couldn’t follow and “keep an eye on” the child said that the sun, or more frighteningly, the moon was always watching (for her). I didn’t just want to handle the results of the horizon disc’s behavior on spinning Earth. I wanted that human contact. Who is as ubiquitous on our planet as the farmer then or now? In our “scenario Universe” it’s the film-maker. Without him, Bucky would not have had the word scenario or the natural impulse to attach it to Universe.

Concepts in humans; humans in concepts:

The farmer squinting up toward, but not directly at, the sun, thinking about the time of day, the season, the work to be done in both, contemplating the coming weather, or the results of the just past weather, moved to the covered porch to do this when the storm blew in and no sun could be seen. In our time, he has a clock and an almanac, so e knows exactly when it’s sunrise with no visual clues at all. E is pumping knowing into e’s sensing. You can see, then, that on a human scale, we need more than “geomtry”. My film-maker is actually a crude imitator of that farmer. But his camera is a model of some conceptual tools. The shutter is, on a conceptual level, a horizon or threshold. Directing and operating the camera models, if crudely, our attending. And this gives us a pair of terms to replace rise and set. It’s take and cut. In suntake we have a post-Einsteinian, post-Cognitional sunsight, which is the post-Copernican. In suncut—we get the pun, of course, to cover all those colors and what we, cognitively, make of them. This is from Okinawan Carvings, and as I was there during the Korean war, not WWII, even time is warped in this cognitive act we used to call sunset.

            IV
over the jungle
        spread out over acres
bounced off the beach half a mile away
rebroadcast for my convenience
        great purple shell bursts
and sand soaked in blood
each grain scraping my eye
        a dying sun altered
by screaming men

A “sun altered”—and that is an aspect of human cognition we can’t safely omit from concepts we use to handle our living. That cut in suncut fits into all our variants on “cut that out” and such phrases, and, here, plays on other, colorful uses of cut. Suntake fits in with “mistake”, “double take”, or “my take on that” and these may have come in before or after the film-maker’s advent. I couldn’t use suncut in a poem, it’d break the reader right out and leave e sliding across the surface. I suspect, though, that “the sun set” before we used the compacted sunset. So, in the fourth part of In the Garden of My Lady I had these lines...

...

Afternoon late, fall, earlier overcast
pulled back
and coming on time for a sun cut
by a rearing horizon

no sunset here
sun flashes, sun flooding, sun
pulses
a lessening, a loss of color
the horizon coming in

in slow motion
a series of paintings so hard

brushes are ripped from our hands
our hands
smashed, crippled, made claws
to hold, as stands hold, what we are given

...

I’ve used italics to bring the image out for you. and that “rearing horizon,” like the sea-serpent, Naga, rising up over the ship and its frightened sailors to crash over the deck as flashes, flooding, pulses...! The lesson? We keep on going with our developing, evolving concepts. And, we don’t lose older ones. In the discussion here, I could have used the concept of kennings to talk of my “humanized” concepts, concepts closer into to live experience. Here’s a take on inventive scrying:

THE SEA

Again at the table.
My arms, just below the elbows,
calloused from the gentle
swells of the table pulsing
under these twin hulls.

And I watch intently
down into this paled sea
from which
forces of constant rising
push into the swells

those creatures that will burst
forth to flounder or find footing
on my beach
and tell me in their dying
gasps or first breaths of alien

ways that shaped them
beyond my ken
and sent them, in their
last moment, or first, to stretch
my ken.

Soft and hard “tracing” where your concepts came from:

Anybody who used sunsight or suntake instead of sunrise in conversation outside the context of talking about these cognitive queryings and quarryings will seem intrusive and nutty. If you’re waking to awareness that you conceptualize as you experience, with a intent to take responsibility for it, you can substitute noting for Bucky’s blocking of your spontaneous talking. Everybody who reads Sunday supplement articles knows that most conversation is just “ritual” or “pastime” and you can play with small twists and tweaks to see how people respond. Or you can run an interior dialog along side the exterior dialog for your own study. All the talk about how “other” people see things, or hear them or feel them, keeps pretty close to the top the fact that we are always conceptualizing the world as we experience it. The darkness of our Dark Ages, finally, rests in the lack of flexibility in that conceptualizing, though stability ranks with flexibility as necessary. Accepting responsibility for your conceptualizing and, then, being aware of it in your experiencing does not mean you need to “fix” anything. Escape, here, as we enter a new epoch, or live in a later spread of civilization, a distributed and cognitively based one, does not mean fleeing old ones. We are “layered” creatures in a “layered” civilization. We’re creatures of all the epochs, and sorting origins into “layers” is only a conceptualized model that’s useful in thinking some exploratory thoughts. Then, we collapse the “layers” and comodel in other ways. Our source of light? A lively mind. Of course, if you’re up to it, you can take a couple years for Bucky’s fierce taking of responsibility for his conceptualizing as it controlled his internal (thinking) and external (talking) communicating or, better, comodeling. Just taking “comodeling” as what communicating is goes a long way. We each model things within and comodeling is assisting or guiding or at least encouraging and discouraging modeling in another, or in others. Comodeling, like modeling, rests on the human activity of conceptualizing. and escape is not fleeing from conceptualizing, but sailing into the wind by tacking across it.

How to build tools:

I’ve thrown into the wind seeds (whre seed is a past-participial form of “see”) to grow tools and many of these show more clearly than any straight forward emulations of bucky could how Bucky’s thinking has influenced mine, that is, how his “way of modeling” has flowed into my “way of modeling”, the comodeling that influence is. I often introduce pairs of terms, old and new, in my letters which are written conversations. An example. I often replace frame of reference with system of referents. I replace the 2D picture of a frame, though it can be short for framework, with system—implying intertensioning, relation. And the vague “reference” gives way to the sound-alike “referents”. I had Bucky’s d-stick and hub models. A great many psychotherapists influenced by Milton Erickson developed a literature of reframing to account for changing peoples sense of what specific things mean, an example being changing a woman’s sense that her pile carpet having footprints implied she was a bad housekeeper to the sense that her children were close, even when out of sight. Erickson himself never, in all these psychotherapists’ transcripts of their conversations with him, used the term reframing. He used reassociating. He used associating, dissociating, and reassociating. A set of terms for fine grain description. In another instance, I take a common image, “a line of thought”. First, I always de-reify a term like thought, a past-participial noun. I use the present-participial, the verb still alive in, a jinni in the bottle, and so, here, thinking. So I use “a line of thinking” for a fairly straight forward or not overly complex line of thinking. Then, for a more complex thinking, I introduce “a system-of-lines of thinking”. I use these in exactly the same easy way as “a line of thought” and do not feel compelled to sort out the lines of thinking in the system of lines of thinking”. The underlying image, though, is shifted in two quite radical ways and our sense of what cognitive activity is like shifts with the image.

Idries Shah publishes, in English, sufi teaching stories. I recall one about a man in prison. He is a metal worker. He offers to make small items for the guards to have or to sell if they bring him metal and tools. Then, he contacts his wife. He has her find the specifications and drawings for the locks between him and freedom. She has these worked, as designs, in his new prayer rug. He has his face very close to the rug five times a day. In time, he makes his keys and leaves the prison. We can use this story as an image of how to “escape the clutches of our Dark Ages”. Some may be discontent that it’s a “technological” solution and, like other technologies, might get into the wrong hands. But as with my technology for reforming the farmer’s sunrise and sunset, it’s a human technology.

Gene Fowler

1/18/04

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"Answers at the End of the Book"

Who’s e? And no, it’s not dialect.

In all of the papers in this series, I introduce e for “he or she” or e’s for “his or her”. In the seventies, people began to look upon the “honorary masculine” seemingly in use when a generalized person, a human with no specific gender, was mentioned. It could seem to dishonor “the feminine”. Everyone was looking for a “unisex” term. Not only MS Magazine, but MIT offered whole new lattices of pronouns. Nobody could have used these, even had anyone wanted, really wanted to. You could not have plugged such a lattice into an Internationale or an Esperanto. People who forget that English is a spoken language used s/he in print. Others, working in print, would alternate he and she as generalized persons were used in examples. A reader could become very disoriented by that practice, though in some contexts it made good sense to, in fact, use a mix of specified people rather than generalized people. It livened the text.

The one thing remaining in use was an error with a longer history than attempts at unisex. It seems as natural an error among adults as a young child’s difficulties with the past tense of “to be”. Here is how making sense internally can produce the error. “If anyone wants a copy, they should come up to the podium after the talk.” A speaker may imagine, as e says “If anyone wants a copy”, somebody sitting out there, brows furrowed, and wanting a copy. The speaker speaks to e. As the speaker goes on to say “they should come up to the podium”, e imagines several such people getting up from their seats and while others head for exits, they come up to the podium. Most of course, just mixed up their singulars and plurals. Now, they c’n say they’re being really cool and non-sexist, even if they’re imagining only men being the free agents involved.

I found a few years ago that somebody else introduced the “e” I seem to be using here. In fact, two have been mentioned. A California-based psychologist and a Chicago (I think) –based Jesuit. But, the objective was “em”, take, I assume from “them”. The “e” is, Paul Forman told me after I told him my results, that it’s Jake Grimm’s “interior e”. I took it because it shows up in he, she, me, we, and they. Which makes it, I’d guess, the “interior e”.

I could see that unisex wasn’t going to fit into the existing language, no matter how you did it, and all attempts to deal with this were a kind of flailing. So, what was the problem, functionally? Two distinctions were being made. If you took one side of the first, you had no choice but to make the second distinction even when you didn’t want to and doing so created difficulties.

The first distinction has to do with personification. On one side is it, its, it and itself. On the other, for the personified (it doesn’t have to be an actual person), is ...well, nothing. Your only out is to take either the masculine (he-row) or the feminine (she-row). And onward into the current difficulties (in the seventies and now). What we want to do, and it’ll be the easiest to fit into the language, if anything can be, is to have a pre-genderal split. I figured it ought to “balance” the it-row. I took my “interior e” and I expanded it in parallel to the it-row. e, e’s, e and eself. I keep the apostrophe in e’s to force “ease” rather than the German or Spanish “ehs” on the person pronouncing it. The explicit possessive in something new is likely a good idea, anyway, as most using it will not notice the parallel with the it-row.

No one will ever use this, just as no one will use my names for the polyhedra or any of the other terms and usages I’ve invented. But all this is, in any case, only a “mind and times” wrapper for my books of poems with annotations added in these last years. Someone, sometime, wanting to know my poems and the mind and times they came out of can, after coming to know the annotations, look into all this. Maybe you, the reader, are one of these future folks. I’ve written this note, of course, thinking some of those who are curious as to why Bucky kept my letters and made them prominent in his Chronofile. It was because of that question that I wrote the ten scroll Stanford eletter. These papers came out of that “revisiting”.

The Dark Ages “engine” exists in rigidly routine conceptualizing.

We conceptualize our experience as we experience it. We call that “making sense” of it. When we take up pencil and paper or modeling materials, we create models that, taken as models of reality, become theories and, at some point, maybe as reality. You know by now that I’ve pulled up/down out of Bucky’s list of Dark Ages terms. I did this in 1965 and it’s very likely covered in my letters that Bucky saved as a set in his Chronofile. He wanted to replace them with out/in. Neither has much relevance in geometry. Out/in can be said to have relevance in “solid” geometry, which isn’t geometry and which would make Bucky shudder with distaste, were he alive. Solid geometry is not simply mapping Earth (or a sphere, more or less) from the center out. The implication is that the sphere is in an “outer” realm with other bodies, presumably spheres unless distorted. So, as I suggested to Bucky from time to time, given his interest in Newton’s and Einstein’s “universe”, the proper term would be universometry.

Before you nod off, think about the term. No cap-U, so it’s hardly Bucky’s Universe, the totality of our apprehended and communicated experiences. It’s just the cosmos. As “solid geometry” (meaning the metry of a sphere), out was out to nothingness, akin to the flat Earth’s triangle having nothingness outside the three line segments. Bucky showed that on Earth, those three lines divided Earth’s surface into two spherical triangles. We haven’t a “new” name for triangles or even terms, in general, for telling the common folks “users” that we do our mapping on a curved surface though we draw the maps on flat surfaces. Bucky’s icosaglobe is the key to reconciliation. The icosaglobe is unfolded to give a flat, no-distortion map of Earth. The geometry of a sphere “hanging in a void” is useful, mainly, for developing measuring tools. With universometry, we use those tools and extend our mappings out into the cosmos. These tools become useful here on the surface of Earth when we think about networks such as the Web. Instead of thinking of servers as “higher” than client machines, we can replace uploading and downloading with outloading and inloading ...and it makes sense. Of course, much language used “around the net” could use some reexamination. We don’t have pages on the Web. Pages pair on sheets in the world of cut sheets. On the web, we have scrolls. It’s more like the Alexandrian library than the Library of Congress. If you’ve done any small press publishing, you know that in paperback publishing in which you put a stack of pages in a vise, slap glue over the spine, wrap a paper cover around it. This is called perfect-binding. I built on that to cover the instance in which you don’t just collect pages, or scrolls, and call this a book, but design the pages so the look-and-feel is of book pages. Nothing holds them together and in order but the hyperlinks. So, I call such a book’s construction (as a book), hyperperfect-binding.

Bucky’s selecting out/in “over” up/down resulted from his focused interest in what he was doing. So he missed the notion of scale and our human (paralleling Gibb’s, perhaps) phase changes as we switch coordinate systems or orientations. On the human scale, outstairs and instairs are lively comedy, but such terms, sensed as wrong, likely caused many to miss what Bucky was saying and undermined his comodeling with those people, his building experiences in their imaginations and opening potential conceptualizings in their “storehouse of experiential learnings (Milton Erickson). When we come down to the scale of humans living on (or near) Earth’s surface, we switch orientations or, when measure enters, coordinate systems. A human, unlike a planet, is a cylinder, not a sphere.

Our three dimensions do not come from Geometers or mathematicians discovering and liking perpendiculars and their quality of “independence”. Those who make 2D or 3D essentially Cartesian drawings with an origin point and three direction-pairs for reference lines and three (taking reference lines two at a time) forming a room corner.

What is new in the paper above, is that our three dimensions come through precession (as Bucky defines and models it, starting with his hammer-thrower). Before being xyz, these were forward/back, left/right and up/down. Our horizontal “cross-section” is a circle and our surface we live on is great and lesser circles, our paths are arcs. And the hammer-thrower releases e’s hammer when e’s facing 90-degrees from the direction of desired flight. So there’s your 90-degree system. We’ve learned to think of the 90-degree system as being unlike the 30-degree and 60-degree systems, having to do with static, squarish systems, with quadrants, say, but with the circle erased and only the cross left. The problem is the static quality, not the 90-degree quality.

You want to contemplate that, because I won’t do more with it here. Think about contemplate, too. “With the template”. That’s with the structure plan of the temple (whole). that means, take the relevant models and, move the pieces around, change the relations. See what develops.

What matters is, the corner was there before the coordinate “system”. The three “two-way” directions, lines of sight, whatever you want to call them. People can move forward and back, to the left and to the right, up and down ...and no other ways. You can talk of four dimensions modeled by a tetrahedron or eleven dimensions modeled, in fact needed to make a model at all, in super-string theory. We have from the beginning a sense of circles in the horizontal, because our moving involves turning.... Even our up/down is in a circle for the four, five, six year old who learns to do cartwheels and somersaults. Da Vinci drew a man in a circle. Kennedy could have used that drawing as an “Up”-clock to keep track of what out-line would match the astronaut’s up-line and see how that related to his own. (This is what I meant in the preceding paragraph about moving parts and relations around in your contemplations. Loosen up your conceptualizing.)

This does not mean that it makes sense to drop into habitual, and probably rigid, conceptualizing of space, its mappings and movements within it. That’s why you want to think about those movements coming first and about precessing yielding our 90-degree “feelings”. This is the same sort of thinking that Bucky was doing when he put his two giants on a small Earth and had you sense divergent “up”s and think about out/in. In fact, he does a neat thing with this thinking from a turn in the 90-degree coordinates. It’s in Cosmography. He takes a chart of something progressing exponentially. That is the curve starts out rising not too fast, but it keeps rising more steeply until it’s going straight up. Such a mapping doesn’t make sense except, maybe, to show runaway positive feedback. Anyway, Bucky rotates the chart clockwise 90-degrees. Now, that line starts out, like a plane, that’s dropping out of the sky but, then, pulls out of the fall and flies straight. A delightful “reconceptualizing”.

Walking the walk (imported from a 2004 re-exploration):

This wasn't in my Dark Ages [email], but only in the 2003 paper [this one] I referred to and quoted from. I didn't quote this section so you have it only in the outline included under my second segment of the email. It likely seems trivial. At least nobody has ever responded to it with note, question or simple question mark. Yet, it's perhaps one of the most important things I've introduced if you wonder about the hidden, Kekula-like conceptualizings behind the presentations of a Bucky or a John Nash ("A Beautiful Mind", the book, not the movie) or Einstein ...or anyone who seems to "come out of left field" (right hemisphere).

I took the triangle that Bucky took, but a different path to understanding it. What troubled me was the constant that people, with a Pythagorean drive to mystify one another, like to present to show nature's occulted secrets: The interior angles always sum to 180-degrees. Unfortunately, there's no sense to that. The number doesn't have any "doings" in it. It's just "fall out". It falls out. Bucky, very aware of being always on or near the surface of earth, forced people to take notice of the "outside" by pointing out that, on Earth, the closed system of three framers separated the surface into two triangular areas, one inside and one outside. Given an equilateral triangle, one corner had (locally perceptible) a sixty-degree interior angle and a 300-degree exterior angle. Blow up the scale and you've curved surface numbers tumbling into those approximations. Bucky is very specific about the "trajectories" forming a system. It's the so-called "edges" that make up the reality.

Still, Bucky, like all his readers, think of that 2D system as out there (the pushed away here). To change how you perceive you've got to ...well, ride on the front edge of Einstein's light beam or a pencil tip, whatever. A line is the trajectory of an energy event. That's Bucky in Cosmography. We'll have to drop Euclid's point, since it has no heading, and take up a Papert-point because it has heading. Instead of simply drawing our equilateral triangle, measuring off those 60-degree angles, we'll "walk off" our equilateral triangle. We will actually draw the triangle, of course, or I would if we were together near a blackboard, but we'll use different angles of measure and it's because, virtually, we're walking off the triangle. You start at a point and facing in a direction. You walk off a measure for the first framer. Then, you turn. The line you've walked extends behind you and in front of you. You turn, say, left. You'll turn, for this figure, 120-degrees. You'll walk off a second framer and, again, turn left 120-degrees, walk off the third framer and turn 120-degrees. You are now facing down the first framer. You've returned to your starting point and heading. If you get into this bit of "let's pretend" you get a very different sense of this triangle and while Bucky always spoke of trajectories, of energy events. I do not think he did this, for all his admiration of Einstein, but he at least thought of his drawing as activity, energy focused and used. Now, of course, we don't end up with a triangle with an inside and an outside. You might have a sense of three lines, intersection/turning points, and really a map of activity. The system comes out into the foreground "for real"

Now, we have a constant that makes sense. Those three turns add up to 360-degrees. We've walked off the a complete chord-set for a circle. We've made a 360-degree "turn" that's, except for scale, identical to "spinning on your heel", a complete spin. You might say we've modeled sub-atomic or sub-point (given a point with heading, a Papert-point) "energy"..

And that's where I've always left it. that's where I left it in "Walking the Walk". This morning, I was considering that "drawing" and it's hovering extensions and turn markings and I thought, "I can give them back their 180-degree interior "constant" to use. And now it can be rendered so as to make sense, to have context or be meaningful. I fear that given back, the constant will drift to the foreground and all that "walking the walk" will drift into the fog of amnesia like a dream, somebody else's recounted dream.

The turns add up to 360-degrees. In each instance an on the line turn (to the left, or right) could only be a 180-degree turn. So, three times we take the left-over portions of a 180-degree turn. 540 - 360 is 180-degrees. Now, you have why those interior angles are what they are—and what they are is left-overs from turns less than 180-degrees which necessarily take the walker off a line. We have an action or energetic/synergetic model. The thinking (or imagining) creating the model reminds of other "turnings off the line" thinking that yielded Hamilton functions and imaginary numbers or partial dimensioning and fractals. I don't know anything about Hamilton functions, work only clumsily with imaginary numbers, and have only a dim conceptual understanding of fractals. But, I can sense "similitudes" of thinkings. Those of you who've learned those other modelings can bring all you've absorbed back to our little "walked off" triangle to lift your seeing from a triangle with an inside and an outside to this action modeling and a sense turnings, incomplete turnings—that take you outside of "dimensions" with which you started.

It c'n be fun. The first section of one of my first poems...

THE MAGICIAN

      i

The swimmers
who know time
as a stream

wonder
that I walk
on water

but miracles
are easy if
the eye is remade

& time is a line
of boulders
shaped to the foot