"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...
From our "triangle" (the name) to
the sixsys (the thing) and all the syses…
In this musing moment, I first run over what the syses are—and their role in my thinking about pumping knowing into sensing. What's in a name? Well, it's involved in our power to shape the knowing that we pump into our sensing. If we deal with names that are not simply tags, but carriers of genuine knowledge, a re-naming can change what the named thing "is". And do that in meaningful ways. After I show you the syses and what they carry, I’ll show how a name, "triangle", may have nudged me toward imagining the syses and their names.
Bucky made all sorts of
models using paper templates folded up, marbles glued together and sticks-and-stick-holding-hubs
made into basket-like systems. For showing the polyhedra in the foreground and
as structured systems, the sticks-and-hubs were the best bet. It's all out in
the open. It's not a closed "opaque" shape or something birthed by joining
radii among marbles, but a clear structure hanging brightly against a dark
back-drop. Just looking at it tells an observer how it's put together. The
sixsys, fully the sixsysthree, is the minimal system, the tetrahedron or
four-face.
Euler linked the faces of a polyhedron, the vertices (hubs in Bucky’s d-stick models) and the edges (face-framers in d-sticks) in an equation. F+V=E+2. On the "opaque" (solid or skin-wearing) model, we have flat surfaces and pointy vertices and "folds" that are, the eye says, double-edges or an angled meeting of edges from two faces. The name, given a tetrahedron, helps us see faces first, a little tent or three sided pyramid if it’s sitting on one face on a table or palm.
In the "stick"
model, we see that the "edges" are, now, structural members, the
edges of faces being only area stopped by the framers. The system we
build depends on how many sticks we use, how many stick-ends come into a hub
and ...nothing else. The faces are the least interesting thing about these
systems to a probing mind. The edges, better called framers, are the
materials required to build the system: n framers with 2n ends. The vertices
are the bindings created by the "binding dance of human
fingers". In the early eighties, I wrote to Bucky of my wrestling with
what Kirby Urner named my systalk. My letters may have nudged Bucky
toward re-imagining and renaming the minimal system held in his mind’s
eyes (binocular vision, even in imagination). So strong, however, was tetra’s
hold that when he felt a need to shift attending, he moved only from the tetrahedron
to the tetravertexion. The other vertexia remained beyond his horizon.
Bucky didn't have time to handle vertexia, to think about them, turn them over in his active imagining—or run into their names’ confusing pumping. The hold on his imagining that tetra had was strong. And moving only on the surface of the tetrahedron allowed him to shift to where movement sometimes occurs in these structured systems. (One problem is that new names and old will be on the landscape together. The hexahedron and octahedron flip and become the octavertexion and hexavertexion. A second problem is the Greek numbers which don't hook, outside Greece, the myriad associations numbers have for even very young children.) However we bind framer-ends together, it will always be effectively the same skill and so not unique to a given system. Only the framer-ends caught in the binding matter.
I didn't want faces, vertices or edges, one of Euler's extracted entities, to name the system. I took sys to make an abbreviation to be our noun-base in its own right. Later, of course, all the "high tech" naming came in and sys was all over the landscape, but mostly in names not meant to bind any real information. So, in place of the polyhedra we have the syses. Unlike the "partials" names, we don't need the poly-. There's no count. We'll use a count, though, to flesh out our name. Three interlinked counts. We'll use the base-count (in the real world), a count of the materials we better have on hand. A count of the framers (even if we're working with pure forces, ethereal and ephemeral). So, where we had a tetrahedron—we now have a sixsys.
I called the structural members framers rather than members for a structural reason. They are not just sticks, members, energies, push-pulls.... We see faces (or spaces, areas) and that's the reality of the "solid" unless it's a crystal you hold between the sun and smoothed light dirt or sand. These netted "polygons" are the "face" of the system. In our "language" of framers, we state what we're framing. Our sixsys is a sixsysthree. Our name actually sorts out face edges from framers. We have six framers with twelve ends. Each framer will have a triangle on each of two opposed sides, so we have twelve face edges. We know we have three to a triangle, so we know we have four triangles.
We don't have to vocalize that "-three" except when introducing somebody to the names. But for our next two systems, the cube (hexahedron) and octahedron, we do have to complete the names unless the context makes it obvious which we are referring to. They are both twelvesyses. One is a twelvesysthree, the other a twelvesysfour. The icosahedron and the dodecahedron are the thirtysysthree and the thirtysysfive. These are no more polysyllabic than their predecessors and they read easily as packed phrases, full of implicated knowledge. In the two pairs I introduced, you can see that these are pairs.
Okay, that's a sufficient sketch of the syses. While I was first working these names out, I was thinking of Bucky showing his models to people new to examining such things and often, as he loved to do, to children. In my "thought experiment", I wanted to slow down the seeing of one of these systems, a kind of zooming in. And, then, blending thinking with seeing—the pumping knowing into sensing I've mentioned above. So, I'd rehearse saying, "Start in one corner of one face. You are in the corner and two of the framers come in past your shoulders and lodge in the hub, are bound together there. You know that beyond those two framers are two faces. Beyond them, two framers. Those two far framers may be the same framer and you have a 3-hub. Or they may not be the same and each may have a face beyond and these may be the same face and you have a 4-hub. Let's take the 3-hub case. Actually, we went in knowing we have a 3-hub from our name, sixsysthree. So, we have a 3-hub and three framers with "loose" ends. We know those ends have to lodge in 3-hubs. We see three more 3-hubs, each of which has one framer lodged..."
So, it's possible to slow seeing, or to build blindfolded, or.... In the instance above, we're building a sixsys and it's no big thing to know the number of framers and framer-ends left and the number needed in each "unfulfilled" hub. We can, then, put together the sixsys—blindfolded (by touch alone). If we have the 4-hub but are putting together a -three, we are on our way to building that base-to-base pyramid-pair, the twelvesysthree. If we have the twelvesysfour, we again go with a 3-hub, be we see our way through quite differently. We can have all our "parts" computed from the name.
How does this change our ordinary seeing? We are not hunkered down in the corner, but instead of taking in a sort of wide view of the sixsys, we do a very rapid marking off. We start at a corner, but in a face, in an angle, and we mark off the framers, the faces beyond, the framers or framer beyond…. We do a bit of detailing in our seeing.
Thinking, or talking, about the syses, I'm making an issue of names ...well, nudging our imaging, if not quite restructuring our thinking. This morning (it's now afternoon, of course) I was thinking about all that slowing of thinking, the calling of "edges" or "interfaces" framers, which I didn't do regularly right away, and it occurred to me that I was likely nudged into this, and much other of my Bucky-like thinking, by the word "triangle". We don't say trigon or tetragon, the two baby figures. We do say pentagon, hexagon, and so forth. Just as we don't think neatly in metric system names and all. The 17th century birthing of natural philosophers and all of what's come roaring out of that—using English (rather than Latin and, behind that, Greek), within which a measure, if not a hand’s span, was a foot’s length, or a finger and thumb held up to illustrate an inching along, perhaps by a toe’s length, where a yard was three feet, end-to-end, an easy half-step. Square, my Webster’s tells me, is square going all the way back, until it's four only, but maybe with an implication of "sameness" in the four. So, a nickname for an "equilateral" tetragon (as English., French, Latin and Greek bounce off each other and around).
But triangle is
different. It puts us smack into that corner. Each angle takes two framers and
they are coming out of (or going into) a corner. It's inviting my
MARKING OFF (noticing, counting) of faces and framers around a vertex. I'm looking at
the whole sys, of course, and "marking off" right on around and,
then, out along the three framers simultaneously. Pumping knowing
into sensing and pumping sensing into knowing, I "wash back and
forth" in this evolving envisioning, this vision flight…. Growing up with triangles
(not trigons) in my world and then finding them in all of Bucky's talk
and writing—I suppose I was just about destined to see the syses into being.
An
afterthought, looking forward. These d-stick models are, remember, topological
models. All the freedoms of diagrams drawn in topological spaces are here. The
new names, like the old ones, do not particularly invite this sense, though
they do not preclude it and are better than the old names at suggesting it,
given other implicating thoughts. Bucky often pointed out that the sticks model,
and in fact embody, "energies". A stick with its ends in hubs might be thought
of as a balanced push-pull force.
Gene
Fowler
12/3/03
Return to the essays list
Postscript:
In the newest spreading
civilization, the third main sequential one, the first two being the agricultural
and the industrial, we can expect more to be packed into a name than
just a shift of attending. The third spreading civilization is the cognitional,
though people who glimpse surface phenomena like to call it by names such as
the "information" civilization. Our "cognitive unconscious" or "storehouse of
experiential learnings" or sensory-motor grounding, the personal history
coiled in the hippocampi, all of it is coming up into sight. We won’t ever
follow the workings while we work (too fast), but we can play into our
strengths. In names like those for the syses, we can pack in computational
capability and have extensible names. Take our sixsysthree, thing and
name merged. We know we’re naming a thing made of framers. We know two things
from the name. The over-all system is made of six framers and each "area" is
framed by three. We can extend this name to include the information
needed to map the making of the system. Each framer has a threefig(ure) on each
of two sides. So, we have twelve edges. Three of those in each threefig. 12/3 =
4. We have four faces. We have twelve framer-ends. We know (except for some
complex systems you’ll never meet) that all the vertices will bind the same
number of framers. So, we have four 3-hubs or three 4-hubs. Three hubs won’t
make any system. So, we have four 3-hubs. Now, we do a "thought experiment". We
fill a 3-hub and have a dangling three framers. At the loose ends, we must have
3-hubs and these will accommodate our remaining three framers and their six
ends. We’re following exactly our earlier seeing (in live, comprehensive
detail) done to keep the eye from skimming our sixsys.
"Answers at the End of the Book"It is even possible that you've experienced moments in which the poet's mind was active, moments when you seemed, or something in you seemed, to "pump knowing into sensing." What you perceived wasn't just the sense-contacted surfaces of things, but the extended, even live, depths of things. Actually, you do this minimally all the time, without noticing that you do it. For instance, you glance up the hillside not at a white rectangle, but at the white stucco wall of a house nestled in the shrubbery.Though I'm a fine, laid-back sort of fellow, my blood pressure as I roll into my seventies seems to be a bit elevated, so I take a diuretic. Squeeze some water out of cells. Reduce pressure? Well, it sounds plausible. In any case, the diuretic I take is named hydrochlorothiazide. Is this a "high tech" name taken to sound biochemical, medical, magical—for marketing purposes (even though it's a generic)? Of course, but it's not only that. In fact, it's not mainly that. It's a "chemistry name" and while it's only the surface of a technical, descriptive phrase, it is a packed-phrase name. I invented this term while writing the Answers appendix to another essay in this group: "A 'pair of fives' & seeing dimensions into space". Anybody knowing just the "chemtalk in the air" gets a little meaning beyond, or within, the naming pumped into his or her sensing of what's there. Hydro- brings the sense of water, maybe of "connate" waters deep in the crust, there from the formation…. -Chloro- is a bit more mysterious, but, with watery hints of its own, green of chlorophyll and clear too and fumy, all from chloroform, and…. Chlorine in swimming pools holds us at the watery…. Thiazide, resting on thiazine ...takes us to the great doors of a temple that will not open easily, as single molecules of hydrogen seep out to flow past us…. For most of us, then, the knowing we pump into our sensing as we battle to even say this name is tentative, ephemeral and like a vapor cloud we quickly move beyond, smelling a bit of swimming pools…. We shake our heads clear and go on. But we walked through a name-space where we sensed "more dimensions" than usual. We have rich associational hooks in all our names and in the early sixties I called what others call our vocabularies tapestries of words. Multidimensional or, better, myriad-dimensional tapestries—to be sure. In these packed phrase names, however, something else is going on. We are hooking into structured bodies of knowledge with what I guess you'd have to call a cluster of hooks. I started these Answers with these names not because I know anything about chemistry, but to provide an example not attached to the polyhedra or syses I'm thinking about through my fingers on a keyboard. My syses are intentionally packed phrase names. But the Greek polyhedra also bear these names. Bucky's vector equilibrium is the Greeks' cubeoctahedron. Dictionaries say the "e" is left off of "cube" but a search of the Web shows that most, certainly everybody writing about Bucky or Synergetics uses it. So, we don't get a cub for this bear of a word. Note why a human's innards pump that e in. It's to control your pronunciation of the word as you read. With or without moving your lips. Given notation based on the phonemic flow, writing is intended to reflect speaking. Disembodied writing isn't writing that's not hand-writing, it's writing in which you can't hear an individual's voice. That's why shop talk among poet's is about a poet's ear, not e's (his or her) voice (except where over- all style is the point). Why does this name refer to a cube and an octahedron? This is a twentyfoursysthree,four, referred to only as a twentyfoursys because, while paired to a rhombic dodecahedron, it can be considered as one of the non-paired syses such as the sixsys. I know that a sentence like the previous one must raise hairs on the back of your neck with all those hissing syses running through the grasses. The twentyfoursys, with twenty-four framers, has, on opposite sides of a framer, a square and a triangle. Forty-eight polygon edges, twenty-four for each type of polygon. 24/4 = 6; 24/3 = 8. These are so arranged that it looks as if a cube and an octahedron blew outward from a common center. Bucky even made models of this by declaring one set of faces solid and the other set spaces and moving the solid faces in and out on dowels. How's that for packing structural knowledge into a name? Twentyfoursys tells you that you have a "cube" and an "octahedron" there, but not immediately. Your ear-to-mind-to-thought pumping passes through a moment of calculating in the associational netting of sense. The 6 and 8, themselves, no longer hidden in "hexa" and "octa", hook the other syses. And you see another level of pumping (without dowels) as the simultaneous (impossible?) twelvesyses expand together into the twentyfoursys and the twentyfoursys contracts to the simultaneous (maybe one is only potential) twelvesyses. The formerly independent two are now one, a pair, some sort of twins, and even the simultaneity is suggestured only. Writing my Stanford letter, responding to the request to tell about Bucky's influence on me, I became convinced that I could onlyshow it by recapping my thinking done since my exposure to Bucky and his thinking, imagining, and building. It wasn't what he thought so much as how he thought that flowed into me, waking the connate waters, the waters within the rock and there from that rock's formation, the human "genius" that unfolded in our geniusing — until we're, more or less effectively de-geniused. Even without this context, I've always figured my talking about the syses was not just showing these names and their relations to be useful to Synergetics and related subjects thinking, but was contributing to strengthening listening readers' "associational" systems—and an inborn probing tendency to focus these systems within relevant knowledge systems. The Greek names have been around for a long time. They are known to people who speak almost every language in the world since all "western" civilization sees a root in Greece and its ancestral lands and other major lines of advance, too, look back in that direction to some extent. My language of syses is in English, even Amer- English on its way to splitting off as Amerish, a separate and larger (and even more flexible) language. Translating into most languages is pretty straightforward. Only one word for which to find an "equivalent". Suggest system and then, through truncation or another bit of surgery, make it a recognizable noun in its own right. But, English is on its way to being an Earthian language, an (on this planet) "universal" language. People may think this is because the U.S. is a super-power. Or just arrogant and bent on Empire. Well, it has to do with the "empirical", I guess. Latin gave way to English in the 17th century, and natural philosophy emerged from somewhere between "philosophy" and "alchemy". Some would say this was because English pulled in everything. The Anglo-Saxon and, then, what with "Norman" invasions, the old world. Whatever the truth of that, what mattered, and matters, English is clean. Look at all the languages with "gender" assigned to everything in the definite and indefinite articles (to take one stunning example of placental goop never washed away). English washes all that sort of thing away. Just (now) our the. It not only avoids furnishing irrelevant (and flat out wrong) information, but it's active. Let me throw a little "folk" etymology at you. After all, it's in the "folk" that language gets made and used. I'm jumping into another talk and very much in the middle, but I go into this elsewhere and you can find it. We've some special terms: here, now, is, and at. We use them a lot. We can push these away, in a sense, and generate a little perspective. The is our pusher. We can take the here. We've pushed here away and we can look at it or it can be another here than the one we occupy. Just as "day's eye" becomes daisy, the here becomes there. And we generate then, this, and that the same way. We've another sort of "article" in English that's never said outside of such a compound. It's the solar-plexus based (or lung-based) gasp of surprise, wha"?". Down in our innards, we remember this early gasp, a bodily word-pusher. And we parallel those the-words with where, when, what ...but not whis. We tend to spell that out with the –at term. What is this? What is that? The others can "double" up. We can ask, what here or just start with where. So what seems to be taken as a base-term masking the undignified (but personally ancient) wha"?". These pushings around of what's available are the primary working models I got from Bucky, I think. Bucky was a mathematical explorer and he explored in geometry in which he could get his hands on the materials. My explorations were not in, but within, language. So, I didn't get a collection of geometrical facts and methods from Bucky. Or social attitudes. Or anticipations about technology and the "hopes" and "fears" that, for most, mask these anticipations. Perhaps what I got from Bucky was an advanced course in how to play. |