Bucky Fuller: The Cracking of a Geodesic Egghead

The other nite I went to see a fully accredited culture hero. A liberally lovely evening. The whole range of beautiful people and even a couple real ones came out to hear a kindly and intentionally invisible old man. I was surrounded, engulfed, by just-rite long hair overflowing Harris-Tweed-Jackets. My hungry hormones kept me distracted as too beautiful women in bluest blue jeans, with that just-rite toudh of peroxide, smiled langurously to a not-too-listened-to lecture. What a strange assortment of people! I suppose it was the beginning of their weekend, — a time to “let loose.” But a bit too beautiful to be natural. Too frightened to be real. And punctuated by a seventy year old couple squeezed next to a glazed eyed wild haired freek. What sort of prophet calls forth an assemblage such as this? Timothy Leary is on an extended vacation, so it must be that Bucky Fuller’s back in town.

If you look in the front of your Whole Earth Catalogue, Whole Systems, Pg. 3, there’s plenty of introduction to the rich thoughts of this wise old man. Apparently all of his lectures and books are somewhat the same. “People who beef about, Fuller mainly complain about his repetition, — the same idea again and again, it’p embarrassing. It is embarrassing, also illuminating, because the same notions take on different uses when re-approached from different angles or with different contexts. Fuller’s lectures have a raga quality of rich, nonlinear, endless improvisations full of convergent surprises.” Of course the ideas are the same, and that really is nothing to beef about, (or they all begin with the same point — the life story of R. Buckminster Fuller.