Pages

2/9/15

I Seem To Be a Verb

BOOK I Seem To Be a Verb by R. Buckminster Fuller with Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, 1970

I don't know too much about Bucky, except for this book, his elongated map projections, and that there is a big competition named after him. The book begins:

p. 1

"I was born cross-eyed. I could see only large patterns, houses, trees and outlines of people - and all coloring was blurred. I could see two dark areas on human faces, but I could not see a human eye or a teardrop or a human hair. Not until I was four years old, in 1899, was it discovered that my cross-eyedness was caused by my being abnormally farsighted. Lenses fully corrected my vision. Despite my new ability to apprehend details, my childhood's spontaneous dependence only upon big patterns has persisted." 

It seems that sight, in the phenomenon of interpreting light in relationship to material, is one of the major ways we tend to grasp our truths. But in being human, sight is at best a predictable illusion of illuminated light, at angles of particular distortions and proportions that become familiar in the memory of the mundane. Luckily, there is the smell, sound, feel and internal sense of things that give the second, third, fourth, and infinite series of dimensions found in a moment. In being a verb, is Buckminster Fuller revealing that he seems to be in infinite motion? Or is he simply a part of speech that has a past, present, and future? Whatever. If anything, glasses provide the distortion.

p. 128

"Let's pretend there's a way of getting through it, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through..." - Through the Looking Glass

(Getting bored at my grandparents' house over the winter break.)


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