Everything I Know: Section 12
Part 1
Cynde gave me a very beautiful drawing and quotation from Cheyenne Indians on it was a marriage in the north and a marriage in the south, and then the east and the west concepts that are really very moving take, there is no way for me to paraphrase them because it is so beautifully done itself, and I’ll bring that out at the interim if other people would like to read it but in the marriage of the south, there is a marriage it is a different kind of a marriage a marriage with a sister. The, my grandson was on his 18th birthday, my grand daughter, who is a year older, I went into his room, his birthday, and she had on, she done little things on the wall, made a little drawing, but she had written these words:
“So many love you, as do I
Who do I thank on this day of your birth?
That you were born a part of me, that you were born my brother?”
I really felt that kind of a feeling, because I do find that, here I saw had watched these two young people during much skirmishing and kind of battling when they were young, but the sense of brother and sisterly love of those two, is a very beautiful thing to me. They seem to have grown up to it. There is no question about a love that is not a physical-baby-making love that goes on between human beings, and I feel this very strongly with my fellow-men, fellow-humans.
The first question. What can you say about coordinating the vibrations of music with those of light with the object of causing a healing effect in a person with disease dis-ease? For instance, music used to change moods, sounds to destroy, color to effect mood, combine all to effect healing maybe in conjunction with acupuncture. Points under pyramids domes.
I’m just going to say something technical about music, because this brings it up. You may remember that Pythagoras also discovered that we take a tensed string, we’re dealing in tension and compression, and I think about the tensegrity. If you half the length of a tensed string you go up one octave. Octaves are related to “halvings” of unity. This is again, like quantum. You start with the whole, and you fractionate the whole. And that makes the octaves. Then, to discover, that when you third the strings, you get the “fifths” which give us then our keys going up up in the sharps and flats, all on those those are fifths but they are brought about by “thirding” the strings, and “halving” it, makes the octaves. That’s really a very fascinating fundamental, and, when we get to such I don’t like my use of the word fundamental. I’m conditioned reflexed. They’re words that I have to try to get out, and I don’t like “fundamental” because I don’t think there are any foundations, and somebody asked me another question here about my use of I found I’d been using the word “package”, and I think the word “package” is not quite as bad as “particle” but it is the same kind of a word it’s a thing word, and I don’t think, things I think verbs, and events, and so that I have to keep housecleaning my language. Even the word “house” is a bad one.
So, excuse me, from time to time, if in my spontaneous discourse I revert to the use of words that I would not use in writing a paper, I’ll catch myself on paper, but just coming out, I’ll often use ones that I do not approve of.
Now, coming back to the music, I wanted to have a feeling that when you get to something as absolutely simple as just “halving” that this makes octaves. This must be something very deep in all of us that we don’t know about and if Pythagoras hadn’t discovered it is so, which is very fascinating. There is a great deal written about what I’m talking about, and the man that I’ve dedicated by book SYNERGETICS to, Coxeter, I think is the greatest geometer of our time, has written some very important discourses on written out on Pythagoras’ work and the relation getting into harmonics just so far as the number goes some simple things that could be of interest to all of you.
The now, in relation to what this music might do to people in various ways, and correlating the word music with light. I became fascinated with this subject at the time of the first Dymaxion House where I was trying to really develop a generalized be as generalized as I could and then reduce it to special case advantage for life and particularly the new life, and I determined to have everything that I had of a physical nature as close as possible to neutral, so that, like a piano that would be muted until you began to play it, I thought of it as a musical instrument, and the architecture, that is whatever you might get out in harmonics would have to be something the way you used your house, so I tried to have colors at neutral, and arranged, as I’ve shown you, there was a control where the light coming from the center of the house could become any color. I could make rooms different colors simply by introducing colored light, and then I tried to have the room as nearly neutral as possible. I went through just concepts of fog and the neutrality of fog and so forth, but fog isn’t really quite that way and I found that aluminum colors, and just grays were not as neutral so, I found that the human eye really has things that it is accustomed to, it is really accustomed to a brown earth, and this has the most neutral effect, apparently, more so than if I tried to make a green floor or a black floor, or a white floor the earth colors seem to be just very, very excellent. So, the point was, I sought for the neutral tone if I could find it, but tried to arrange for humanity, then, to change things.
Then I found that, at the time I was doing the Dymaxion House there was, Wilfred was working on a color organ for the first time and this back in the twenties, and very interesting man. And I found that the it did not please me, and people were fascinated, but they didn’t seem to use the word, they were not being particularly satisfied, they were interested or fascinated. I came to the conclusion that in relation to what I gave you the other day of our sensing, and the distances that you can sense, and that these were very different magnitudes, and I found, then, that in nature, as far as color goes, nature changes colors really quite rapidly from day to night she gives you blue skies, the clouds change really goes and we get immersed in a gray day and we feel gray. We don’t get it’s really hard for us to tell that the mood we’re in on a gray day isn’t the mood we’re in on a blue day in a blue, clear sky day, because we don’t move from one to the other fast enough. Yet, the colors do change fairly rapidly, getting up to lightening. The season colors change quite slowly. So we have the day and night, but day and night takes quite a lot of hours, and if the sky is clouding over that takes quite along time it begins to take, actually how long the scene is in and comes out, they are pretty large, they are not in seconds, and they are not in minutes they tend to be in hours.
And, then the season colors change, the snows and the green periods and so forth, those are quite slow. But then I found the sounds seem to change really quite rapidly. There are rushings of brooks and the birds notes, the frequency of sound change is very much more rapid than the frequency of the light change. Because we are accustomed to it that way, and so we can take very high beats in music and so forth, but if you get that in light, if it goes beyond a certain periodicity, it gets to be startling and shocking, and we do not freeze-on very rapidly. We can, if it is a shaped picture, there has been of course, a great deal has been done with computerization of moving pictures and doing some producing some very fascinating things that are the word fascinating. But I think they have to be designed, they have to have some transformational continuity, they can’t be they have to be comprehendable not to be shocking.
Part 2
Then, I find smells, we have really, lily of the valley periods that go for several weeks and we have rose periods and these smells can continue for quite a long time. Those notes do not change rapidly. If they would change too rapidly they would get to be confusing, not very, not particularly pleasing.
Touch. The kind of periodicity we get with the roughness and smoothness etceteras it is fairly difficult to say what the periodicity is, but we’re terribly sensitive to the change, with that touch, between the rough and the smooth, whatever it may be. If you’re just finding your way, that way.
But I think these harmonics are really quite different scales. I don’t think so far anything that I have experienced of human beings trying to bring together the light and the sound are very successful just as light and sound notes, abstracted. That if the, if you are seeing a picture, something you recognize as a total synergetic affair, it is life, and you see the scenes changing with some, you can handle that kind of complexity very well, but it is really being handled as a whole. And, I don’t know whether I’m being very good in my answering of the question.
What can you say about coordinating the vibrations of music with those of light, the object causing a healing effect in a person with disease? I have no experimental knowledge of this. I can certainly accredit that it could be so it seems to be, sound as though it might be, particularly if a person is particularly musical. I would think this might be very, very powerful, but using sounds to destroy we do get, particularly in ultrasonics we can do some very shattering things with vibration no question about that. And there is no guess about the harmonics getting to where you could smash a bridge.
Then you get to asking about points on the pyramids. One of the things we have a great deal about in SYNERGETICS that Sonny Applewhite and I talked about a great deal, relates to the, I mentioned to you that if you had a triangle, light could bounce around in the triangle, or it could go out through the edge of the triangle, but when there is an impingement on the edge of a triangle, your line goes through and you find the great circle comes out the same angle between the two lines from this side and that side. Some of you have learned in geometry long ago. So you can either have the line go out of the triangle, or it will bounce back in at the same angle, and so the energies can stay inside the triangle, or they can come out of the triangle into the next one, and that is really what I was showing you with the folding up of great circles, where those great circles then came together again and re-established the great circle and went on. Where it could be, the folding was simply the way that energies and sounds would be locally shunted into local holding patterns, or it could go on in the great circle. Do you understand that? This I found a very fascinating matter so when we get into the “A” and “B” components out of which you made all the geometries.
Then I found that the fact that the “A” could be made out of one triangle, therefore the energy would stay in an “A”, but the B could not be made out of one triangle, therefore the energies would not stay in the “B”. “B” is an energy loser and an “A” is an energy holder and these, when we get then to the proton and neutrons and just to the nucleon idea, where we get to where one is really neutral and also has great similarity here in principle to that idea of the sphere becoming a space and the space becoming a sphere there is an enormous number of interchangeabilities here, but the angle refraction business, I mean, and this brings me back then to the business about pyramids, and you can trace in the “B” particle how the energies, then, you’ll find that they come out of the triangle, but they work towards the end and come out of the end. You just follow the bounce pattern, it goes out, and so I can see, with the pyramids which are half octahedra, and they have both the “A”s and the “B”s and they are the heart of the octahedra octahedron. You remember that I had the “B”s are superimposed on the “A”s do you remember that? How you first found them, and thinking about the mites and the sites where I had these asymmetrical tetrahedra but they were also right angle isosceles asymmetric and they filled all space, that you have then the “B” and the “B” two “B”s and then one “A”. Those “B”s are energy diffusers and the “A” is an energy holder it would be at the center there. So I could see then where there could be some very interesting effects in half octahedra of energy as far as pyramids go. That, I can really explain, and show the mathematics of it alright. I often have young people talk to me about this half pyramid business and about safety razor blades, and there is much discussion about such things. I have no experimental evidence that a safety razor blade is sharpened. Nobody has ever given me you’re going to have to do some very beautiful work with a microscope and everything to really know if a razor is sharpened. Nobody has ever given me anything like this everybody just talks about it says, somebody said they tried it and it does work. Nobody has ever given me any experimental evidence of actually ever having done it and proving it is sharper. So I think it is very easy to have loose talk like that and it is lots of fun, but whether it I am perfectly as the talk came along I already knew about my “A” and “B” particles and what happens with half octahedra and I could see that somebody may have known this long ago, and I think it’s very interesting that you find that in the Masons the Masonry, going back into their antiquities, they have that half that pyramid, and they have it showing a light and a star and this is on our dollar bills. The pyramid idea, and it very much may have been discovered by humanity in this manner. But as I gathered my own SYNERGETICS themselves, they themselves automatically continually reveal to me, because I know I am dealing in events and energy and not as I called it energetic-synergetic geometry, and, yes, I still call it that, but sum totally now find the world SYNERGETICS seems to be o.k., because it embraces that is an embracing word.
I don’t think there is much more to say. I know, theoretically, energies are processed by the geometries very powerfully, and I’ve talked to you about those railroad tracks of the 25 great circles going through the 12 points and the fact that we have 7 sets of great circles and one of them is infinitely holding that’s the 6 great circles that go around the icosahedron makes the these are the equators there are 12 vertexes of the icosahedron, so that there are six equators, being 6 axes between the 12 opposite poles, and those go always, if you think about the icosahedron, here are its poles, and the equator is always the mid-edge of the triangles you’ve got mid-edge, mid-edge, it never gets near the vertexes, those are absolutely energy holdings. And they’re, they are this pattern here. These are the same six great circles, see? And there was a six eight circle tensegrity hanging up here behind me yesterday.
Those will hold the energy of this whatever the icosahedron is and I think it is an electron. I can see how that axis how electrons have, just electrons, and they can be taken away from an atom, because they are separate.
The main answer to this question is that I can accredit really quite incisively, mathematically, high potentials that people but when people talk to be loosely, when somebody talks about astrology, I’m not really sure of my astrology because I know that people are patterns of what they think of as constellations in the sky, and I know those are changing going to just the big dipper, the big bear Ursa Major, where we find then that one of the stars in the handle is a 100 light years away and another 78 and another 200 light years away incredible distance behind. Seen from some other part of the Universe it wouldn’t look like that at all. And we know those two the 100 year and the 200 year are moving in different directions. In a few hundred years they will not be lined up the way they are now at all. That one is gradually changing. So that the constellation ideas that go along with astrology and so forth make astrology unfirm to me, whereas I said I thought it had a great base, that I can see, understand and accredit celestial interaction of little individuals on our planet. And that the confirmations of the stars at the time they are born I could think could have very great importance, what the vectors were that were operative of the forces of Universe must be tremendously powerfully different with each birth.
So all I have something that goes on in me all the time, and I don’t exclude phenomena, I’m willing to entertain it, but I really do like the people who would like to talk seriously, and I find kids often do take things very seriously without really getting experimental evidence. They don’t get a confirmation. They can get they really can get into a fad then, that, I personally then, I told you earlier, I keep alive superstitions, I keep alive all the myths, because there might be something there someday. I’m not dismissing them at all. And many of them have been good, because they actually have done numerology began to open up a whole lot of knowledge for me of real number behavior, so that I find there are many payoffs, and therefore I don’t want to discourage human beings, but I do urge them if they really are eager to know to really get more really experiential and find out something, because they might really find something much more exciting than what they are talking about.
Now, Connie, “If physical precession involves 90 degreeness, does metaphysical precession also involve 90 degreeness?”
Yes, I would really say so. I have been saying that we were metaphysically misinterpreting our experience when we said I’ve been throwing, that I’ve been throwing at l80 degrees I throw a straight ball. I said, we let go here, and the ball went there. So we were handling it mentally wrong. I find that when we begin to really understand the precession, the thinking is simply finding out what it is about, so it is not, does not have the characteristics of “thingness” of the physical, of special case. Physically we have special directions and special cases. So that the yes, the thinking can help you to the metaphysical can help you to understand what it is you really are experiencing. To encourage you to become experiential and really be incisive about your information, but I yes, I would say metaphysically the following. This is very important put your two hands out in front of you two fingers, and start moving them sideways. Now, keep looking at me, and how long can you see, I’m still seeing my fingers, still seeing them. I say I am looking this way, but I am looking out here too. There is your 90 degreeness. Because your metaphysical is very powerful. It also relates to Meddy’s question about Intuition “What is Intuition?”, and I find intuition is, I call it the twilight between the conscious and the subconscious. There is no question about subconscious. There is no question about my heart being coordinated and carrying on, beating all the time without my doing anything about it. There is no question that I have the experience of saying, “What is that man’s name, and my subconscious goes to work and suddenly brings me back the name. There is no question about, I say that I want to wake up at such and such a time, and if I don’t have an alarm clock I can wake up at 7:15 or 7:13. Because we’re counting internally all the time anyway. We have so many rhythms it is really quite possible to do that, and I’ve done this do this really a very great deal, so I have any number of proof to myself of sub-conscious activity, which then becomes conscious.
Part 3
I know that I go to sleep and I carry on and I wake up, so every time I’m asleep I’m subconsciously operative, so that what I call then the Intuition, is a twilight zone existing between the subconscious and the conscious. I don’t think that the line is sharp. I think it can vary. And at times one gets a little bigger and the other a little smaller they are pulsative, they have tides. So, this is the kind of thing that I’m really quite busy looking this way, and something makes me look over there. I’m trying to give you a 90 degree metaphysical the metaphysical tells me to turn that I’d better look over here all of a sudden. Maybe it is kind of a hint, and maybe it’s a sound. Maybe it is just because it is a pattern that I have experienced before which tells me that I’d better look to the side.
So I can see that there can be metaphysical 90 degreeness that’s watching you all the time being very careful.
And now I’ll take you into metaphysical 90 degreeness where I spoke to you about all of our economic charts are Newtonian, and the baseline is 90 degrees, and you find all of our curves, everything we’ve been having in our civilization, where we grow faster and faster, and we see more and more of the world, all of the curves are increasing and getting more and more abnormal. And they’re getting into almost verticality, the acceleration factor is so high. So we say that all of humanity is becoming so abnormal that we are coming into race schizophrenia. But I see then if I take the Einsteinian normal that normal is 186,000 miles a second, and any other speed has to be accounted for by the energies intercepting one another, and tying themselves in local knots, which is really beautifully proven enough to come out with fission which definitely demonstrates this is exactly the way you can predict how much energy is in any given matter, so that I find, then, the Einsteinian norm of constant motion intertransformation and 186,000 miles a second is normal. Therefore if I take motion and change as normal, and Newton was not only the norm baseline, but his first law of motion said “A body persists in a state of rest, or in a line of motion, except as affected by other bodies.” At rest was the norm. If anybody threw anything new it came to rest over there, because they didn’t think bigger than the world because the world was standing still in Universe at that time. So the norm was at rest, and so death was the only thing that was really normal. They had the “quick and the dead” and the dead was absolutely normal, that’s the eternity.
So I find then the Newtonian showing man going into race schizophrenia due to the acceleration and so forth, I turn the chart 90 degrees metaphysically, and I find that man was in a tailspin just about to crash and pulling out into a straight level flight! So this is a metaphysical, 90 degree, reorientation. Taking it which is your base? Is that a fairly satisfactory kind of an answer?
“Do you feel that a knowledge of politics, and or economics is necessary to make major contributions to humanity? You say that naivety is invaluable wouldn’t it stand in the way of comprehensive anticipatory design science?” They are really two different questions, alright.
The politics and the I think it’s very good to have knowledge of economics, I don’t think you can do design science without economics, but I have to say what I mean by economics. The word “economics” in Greek did derive from the world “ecology.” And this was the “ecol” “house”, the “col” is the house, and the management of the house, and the word “economics” comes from that. So I think we are dealing then in environment controls, and there is the environment which is the whole Universe. Environment to each must be all it is excepting me. And Universe the only difference between Universe and environment is “Me” the observer.
So my environment could be very big, or it could be a local environment, as for instance the biosphere of our little spaceship earth. This is a very local environment, even more local environment is this room that we are in here, but each one, “ecol” then is this collecting, collection. Which one are we really talking about this particular one. These are economics. And the energy, the metabolics, what I taught Meddy, quite a while ago, my grand strategy of Design Science in World Gaming is to have internal metabolics and external metabolics. And external metabolics are economics. And to make them in the terms of just a cow or just in terms of a coin or money is where we’ve gotten into confusion rather than bringing it on to what I call a “cosmic accounting” basis and the “cosmic accounting” really does deal in these energies. How much in producing oil at a great refinery, you take all kinds of energies that are going into heating, this fractionating column or whatever it may be. They figure the energies put in here and taken out there incredibly carefully. And that’s the way the Universe works.
If the people then who are exploiting oil then really took the work that engineers do in designing refineries, I’ve been through this refinery design it is an extraordinary matter. The exquisite accuracy with which they know how much energy to take from this or that and turning that energy to the larger account where they’re going to cash in on what they’re making with it
Well, so economics, when they’re energy economics, and motion economics, and Newtonian economics, I think that those are very essential to design science, and to you and I being useful to our fellow man to humanity.
So “naivety” I really mean then not knowing it all. Not saying, “I understand that and I am not going to listen.” The naivety to really be quite a sucker about everything, really, somebody is attracting you and saying something is going on with safety razors, to be naive enough to say “this could be something.” But to go on a little further and to look into it more. But I think an enormous number of people miss everything because they say “I know that, I know that, I know that.” There is that goes on a very great deal. And I know my own propensity to be just that stupid particularly if I am tired, I know that. So I really have to watch to watch that. I really deliberately try to keep myself as a child, and a child is naive. That’s what the word means, “being as a child.”
I did everything I could to recover my sensitivity of a child because all the people who were talking to me when they were telling me, “Never mind what you think,” they said “You’ve got to get over your sensitivity this is a tough world, and there is going to be a moment when you’re going to have to do something pretty tough if you’re going to survive. GET OVER THAT SENSITIVITY.” And so I kept trying, and started learning the game, you really had to get over your sensitivity. But when I tried to get myself in my own thinking again, I did everything I hope I haven’t lost the sensitivity I really was born with, can I open it up again, and sure enough I did. So, I really am enjoying life, I feel very much about life as I did as a little child. I get just as excited really looking at the flowers as I did when I was a child. But I got to a time when I was pretty blase about that flower. Something you send to funerals and make the girl feel good. Now, either a bribe or a lever.
“You made much mention of the tet, octa, cube and icosa the dodecahedron is a platonic solid too, why does it not have a place in your mathematics?” I said, I gave you something about the domains, topologically there is a domain of vertices, and domains of edges and the domains of faces. The domains of faces was the face, the domain of an edge was a diamond, and domain of a vertex is a connecting centers of gravities of the triangles around I only deal in structural systems and they have to be triangulated. The dodecahedron are the domains of the vertexes of the icosahedron, but if you make a dodecahedron as a necklace, like this, you’ll find it collapses, just like the cube. So it isn’t a structure, and that’s why, I only deal in the cube as a structure, and that’s why I do all this accounting as a structure, by triangulating it. So if I triangulate the dodecahedron then it turns out to be the icosahedron.
Part 4
I’ve got to put in a battery. It’s a strange feeling as you you begin to hear yourself in very peculiar ways as your hearing aid is sort of beginning to fail. It’s a whole new, probably with hearing aids, you really have to learn to live with them. The doctor said if I could really put up with it for a couple of years then I’d begin to find that the human brain is so extraordinary it begins to sort out what it is you do want to hear, but they just give me incredible noises, but now I’m really getting now I’ve been using quite a few years, and I’m beginning to really get a great deal out of them. At any rate, this compensation business, I’m sure that if I hadn’t hearing aids, I’d have just stopped trying to hear and it would be quite easy to get old and just enjoy your own thoughts, and keep going over and you read a lot, and, but with them, and trying to hear, it again has helped me to recover that childlike business I listen terribly hard, you have no idea how and I’m sure this keeps me very alive.
Does that answer the platonic business? It was just not in the structures class.
“Does the metaphysical Universe employ spatial relationships such as vectors or shapes?” Yes, because I said, what was I think absolutely unique as far as my own any kind of contribution I have been able to make in SYNERGETICS was introducing the conceptuality independent of size and time. So, what are the tetrahedron? These are conceptual structural systems. And then if I say, “What does that triangle consist of?” What material? I really don’t know at all. I really can see tetrahedron, conceptionally, without having any particular material. The “insideness” and “outsideness” business, there is something that I can associate with really motions itself, but without having to say what the material really is, because there is this is we have such an extraordinary frame of reference with our own insideness and outsideness and so forth. And anything we can think about that has any substance to it any “thinkable system” thinkability requires a system. Anything that is actually identifiable will, at any location, is going to have an insideness and an outsideness.
So, “Does the metaphysical Universe employ” so the metaphysical is my mental activity, so it does employ the spatial vectors and so forth.
“Can human relationships be described as joining of shapes, convergence of vectors, and so forth?” Very much so, the there is it’s rather dull, but you really can get down into making the vectors of the approaching things, and we can really get to the vectors like we get close in critical proximity, and feel heat and all the energy and everything else. There are vectorial things going on very powerfully. Actually can be described as forces. The metaphysical, I the metaphysical intereffects I don’t think you can describe with vectors the physicals, yes.
“How do other peoples around the world feel about a cooperating, trusting one-town world? How far is humanity from realizing this? How urgent is the need to act soon? How likely to succeed or fail?” I have, fortunately, traveled around the world, and I have talked to the human beings everywhere, and one of the things that really has impressed me is, in Russia, the Russians can’t understand why the Americans and Russians shouldn’t be getting on absolutely superbly. I’m not talking about their politicians or leaders, but the people themselves. They just don’t understand why we can’t get on. What’s going on?
And the Arabs, Israeli I have talked to many, and absolutely good feeling. It couldn’t be better. And really, there is a people resentment around the world of the political manipulation of them making and putting them one against another and realizing how terrifically propagandized to feel the way they do. Going back and forth as much as I do, and being in India when they found, the United States papers I was really shocked when I found the New York Times was really pretty reliable, but I found the New York Times reporter in India not being faithful to what was going on there, and he was really participating in propaganda. Whether he had a political job and had that job mixed up with I’m afraid that was in there. But it was really, there was some treachery of information to humanity going on.
The, so, I think my answer to you is that the people are ready. Everywhere. They would very much welcome it.
How quickly people will this phenomena, trust, every child is born with trust. Has to. It is absolutely dependent on that parent. That the breast is going to be there. Whatever is necessary for a long, long time. And when a child, lying in bed, his drunken parents suddenly (smack) in a fight with one another, I assure you this trust gets very greatly shattered. These things are very, very delicate, and it doesn’t, it’s hard to find the tiny little things that suddenly make little human beings really skeptical about other human beings. But there is a born trust and it will persist so long as it doesn’t have very important evidence that is not to be trusted. When I say the mother and father are drunk and father is leaving home with his angry voice, and this little child really may not know what the words are but really feels absolutely insecure all of a sudden.
The urgency to act is always there. I think it has always been there through all history. All history calls for integrity of the human beings, and I, fortunately I think, very, there are a very large numbers of human beings acting in extraordinary integrity, and even the ones who seemingly are bad, they’ve been taught the game and they’re really quite convinced of the game they’re playing. I don’t see businessmen as bad people at all, but I think they really are caught in convinced of the game being valid that where they haven’t had the right information, and it’s very easy to get people to play the wrong games. So that, the big thing is, integrity is required at all times, so then “How likely is it to succeed or fail?” That I feel is absolutely touch and go now. And I think the whole difference whether we do or not actually lies with each one of us. It’s really the little things each one of us are doing. If I don’t personally feel the need to pick up the paper, to clean up my own mess, if I don’t feel that, it’s going to go just like wildfire everything is going to go to pieces. I’ve got to feel it about everything I do, and I do feel it that way, all the time now. Much more than I ever have. All my life I’ve had this feeling, but much more now I really feel there were times I let things go a little, but I must not let things go anymore. I think humanity is really being weighed. I call it really some final exam. And humanity is not marking the papers. Nor are politicians marking the papers. We are we really going to qualify to graduate to be a little more responsible than just, just really thinking that we are the whole world and we are the whole Universe, which we tend to be prone to think, and that the Universe is here to please us or displease us the stars are just a decoration. Are we really going to graduate where we are going to put ourselves in the right magnitude and really realize that we are here to really use this beautiful thing and it’s truth is just not something you traffic there is no temporizing with truth whatever it is you go with it.
So, “What are your predictions for future years?” I can give I know what the options are. I know where things can go, and I can really spell out and the particular thing that I gave you to read last night, as I go into the last parts there, ways what would happen if you then stop wasting the fuel to go to false jobs that are not producing life support, and you begin to see how the economies work out I spelled that out quite clearly in that piece that I gave you. I think I know that those are options. So that, but whether we are going to make it or not is quite a different thing, so I can’t make any prediction that that is where we’re going to go, but I know those are options and there are probably other options. But that’s true and somewhere along the lines that I put there seem to be the prominent way in which rivers would flow if you do this and that. It was a good question, Connie.
Question from Janet. “Is it as valid, or as valuable for a person to devote his time and energies to playing music, painting or writing poetry as it is to devote time and energies to show the healing and so forth?” I think this is very much a matter of the individual. And here is where the intuition really does play a very important part, and I know my artist friends who just really did do painting and so forth and my friends who have been musicians, have helped me a great deal to do what I do. They have loved me. We have been friends, they inspire me, and apparently what I do inspires them. But the main thing is INTEGRITY WITH SELF. Because we are nature does have butterflies, and she has lilies and they’re different. And they are very intercontributory and there is great cross pollinating that goes on in the affection and the harmonics our metaphysical cross pollination is harmonic. Things that really either inspire very positively, or might irritate, they force you to precess or something. So, as far as I’m concerned out of validity, it is just a matter of integrity, is this person really feeling very much like painting? be sure to paint. Be sure to do it. That’s the language. I see artist after artist that I know who did not stay in school very long, and they very often were the drop outs. And they were, to me, very probably drop outs because as they were being exposed to information and the way they were being taught about language, and how to write and so forth, it didn’t feel right. This was not an intellectual decision at all, but it just didn’t feel right. The artist had, then, I say, every child is born genius. And their genius is they are intuitively threatened, and they really just clam up. They don’t know why they are clamming up, and they don’t want to be bad boys, or they’re just not getting on. Because I think they are absolutely protecting something within them. So many, many of my artists friends simply were drop outs that way, they just clammed up. That was not the language they liked to speak. They had a visual language instead of a hearing language, etc. So they wanted to paint. This is the way they talk. That’s what you do in your music. You speak that way. So I think it depends on what language that you feel you are going to be most effective in. So that is really the artist.
Part 5
2. This economic crises, inflation, recession, whatever we are passing through it is beginning to seem like the stories I’ve heard about the ’30’s Depression. Is it similar? Is it going to get worse?” Ah. It is not similar. It is incredibly different. The other one came on, society wasn’t expecting it at all. I was amazed by it. That 4-D that you have, you’ll find there are letters of my mother about the stock market and about the selling railroad bonds, and things like that. 4-D was written two years before the economic before the ’29 crash. And I could see it coming, and I really tried to tell people that it was coming in many ways. If you read that carefully you will find, as I talked to people in the stock world and so forth, I am saying those things. At any rate, there were not many people who had stocks and bonds. That was a very esoteric subject society just didn’t know what had happened. They were not thinking much about banking, the society was extraordinarily naive, and they didn’t know what had happened, the, it is, I say many people really don’t know today what it was all about just that it was the Depression. And it had a very it was depressing, that’s one reason it was the “Great Depression.” The people really stopped being communicative. I told you, in those days the number of literates were very much lower, the vocabularies were less, and people began to get just sitting in rooms and not doing anything. It was a very stagnating kind of a thing. There was no protest down the street, just suddenly things began to be wrong and the newspapers, the financial world kept trying to say stupid things, that prosperity was just around the corner and all of the nonsense. And you heard just exactly the same thing in the Nixon government and so forth, “There is nothing wrong, there is nothing wrong ” so were just suddenly, so it is obviously but all the time it was wrong. So that there’s been much more education about what’s going on, and this time the issues are different.
That was the beginning really as Roosevelt’s term was “the forgotten man,” but the forgotten man is very much in today, so it really is an everybody based and it was not at that time. It was still very and I said this poker hand business showing that, there was in those days a respect for power that was incredible. The for which reason the poor of those days when they did get the money immediately wanted all the labor man who suddenly made money then got a lot of things his kids didn’t like it, but dad got marks of distinction. In other words the association the superficial associations had very powerful psychological effects they don’t have anymore. Society has really been completely purged of that kind of a feeling so that what is so very different in this one, is that the young people in my day were not supposed to know anything and the older people knew everything, so the young people just sat around anyway, leaving it to older people, and the older people were in confusion. But today all the young people have been purged of the respect for superficial grandeur and strength and so the base is different.
I actually find around the world, now, just having come around again, everybody really very cheery. You hear that things are awful in England it couldn’t be nicer in England. Everybody is feeling great, I assure you. The newspapers keep they keep saying that, and they want to have the other people, our newspapers like to have the other people are in much worse condition, here than we are, you know. We’re pretty bad but everybody else is worse. But I find people around the world really are very expectant. They are expectant of something good coming out of this. And the other times you thought, you’ve got to leave it to politics, so you did finally get in a new deal. Everything, the whole hope was in politics the leader. But the people don’t do anything, you’ve got to elect a big father and the big father would decide what to do. That’s not the way people are now. They really are all feeling
What makes me say what I do, and I think you saw the piece I wrote which will be coming out in the Philadelphia News. I think we are coming to where politics simply you say, “what kind of politics we are going to,” my communist friends say if you don’t join up with the communists, this was all the way back in the ’30’s, what are you going to have?” I said, “You don’t have to have a government.” They said, “Oh, what are you talking about! of course you have to have a government.” “You don’t.” We do have spontaneous commitments, so we’re off cruising in my boat, or we’re going around the world and there’s a big crew on the ship, a sailing ship, I assure you every sailor knows what every sailor does on that ship. And you don’t need any politicians when something goes wrong to know what to do. You really do know your job and the other guy doing it, and you really know he is doing it. If anything went wrong, the only reason he wouldn’t do it is because he’s actually been hurt, but there is spontaneous coordination because everybody can see the other guy really at work.
What fascinates me is the sea, and the sailor. I’ve seen then in incredible conditions they really do fight for that ship, and even then, you get another ship that is in much worse condition, this one is getting on and having a pretty hard time, but this one they really are going to perish and the people on this ship will go after the people in worse condition, but on the land they won’t even stop when the people are dying beside the road. I find man on the land does not behave very well, but the ship of the sea, really has shown, if there is anything that is an anathema to a sailor it’s a sea going politician. It stinks. They don’t want any sea lawyers around. So that I can see you can really get on very nicely without any politicians to tell you what to do. There are, and you do develop codes and you develop laws laws are important. I think what we may, unquestionably have, is something called “city managements,” we may very much have administrations, but we are going to have people nobody is going to be doing what they’re doing because it’s a job and they’re going to make money. Everybody is going to be doing his job because he would like really to be doing something, he wants to make a contribution, and this is the one he feels good doing.
Now, one of the things is rather sad you find in America today, I can understand it and I’m glad that we had labor unions and so forth, but they are the money makers have made such a battle between labor and the money makers that they get tougher and tougher, and Howard Johnson really takes on kids that are pretty hard up and gives them much more to do, and one person has to wait on 20 tables and so forth. But you get even in England where they have plenty of labor organization, people still really love their jobs and they’re really doing their job because they like their job and they’re having fun at the serving of table and all the conversation that goes on. That used to exist in America, but with the hardness of business, and the firming up of labor which was a very great thing that happened really almost the complete joy has gone out of most things, it is very hard the clock punching, and so on so I simply say once we disconnect the idea of how do you carry on, or live, from the doing the job, people are going to want to do jobs, going to want to do beautiful jobs, and they’re not all going to want to do the same jobs. So I’m glad somebody does want to paint and somebody else does want to sing, and somebody else I personally would enjoy very much waiting on tables. It can be a very conversational kind of a job. Very informative.
“This economic crisis “you asked me, No, it’s not similar dear. It’s very, very different, and people didn’t seem to have any idea what was going to come out in those days. I was publishing my SHELTER magazine here in Philadelphia at that time. We do have copies of that over in the office and you can read, because I quote all the newspapers in there what is being said at that time. You can really get quite a feeling about it there. And I did feel that my kind of structures and things would have something to do with things someday but I didn’t think they would happen for 50 years and I didn’t think they would be immediately of importance.
I did work on the idea at that time of buildings that were empty and business buildings were empty. But the property owners felt so strongly about them that the Empire State Building had just been finished in the crash, this incredibly big building with nobody in it. So I made drawings of how it could be used for what you call “space hotel” and move all the people in there who were sleeping in the subways and things, and there was not much enthusiasm about that from the homeowners. I was surprised the veterans of W.W.I, with the Depression on, thinking something ought to be done in Washington, got up a march to Washington. And they encamped over where the Pentagon now is, which was just more or less marshy lands over there. And they were so annoying to the still in Republicans who were this is when General MacArthur drove them out, and they, then, marched to New York, and because of my publishing my SHELTER MAGAZINE their leader came to see me. And I tried very hard to find someplace where they could be housed in New York and I was finally gratified that I couldn’t get any of the churches to pay any attention the subway stairs were all full just with New Yorkers already there people were really sleeping all over it was a little warmer in that subway, and the my, interesting, The Guarantee Trust Company had a lot of properties on the lower East Side where today there are enormous housing developments but they were really terrible old houses, they were really terrible messy, just like Detroit, much as Detroit looks today, and they let me have one of those buildings. And then another one, and the floors were all gone. These men moved in, they repaired all the floors, and they found the neighborhood was wonderful to let them have scraps of boards and things. They got the floors repaired, they laid out newspapers on the floors so that it was something to lie on, they used to try to keep up the morale, they used to have drilling everyday just to sort of get and the butcher at the end of the week, food that he hadn’t sold you have to get rid of because so he gave them this food.
We found the community being wonderful to these people. There were I was only able to take care of a certain number of them, but I did have them, and I had quite a lot about that in SHELTER MAGAZINE if you go back and read that. There are pictures of the work that they did repairing the buildings. When the New Deal came in, they took on these people, and the WPA, and they sent them down to work on the Florida Keys Highway the bridges, and they were all on Matecumbe Key, I’m sorry to say, the minute they began to get some money then, they’d been through such rough things that they did much too much drinking, and they were getting pretty messy. They had just been pushed around, sort of half dregs of humanity, Matecumbe Key, there was a great incredible hurricane, and it wiped them all out. This is the story. So I felt God just cleaned that up decided to get them in a better condition. They were not recoverable. They were living in the railroad cars down there on the key, and it was not a good life, and the WPA thing was not being administered in a too friendly way, it was a mess. It was a handout and really and enormous, really an ignominy. They were not being honored.
“How many miles per gallon of gas did your Dymaxion Car get?” Remember, it carried 11 passengers, so I rated really in the terms of passenger miles, but I did get up to, due to its low drag, I did get up to as much as 30 miles to a gallon. The sum total cruising I think she was running around 20, but this would be for 11 passengers, so if I would take the gallons per passenger mile she was very low. I changed the driving ratio and 2.8 to 1, so that the low drag I could get my engine, when she was really peaking, to get my wheels moving around very fast.
“Once while explaining your ‘Rethinking of the Lord’s Prayer’ you mentioned the physical accelerating and the metaphysical trending to slow down to eternity, will you explain that statement?”
As I have said, man is apparently the physical norm being 186,000 miles per second of energy unfettered in vacuo. As we begin to employ the energies, we are not going so fast, because our earth is going 60,000 miles an hour around the sun, so getting up to 100 miles an hour over the land isn’t something very impressive. We are going faster, but so I find physical accomplishments more rapid to the point that there is such an acceleration that you and I are experiencing in days, where in terms of total numbers of experiences and changes of information changes we have to make in adjusting, we’re in enormous acceleration compared to our forbears. But, I find, then, the metaphysical, we learned a little about that precession, and then how do you describe it properly. We get some equations for it, and it’s done in quantum mechanics. Get it a little more simplified. But we’re dealing in the metaphysical is really dealing in those generalizations, and generalizations themselves are eternal. And, as the Heisenberg principle shows, we can’t get to be absolutely exact because the act of measuring alters that which is measured. So what we do is get we have finer and finer tolerance we’ll tolerate less error. We find a way of getting to say it a little more accurately. But the more accurately you say it, the less frequently you’re going to change what you say. Do you understand that? That really is a metaphysical slowing down because we’re dealing in eternity where there is no change at all. And you get, Universe is always showing these balances. And then the but the motion one only gets to a limit of 186,000 miles a second it doesn’t go on accelerating beyond that. That is the maximum. But it works back, everything works back to the eternity of no change. That’s the end of Janet Janet’s questions, not the end of Janet.
Part 6
Andy Howard. “What kind of educational systems would you propose for teaching comprehensive anticipatory design science?”
I don’t know of any educational system that is being formally made available to society of today that does it that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing for instance. And I really have developed what I have outside, and then I’ve tried to let you know as we go on here the way in which what you and I as human beings can do with another human being who wants to learn, but I gave you the child having to have the experience and then you’re able to enlarge that experience pattern by saying “I’ve had that, but I did this a little more.” You can help the child, then, to get, the little child may have had seven experiences and you give him one more, and that might be, you really need about eight to have the synergetic effect for it suddenly to see the principle. So, I said, as far as I’m concerned all we can do is to add to the experience inventory of the little individual, and we can say “It has been my experience, that I have learned that there are principles and you can be on the T.V. for one, if you’d like, and you might be really right for, you might help them synergetically then to see that principle, it would manifest in what they’ve been experiencing. In other words you can get to teaching, as I did, the great skier at Aspen Colorado that what he was doing was angular valving of gravity. And he agreed that was exactly what he was doing and he was terribly excited to find out that was so. That he could see that really was the proper scientific description.
So, you have to have the experience base. In other words, I think, Andy, there is a whole lot first to learn about how to what we can do on behalf of the other human being to give them the advantage of what we have learned. But number one, they must have a real desire for it, and you answer the kid’s question when he is asking it. We all have very different appetite schedules of what we are interested in today, and to assume that all the kids are going to be interested in exactly the same thing the same day, nothing could be less logical. That’s one of the reasons this kid is climbing up, he is not interested in that at all. So I think that we’re going to find ways for the individual to get the information he wants, when he wants it, when there is that terrific appetite that is driving for it. And I think that is going to come through cassettes where the kids can plug in, they want information so they’ve learned they can go to the shelves of the encyclopedia, it’s sort of fun to look at, and you do find this sort of interrelatedness, so you can figure out how to look up things in the encyclopedia by yourself. I think they will learn how to find there way around calling up the cassettes that they want. They could get a little better on and so forth, I think they will, I’m confident that as I say in, I have a book on this, EDUCATION AUTOMATION, that our real studying we do by ourselves, and we do not prosper by being in a room and the teacher asking a little kid to get up, and the little kid doesn’t feel like getting up and performing, and it gets confusing, and they don’t give the right answer, and then the teacher says “You’re no good,” and so forth. I think this is absolutely cruel, and devastating way to try to carry on. I think you have social experiences together, but studying you do by yourself. This is absolutely all, and you ought to be able to learn to mark your own paper you get that information, find it, because you’d really like to know, and you will find, I’m a very different rate of apprehending, I really have to read things a whole lot of times, other people read through quite fast, these are different traits. So I want that quite a lot of times, and I really want to check myself out. When I learn it that way, nobody can shake me. When I really learn it by my own experimental following it around there.
So, my answer to you, is, I don’t think the system exists, Andy, but I think it is formulating very rapidly, and I think with the electronics mean are going to be very, very important. And that whole matter is being opposed by all the people who are so scared they are not going to earn a living. A number of people are committed to “how I learn a living by a teaching job” and looking for tenure, and they are just holding, the most powerful people in that whole education system are really holding back on any cassettes or anything like that, so it is not being officially fostered at all, what you’re talking about, but it is coming out of the commitment of human beings and the ingenuity there are millions of people who would really like to help the kids, and who are scholars and realize that the other things would work better. The facility is developing quite rapidly. I find electronics things themselves are improving. We’ve talked about it, that the this station we’re in right here, Bell, is really concerned because Phillips and RCA and NBC do not move a little faster CBS about the cassettes. But they are going to hook up to your television, and you’re going to, the Phillips one I said is just one of these records that you can just fold up and mail, and a really flawless kind of a record so that the most information would be in the tightest package really the least destructible, so that I think that one of those is going to work. Phillips wants around $l,000 or $l,600 and RCA says they have one coming next year $600, but this has not been resolved. When the case has really come in, and they really can plug in anything you want from all around the world, about this time we’re going to go through a whole lot before Russia and China are going to let satellites really begin to relay information very freely, but that will become too. But when the kids can really get information from all around the world, from all the, with all the computers really being inter-hooked, and they know where is that information, they’re going to go and get it. They really are going to go and get it.
“What strategies can be employed to overcome the inertia existing in the home building industry?” Number one, the carriage trade did not change to produce the automobile. Nor and the people who made armorers did not develop the airplane. So don’t look to the building industry for anything at all. But what can be done, I hope I’ve exposed you to a whole lot of what I’ve been trying to do for about a half a century working on how you develop environmental controls very economically and delicately, and that’s what really so much of my discourse has been on on the Dymaxion House where I’ve cut down to 3 tons which did more than 150 tons at the time. I was really down to a very low figure already, and now I can go much further with the geodesic sphere. I can give you 300 buildings for one.
And so that the solution is going to be to have man stop using his highest production and scientific capability for the killingry, but turn this in the direction of making man a success and producing the air-deliverable dwelling service, so that you and I ought to be able then, to say, I’d like to live on that mountain top, and then would you have me a shelter up there this afternoon and I’m going to fly up, and you ought to be able to rent it for a couple of dollars a year. That’s really all it should be. So, there is no particular reason why you should come into the city, except if you’d really like to meet people and so forth, to do whatever you’re doing now, whatever it is. But that’s the way it’s going to be solved. So, what strategies can be employed. Really do study that part of my books. I don’t know how much of my books you have read. I’m sure you’ve read quite a lot now. But, that has all been that is the grand strategy. To do more with less and employ the highest capabilities of man to take this prime task of looking out for human beings.
“If Design Science suggests motion is normal and everything else is just in a field of flux, how can an event be described as a “finite energy package?” The word “package” is the wrong thing. We have found that the photon and so forth, the energy does occur in quanta, I should have said “quanta” instead of saying “package.” And the event occurs, and then discontinues. Physics has found no continuums. Events discontinue. Does that answer you properly? (From audience, “I think so.”)
That’s why I gave you you asked “finite packages” seems to describe a Universe of continuous stops and goes rather than with a continual flowing of reality. And I gave you the scenario where this man was born and he has his children and so forth, and he gets to be grandpa, and he dies, but the others, I call it an aggregate of nonsimultaneous and partially overlapping energy events, so it makes a complete web or tapestry. This is what is a rope, all the threads keep coming in at different points and they all overlap. There is a beautiful continuity but it must be thought of that way. That thread ends, and another one begins here, they are not end to end. It is an overlapping affair. That’s the continual flowing of reality. Somebody just died, and somebody is just born. Bing. That’s just happened again. These overlappings all the time in here. That trolley over there just stopped, and here’s another, so it’s always this stop and go.
This is from Ed Applewhite. “What is the rationale for the powering of the Scheherazade numbers? Do powers selected always reveal” he then gives the nine illion and the 14 illion numbers, and my primes only go up to 17 to the second power, all the rest are single powers. This is simply because I, in doing my exploring, because I kept looking for these numbers and finally from time to time coming to the “sublimely rememberable.” I realized that doubling just in probability the reoccurrence of the number 2 as a necessity of halving or multiplying is very high and the numbers of times you need to get into 43 periodicity is very low, so the 17, Sonny, which you get to the second power, if you have an octave 8 that would be 16, so the prime number 13 would be all you needed, but I find then with an octave system, where you have 9’s but those are zeros and these zeros incidentally are absolutely essential to the accommodating of waves and the energy discontinuities, and the only reason we can have any waves going through rooms is simply a matter of relative frequencies, there is nothing here at the time so there is nothing to interfere. These are the typicals that make possible electromagnetic wave propagation. But, 9 then is a zero, and you’d be fascinated if I begin to show you the way that zero begins to function in the closest packing of spheres and so forth. Let’s have then (Bucky is drawing on the board again), I can have, here is a triangle, and there is a triangle, but only one of them can own this one. This is common to the two, and we find that, in the periodicities which this is one of the things that brought me great rewards in my numerology. I found that where systems cross up like that the 9’s occur every time. They make an actual hollow or space for one side or the other to go through. O.K.?
This was a 10, when I get to doing it in this way, I found that where this was a nucleus, you remember, when I go around, building around a nucleus, this occurs in that 9 position time and again this zero position. Where one side or the other can go through that nucleus. One there were twelve degrees of freedom but one of them can go through it at a time, can you understand that? So actually that is an accommodating space necessary to Universe. At any rate, Sonny, 17 then gave me all the prime numbers up to 18 which were the two nines, so as you’re counting the 9’s, it gave me both the positive and negative octave, and from there on I didn’t think the frequency of use of the prime numbers doesn’t seem to show up, the probability is very low. Is that a good answer? (From the audience, “Thank you.”)
Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science, this is Cynde, in your visions if we are able to effectively design our future, how will man be living on this earth in the years to come. Tell us more of your dreams of the future. What patterns, what systems are to be affected? What about the future of the greatest, most complex tool of all, society?
Well, I just say no society, no me no otherness, no me. I’m the product of two to start off with, and I say, “no awareness no life, and no otherness no awareness.” But Cynde, I feel that mainly I predicate everything on my working assumption that we are given mind, and we don’t know of any other phenomena having it, and that the mind can discover and have reference to the generalized principles of Universe and the generalized when we have a complex of principles, which are all interaccommodative, we have then a design. Because, to me a design, in contradistinction to randomness or disorder, is that all the parts are interaccommodative, they are designed that way that’s what you call a design. To find that all of these absolutely independent, extraordinary laws are all interaccommodative, I say, then tells me, human mind has had access to little bit little corner of the great design principles of Universe. This is extraordinary to me. This is overwhelming. Therefore, this must be for a very important reason, when I say, then I read that as meaning that we were to be a local monitor dealing with in Universe in complete inner-transformation everywhere, in incredible frequencies and many, many options, and is bound in making daisies and galaxies to have certain problem times, that we’re here really for problem solving. I think I see us then as being operative in a much larger range of Universe so that our astronomers are dealing in great distances already, and we do have some space activity. I think we are going to be very deeply concerned with much more concerned with Universe than in a big way than we ever have been before. We are not being concerned about how you’re going to earn a living. The minute we really take that nonsense out, and we will, the kind of interest you have just as a child, trying to understand the stars, man is really going to go he is going to be deep in the microcosm, deep in the macrocosm. He’s going to go back and archaeologically rebuild all the cities of yesterday, he’s going to take things out of the museums and put things back where they were originally. Nobody’s trying to steal now because there’s no reason for vandalizing or to steal, therefore you will be able to go and live in the way, you’ll be able to go and live 3,000 years ago, and 5,000 years ago. These are things to be done, and it will be really very exciting so that you can not only range around geographically and so forth, but you can go backwards and forewords in time. We’re going to do some very interesting things.
Part 7
That’s about all I can say, I think. The main thing is that when I say I’m giving you a fellowship to think. And you say, well, do you want me to sit in the school house to do that. I say, No, No. You say, Can I go fishing? I say, great, yeah. That’s a great place to think. So while you’re out there fishing and thinking, I say, I want you to think about the fact that when you get through thinking you don’t have to go and cheat somebody else out of their job so that your family can eat. You don’t have to tell a lie to get that man’s job or something. So you’re going to say, “What else was I thinking about before they told me I had to have a job?” And you’ll suddenly get back in that wonderful continuity of the child. Really the freshness and the eagerness and the interest in the Universe.
“Expand more fully the concept of the 12 degrees of freedom in physics in the physical Universe.” I did give you the wire wheel which needed a minimum of twelve spokes. I gave you the ball on a string fastened to a pole that we called tether ball with one restraint. Then I expected two restraints, and found that when you had two restraints you were as if you were in the middle of a violin string, and you could now, you couldn’t make a whole sphere anymore, a wavy sphere, now you could only operate in a plane. Then I had the third restraint and you could only operate in a line as in the middle of a drum head. And then I gave you four restrainings and you seemingly couldn’t go anywhere, but you’d find you could wriggle around locally, not till I had twelve restraints could I stop you wiggling locally. So then you became part of a system which operated as a system. Is that not clear? Is that alright? But, there are then, because there are everything in Universe is divisible by two in other words unity is plural and a minimum of two, that is there, and there will always be two poles to any system, and there is another kind of twoness there is insideness and outsideness, and there is, I said, a multiplicative twoness and an additive twoness. The poles themselves are the additive twoness but twoness. So all the topological accounting you always come out with the number of vertexes will always be divisible by two and so will the number of faces and so will the number of edges. But, when I said I took out the polar two removed it, then I found that the relative abundance from thereon was that for every vertex there were always two faces, and there were always three edges because there are always two vertexes anyway, therefore there are always four faces and six edges, and those six edges are the edges of the tetrahedron, or the minimum structural system. So, at every event, you are always going to have six there are six linear moves six vectorial moves. And I said you could go around in a hexagon and come back where you started, or you could be six places away. Because of the options, everyone of those are valid, every time you have a play, you get six moves. You can only use two checkerboards, but you get six moves, of whatever way, I’m saying. You’re going to have four checkerboards, but you can make six moves. And, this means that you could be This is the reason that we have positional differentials in Universe. That there is any spatial differential due to those freedoms. Can you understand that? And why there is any time lag because under so many dispositions it’s going to take longer to get back to here again. So, that sixness or the twelve each one is positive and negative, so there are twelve degrees of freedom, the sixness also, I want you to realize is a push and a pull, so there are actually twelve vectors involved.
“How do you describe thinking?” This is Jack? I don’t try to describe thinking. What I said I do is to try to say, “What is my conscious what am I conscious of doing when I say I am thinking, and I say that, I found that it started with a spontaneous interest in something. That’s already underway, so my conscious part I got to was simply dismissing irrelevancies and let something happen, the subconscious does the rest, and suddenly I find that as I keep putting the grass apart, as I put the irrelevancies apart, and suddenly there is a path, there is the relationship I was looking for. So, I can’t, I’ve described operationally what I do when I say I’m thinking, but I assume that a great deal goes on subconsciously in time. Then I could, I said, describe a thought, however Was a thinkable set and differentiable from a finite but non-unitarily conceptual Universe. Because it was scenario and I can’t see all the pictures at once. I can get a meaning out of a continuity of a section of continuity, but I don’t know when it ends or begins, so I find a thinkable set is what I gave you as a system, that has an insideness and an outsideness had a macrocosmic irrelevancy and a microcosmic irrelevancy, but there was a lucid set of stars of this magnitude, just the right ones. That is a thinkable set, so I could really describe a thought as having insideness and outsideness and really that’s a geometrical description of the thought.
“What do you believe to be the relation of pure thought to language?” I don’t use the word “pure” Jack. I don’t use the word “believe” my I can sort of speculatively reconsider experiences and I can zero in on a special something that I find your question interesting, therefore I suddenly find that I am thinking spontaneously. The relation of “pure” thought to language I don’t know what a PURE thought would be. But I did give you how I cope with operational description of what goes on when I say I’m thinking, and I did give you a thought as having probably insideness and outsideness it is the first subdivision of Universe. It is the division of Universe into a thinkable set a tunable set of relevancies. Now, what the relationship is to language, I’ve said that, to me, Universe is an aggregate of all of humanity’s consciously apprehended and communicated experiences. So the word language and then communication I saw it the communication can be to self or to others but it has to be communication. This is the only way we have any identity or awareness of something occurring. But I think I can tell myself, I can talk to myself. I don’t think I talk French, and English or and German to myself. So, I think there is a very spontaneous conceptualizing. And what we do in the way of communicating what it is we are thinking about, that took a long, long time to really evolve the logical sounds that went with the right conceptualizing so that it became sort of a spontaneous way to follow along what the other man was doing. There was an awful lot of circumstance of the time that may no longer be operative. Things that people many tools they used that we don’t use today, and they’re in the words they describe probably in the word, and yet we don’t use that tool anymore, so the sound doesn’t seem to have any we don’t identify any thing with it, and so we have a lot of those kinds of words. I don’t really quite know how to my own relationship that I’ve described as best I could what I do when I’m thinking, and then I may want to communicate that to you, and I might, so there would be several languages, like I might go to the board and make a drawing, I might write something on the board, I might make some sounds to you. The big thing, the relationship between thought and language is that somebody wants to hear what you’re thinking, so you take the trouble to communicate. They’ve said they’d like to know what you’re thinking. I would think that is the big relationship.
“Do you believe, like Norm Chomsky that various languages exhibit certain universal structural characteristics which are a function of the mechanics of mind and brain?” Yes, I, in my own NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON I did a little of this, but there is one I did call The Game of Life, which was originally in NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON and I chopped it out. Ed Schlossberg has recently published it. But I think that the, ssss, ssss, the “s”, this is a resting, arrest, and you might stop, or you may start. Is a change from one to the other. This would be typical of what he is saying here, isn’t it? That’s a universal structural characteristic in there. And the “s” is really either way, to either stop or to start. It’ll accommodate, but it is a change. It’s really a very abrupt change. S is abrupt I think it is very structural, and applies to what we are saying in any language. And it would not be, just the sound sss, just the snakes’ hissing, and they’ve used the snake with the hissing.
“You said Friday night that design is something a group can do is not something a group could do right. And is group exploration in Design Science and World Game possible in a work shop format? When I take for instance University groups and we have undertaken a produced something. I’ve immediately then, given functions of that task, and I put them up there, there is going to be a coordinator, assistant coordinator, for the total effort is going to be the mathematician, I really need some mathematics to be done. There is going to be a design and there’s going to be some drafting, and there is the design of the undertaking of the strategy, but then there is the design of the object, but also the design of the method of installation. There is the design of the there are many different designs, but I ask individuals to decide which one of those they would like to do, but I call them all designs really. But the usual word about design is just an object that the whole effort is going to produce, but I consider every bit of it the Design. And each one is done by an individual. I think designing is an individual function, and you can coordinate your designs of the individual designing, you can have a common objective, and so you handle one part of the task, and you do another, but they will both be designs. And then there is the Synergetics of those designs once they are done.
“Two observations prompt the question which follows. More than one primitive society has been discovered in which the role of the female is huntress and the male is homemaker. Two. The biological function of the male role is one of seed implanting which can also be seen a continuous wave phenomena.” No, it is not the seed, it is fertilization, but it is not the seed. The ovary is really the seed. That contains it and there is quite a difference between the fertilization of it, it’s like the pollination. I can understand a because we really don’t have the pure any absolutely pure female or pure male, and I can certainly see how a set of casualties in a tribe, where the male, there was a war and they really got killed off, the women then started having to do the task, so some of the women started off hunting, and they got to probably be pretty good at it. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be.
I can understand that but you can see really it’s a general pattern of mammals and with mammals even of the water, that the males tend to sweep out larger areas than the females. That’s all. So I call it a “sweeping out.” I explained it as hunting or one thing and another, but I don’t want to just use the word hunting, but the main thing is the sweeping out a large area. Am I clearing up at all what you asked? “Does the male-female distinction determine biologically social patterns of behavior, and role? Or are the differences culturally determined and ethnocentric?” There is no question to me that the female and the male have different many different characteristics, and I, for instance, just in cold water, the female can stay in this cold water longer than a male. She has just a little extra flesh in here. What makes her very soft also makes her a little better insulated. She can be a little more naked than the male, under the same thermal conditions. There is no question that there are really physical differences here, and I would think so one is mildly impeding, and some another advantaging. That I just accept as so, but individuals have very different lives, and there are oh so many forces that operate genetically, and circumstantial-wise, environmental wise I wouldn’t try to, I certainly wouldn’t try to generalize too much in here. But, just, I’ve certainly got to say there is a physical difference, and I am, I really feel very strongly about the woman being a wave phenomena, that she is opening from inside out, and the male really does not, there is no question about it to me, the male penis, and he’s a pusher and she’s a puller. And her tactics are that way, and she is really designed that way to have pull and to be attractive. And he is, he tends to be an aggressor. That’s the big thing, but it does not hold all the cases at all, I would not like to insist that way, Jack, at all. I’m not really being hard edged here. They are their main forces are very greatly complex effects there are all kinds of side issues. And I see also Nature also playing this game where she wants to stop propagation and she’ll make females do one thing, and the male do others and so forth, where you get to where there, just the way they look to one another may be more conducive to propagation or not propagation. Things like that go on that you and I don’t know much about. These are the big trends, big waves.
“What are the constraints upon architectural schools and the architectural profession? they seem to be so effectively inhibitive and frustrate a comprehensive approach to the environment. ” Just the profession of architecture! Period. It is the end of a tailoring business and it is really a pathetic one. And yet it has there is manliness there is dignity, there are human dignities involved, and there is no question about how easy it is to excite, and it has excited, and to carry on as it has carried on. And it is very exciting when suddenly the patron says, “going to do this, going to build a great castle, going to build this and that. A lot of people get excited and a lot of people are going to eat for a while, and it is fraught with excitement and romance.
“As our current economic crisis continues, it may be that the whole building industry and architectural profession could undertake a major reorientation during this interim period. What form might such a transformation take?” I say, just really abandon it all together, and really begin trying to do some thinking. And really look into the resources of the earth, and what is the tasks to be done, and how do you do them best. And try to keep out to me the only aesthetic for tomorrow is integrity. Absolute integrity. That is THE aesthetic. I have exercised this very rigorously in all my undertakings. I do not go in for trying to color something I said I must be if Sandy called and like what I was doing, and he did with my tensions and things, but he then gets into mobiles, but I’ve seen time and again I could exploit what I was doing as an art, and that might bring some admiration and it might make some money, but that’s not what I’m at I’m strictly at some problem solving in the most economical possible manner. But I must use THE best materials, or whatever it is, and what do I say, when it is all through, if I don’t think it looks beautiful, then I know I’ve failed, but that is the only time I really think about what it’s going to look like when it’s finished. At all times I must be doing this thing in the terms of what it’s functions are, and doing it absolutely the best known and practical of our moment. I think, you may or may not feel that some of the things I have done in the way of structures are I do have some beauty, but I can tell you many that didn’t look very beautiful to me, because I knew something I didn’t really do right. But if I really have done things the way they should be done, they tend always to be beautiful to me. So I say, the aesthetic was the integrity, and the is it must be integrated, there must be the synergetics in all.
“Recent book, MEANING IN ARCHITECTURE in l973 labels you as the most extreme representative in the architectural movement it calls bio-technical determinism, ‘a neo-romatic approach to design which obtains its criteria directly from the behavior of Nature, and in effect short-circuits the process of incorporating socially meaningful symbolism in the resulting form. Such an approach, the article goes on to say, is totally functionalist an aesthetic which denies itself as such, and of no symbolic value.” I’m not even mildly interested in producing symbols except when I try to do actually write, and communicate. I like a symbol for communication, but I would not use a building as communication I don’t think. I think it is misuse of a tool, and that I don’t many, many people made the mistake of saying, because I have a whole lot of slides we didn’t run showing you Synergetics in Nature, they have said that I learned about this from Nature, that I was copying Nature, and I simply tried to use Natural forms. I never have done it, never. There is growth in form and a lot of people were excited about that, and I am sure that a great many people have tried to make a building look like a cabbage or whatever it is, but I’ve never done anything like that, ever in my life. I’ve been astonished to find that there was a relationship between the mathematical logic I was employing, because I am simply doing the most with the least what gives me the most volume containment with the lest material whatever it is. What is giving me the greatest strength that I suddenly found Nature had done it over here also, for the same reasons, but that I had never copied Nature never, so this, in the first place is a complete misinterpretation so I will not comment on it. It is not what I’m talking about. It does not operate the way I am operating.
“What about your concept of ‘eternal metabolics’? I don’t say “eternal metabolics’. (From the audience “external metabolics.” Oh! External metabolics. Oh. “Where does it come from? What do you think of Professor McLuhan’s utilization of that idea in his work. The there is something called extracorporeal artifacts there are internal and I have extra corporeal. So the tools I went into. I said many creatures are tool makers. That the species exist by virtue of separately operating organism parts. That the nest of the bird, and the bird, are absolutely one, because you cannot have the bird without the nest, and so I then had extensions, mechanical extensions of my arm, like something else you’re going to make some scissors out here because they’ll squeeze a little more than I can sheer a little more. So, I’ve no, no, none I can’t find any tools that are not extensions of original integral functions of the human being. And so I go back to NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON in 1938 and I talk about the mechanical extensions of man.
Part 8
I first met Marshall McLuhan in Greece, thirteen years ago, and it was on board of a ship, and he somebody spoke to me, and I turned around and realized who it was, so he called to me, and he had two of my books in his hands, and one was NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON and he was just he said “This is my Bible,” and if you ask Marshall about this he’ll tell you his extensions to man, and so forth, came out of this he had the electrical extensions of man, and then got into, this brought him into ways of talking about the communication system whatever it may be. But Marshall said, “Bucky, your expressions are old fashioned, and I have a lingo,” so when I talk to you about man backing up into his future, he said, “Bucky it’s called rear-mirrorism.” So he gave me titles. Marshall will tell you this, he really said, and deliberately said, he was enlarging on my ideas. We’re very, very good friends, and these things we’ve said very much out loud on the stage platform together, so that I know what I’m I’m not saying something is offensive. He says that he’s an English scholar, literature scholar, and his memory, incidentally, is incredible of things he has read, and he began to feel that a great many people who he read many books which society didn’t know about, and society was missing some very important things, so he decided really, taking things he had read about that other people had written and began to get society to know about it. But he gets so enthusiastic that he didn’t necessarily always say, I am extending this person’s idea. His idea he began to make it his own as he began to develop it, which is very reasonable. But he is a man of integrity, so if you check with him about it, he will say, yes, that is correct. That his enthusiasm carried away and he forgot to give footnotes of where he got that. But, external metabolics, I have, metabolics, then, these are energy processes converting in the very kind of way of photosynthesis or whatever it may be. It is always energy interexchangings, and all to do with regenerations or doing work, so I have then the mechanical mechanics, internal to the man, and his, then using the principle external to himself. And then the energies to operate the externals, so that the external metabolics would be what he uses in his machinery in contradistinction to what the metabolics internally, the food that he converts into growth and work. Is that a good is that clear with that part?
“DYMAXION. Where did that come from? Does it apply just to a specific set of artifact inventions?” When the 1927 when I developed the Dymaxion House first my model, and we were in I told you we had this new-born baby and my wife, and we were up in this little flat up in the northwest Chicago, and some old friend came to see me, and in one way or another Marshall Fields, one of the buyers at Marshall Fields in Chicago heard about this and came up, and the head of the Advertising Department. In Paris, 1926, we had the great Paris Exhibition of very modern things it was the beginning of the world really knowing such names as Corbusier and there was the Bauhaus and many, many things were exhibited in that Paris Exhibit in 1926.
The Chicago stores, buyers like Marshall Fields and never mind the other names Scott, Carson Pierie Scott and so forth. These buyers went to the exhibit in Paris. They were trying to outdo the New York stores. Chicago in those days felt very competitive with New York, and was continually trying to show it was a more advanced culture. And they then were going to have their Chicago World’s Fair of ’33 and, at any rate, the buyers of Marshall Fields and these other stores, bought a great deal of the special fabrics and the special chairs and all of those things of the well-known Bauhaus Group, and they brought these things back to their store to sell. They bought quite a lot of stuff. And suddenly, Chicago decided it would like to have it’s World Fair in ’33, so they needed these things had come from they had been ordered in the Paris Fair didn’t get delivered until about 1928 because they were things, where this boy was making a chair, he only had one at the exhibit and he had to make some more, so the people who got these orders had to find a way to produce them, so they did, and the things began to arrive in Chicago. The Chicago World’s Fair was determined on by the community in that year, 1928, when the things began to arrive ’27. And they said, we’ve got to have Chicago architects have to design this thing. We don’t want any nonsense as European. The Carson Pierie Scott Marshall Field, had bought architectural models of Corbusier and so forth, they were going to have the windows of the stores were going to have all these European Bauhaus things in the windows so they could sell all the goods inside. And suddenly the really powerful people in Chicago Marshall Fields himself, and so forth, agreed that Chicago’s World Fair should be run absolutely by Chicagoans. They didn’t want these European architects being celebrated like that. So that they squashed the whole thing, and the house furnishings and whatever the department was that owned all this bric-a-brac chairs and furniture, were in a quandary because they had spent a lot of their money. I think they had well over a quarter of a million Marshall Fields had. So somebody told them about my house, and they came up to see me, this model and looked at it. And, said I didn’t know about this dilemma that I just told you until after things were well underway. They asked me if I would they said they were very excited by my model and they wanted to exhibit it at Marshall Fields. And Marshall Fields does a certain amount of cultural things, they do have some exhibits, and once in a while they have some old Chinese Urn or something like that at any rate, they wanted my house to be on exhibit and they showed me the place where it would be and I felt that was alright.
So having decided they were going to show my model, they’d like to have me give some lectures on it, and so it was agreed that I would give these short lectures quite a few times a day, and then they said we needed a name for this. They said there’s a Bauhaus, What’s the name of this thing? I said, “It doesn’t have any name.” And they said, oh, we’ve got to have a name, and they had two men, called wordsmiths, who often invented names for Marshall Field for things they were going to sell in the store. And they also helped other manufacturers to give names to the products. These men had a great reputation because they invented the word “radio” which was quite a good invention, so they were in great demand, and one was named Warren and I can’t remember the other man’s name, but at any rate, they asked me to lunch with them down at Marshall Field’s has a nice restaurant down there, so they asked me down to Marshall Field’s restaurant for lunch, and they asked me to start telling them and talking about my why I’d produced this house, and what was the philosophy and so forth. They asked me questions till about 3:00. We’d started lunch at noon, and they stopped, and then a couple of days later, they called me up and asked if we could meet again. Have lunch again. So then they had sheets of paper and one of them would say, “What was it you said about this?” And then the other one would say “What did you say about that?” I didn’t know what they were doing, but I was repeating as best as I could, and what they did was to go home independently after the first meeting, I can tell you everything that went on, because I was told retrospectively, each one went home, and they hadn’t made any notes at the luncheon, but each one went home and wrote down what they thought the most prominent things, in their memory, that I had said, testing then their memory, what they remembered, sort of a sieve to bring out what was prominent.
So each of them had written down what they could remember. So they, but they were fragments of this fragments of that, so the piece of paper, then, had what they remembered. And then they asked me what I had said about this and what I had said about that, and then they’d say, “Would you say that again?” And so forth, and finally it turned out that they had then by listening to me, they picked out, then, which was the most prominent word which was the most prominent sentence in all the things I’d said, which out of all that I said the whole paragraph which sentence they remembered, so they’d write that out very quickly. This was highly impressionistic. And then they came back to find out which word in the sentence was most prominent. And then they finally had me say it over, which was the most prominent syllable in that word. So they resolved everything I had done down to a set of words, and the most prominent syllables. They had, really , an enormous list of them by this work, because they kept at this for a week or so with me, and finally they took all the syllables, and they said there are harmonic ways to bring the syllables together, and there are graphically acceptable ways shocking ways, there is euphony and there is graphology harmony, so we are going to have to make words out of these syllables of yours. They said, we’ve counted, and you are a four-syllable man, so it has to be a four-syllable word. And so they then made up all the four-syllable words possible out of all these syllables which were really the pepper and salt of my speech, and then they had all these typewritten lists, and they said, we now have gotten to know you well enough to know you won’t like any of them, so what we’re going to ask you to do, is like a tennis match. You have you can pair any two of them you want, and throw out the least desirable. So you have to keep going through all this list and finally one word is left. And the one word that was left was this word “Dymaxion.” And they said, we’re sure you don’t like that, but you say it for a few days and you’re really going to find that this is an abstract of you. It is a word portrait of you. And so, I did try it, they then got out engraved announcements for my exhibition, and they Chicago did really show up the fancy people all showed up there. And it went on for three weeks, and I kept giving five lectures a day, or whatever it was, it was quite a tiring one. And I met a very interesting, I met Korzybski came to see me at the model there and asked me to go listen to him speak down at Chicago University, and got me into semantics many, many things came out of it, but what I learned was, then, they had deliberately, they had found my house was so far out, that it made the Bauhaus things look very, very safe, so they were selling all this stuff, they just sold everything right off under the aegis of my being too far out. (Lots of laughs from the audience.) This is a strategy they often use to make things sell by making things seem something much more extreme, that the people wouldn’t by. So that’s where they got “Dymaxion,” and then Marshall Fields copyrighted it and made me a present of the name. They said “This is yours,” and it is interesting, I have used it, and it has been really very good. But that’s how it happened.
That’s the end of yours, Jack. Nicholas Peckham. “What was the technology of the pyramids?” I’ve been to Egypt quite a few times and I couldn’t be more fascinated with the stone work that they have done, and particularly if you get to Luxor and you find those extraordinary needles, and there is one of Queen Hatshepsut that these stones were apparently quarried and floated on the Nile, but how they were able to pick them out hammering and so forth, I don’t know, but there is one that was never erected still there. It has been dressed out, the stone has been dressed out, lying on stones horizontally. But if you just take a knife out of your pocket, or a key something metal and you hit it, it is an absolute bell, it is the most beautiful bell. This thing is 70 or 80 feet long, but the purity of the stone apparently, they tested so that it would be no flaws whatsoever. Now, I can understand how they quarried, but I would not know how they picked that stone, they must have had their tricks alright ways of sounding around the mountain doing whatever you do with hammers, but I can understand how they floated it there, that would be very easy you could float. And I could see how you could handle that on rollers. I can see how it could be crow-barred along onto the boat, by how to move things by levers and rollers doesn’t seem to be anything very novel about that, trees are inherently round, so even at Bear Island trees that we strip of bark on the beach immediately become superb rollers and are there for pulling boats in and out, and you can get a hold of a roller awfully fast in nature. So I think that they had rollers alright and, then, when it came to the pyramids themselves, building these extraordinary how they dressed with such accuracy, dressed the stone, that I don’t know, but there is no question about the beautifulness of fit you get. But you find that not just in Egypt. I find it in Japan, around the world, you get old Greece, incredible fitting of stones, and the way stones are dressed, really quite uneven ways, the Egyptians got at least into some pretty accurate symmetries, but there are so many stones in Greece, the very, very oldest stonework you’ll find the incredible way it has been dressed and fitted into other stones fitting absolutely superbly, with a great deal of regularities of the stones.
The, I’m certain that the building of the pyramids, the sands drift up very rapidly and it’s very easy to make breaks, as snow breaks, and you can make the sands drift. I’m quite certain that they simply drifted the sand up more and more on the work and kept rolling up on the sand. They made their ramps of sand. Can you understand that? That would be, as far as I’m concerned, The great, that is what we’re really getting at with the pyramids. I don’t know why, it seemed absolutely obvious to me that it would just be the one thing I would do if I had to do that job there, and I’m surprised I haven’t read other people suggesting that. There probably are others, and probably somebody may know that, but
“What is shelter?” The word comes from “scheltrum” or “shell.” The “scheltrum” was a shield in a war, and a shelter was just big enough really just over yourself. I think that I gave you naga-wise that people also used their boats upside down, but, I think it is very much just that same route as a shell, as a tortoise, or whatever it is a protection.
“What economic system is an outcome of comprehensive anticipatory design science?” I don’t know of any. The economic systems are very much push and pull and selfishness and might, I and absolutely no good faith you had to use gold because you wouldn’t trust anything else you know everybody is a crook so you have to get something that is apparently incorruptible. And then the heaviest metals seemed to do the thing. They stayed shiny. They were the one thing that seemed to be found around the world that could carry on, so monetary wise I don’t know any economic system, then, it seemed to be just give and take, and you suddenly find you’re hungry and you need some food. And somebody may control that food, and maybe not, if they did they made you pay a price.
You might call the five-year planning of Russia, but I wouldn’t call that an economic system I think that would be I would call that to some extent comprehensive anticipatory design science, it’s for a whole economy, but it wasn’t for the whole world.
It was for their special economy, so it doesn’t really quite come into it, but it is nearer to it.
“What is the relationship between precession 90 degreeness and the tetrahedron’s 60 degreeness?” “How did you get to know what you know?” The tetrahedron one remember when I pulled the tetrahedron out of the cube, and we had a continuous string that went from one side to the other, and I pulled the tetrahedron through it? And as I pulled the tetrahedron up the string kept opening up, the quadrangle got wider and wider and shorter and shorter, and it finally got to be a square? And then I kept pulling the tetrahedron through it, pulling it this string was always absolutely around it, and finally it became the string went the other way? Precessed. What you find is, that the tetrahedron is exactly the same distance, all the way around, and it is always the rectilinear section. So one reason, then when we take the two halves of a tetrahedron then a solid one, of wood, and you’ll find this square central section, and you take the square section and turn it like this and then they come together again, so that’s where your 90 degreeness is in there and the precessional effect is in the tetrahedron of the one edge doing this and the other there’s your 90. O.K.?
Part 9
Then, “How did you come to know what you know?” Well, I was given a lot of equipment, for instance, a brain, to store the information and pull it back
Going on with our questions, the first one this afternoon, “We are all aware of the documents documenting Phase One of the Design Revolution, what is Phase Two?” I think we call that the Design Decade, rather than the Design Revolution, those documents. I do talk about a Design Revolution versus a bloody revolution, but I don’t think there are any documents of Design Revolution. Those documents are Phase One, there were five phases of the Design Decade, and the first one was the statement of the problem that is how to get people to realize the problem existed, and then it did go into the resources. I think that was all spelled out, there were five 2-year phases, and they were all literally spelled out. The design decade came about when the world, there is an International Union of Architects, they have congresses every three years, and now this spread into five years apart because the expenses are high, and they are holding in countries all around the world, both sides the Communist and then the Western world, and at the London meeting in 19 I think it was around ’56, it was about that time that they asked me to speak, and I made a proposal of this design decade because they had an annual everytime they had a congress a problem had been given out to students at architectural schools around the world, and winners in various countries of the competition could would be sent to the International Union of Architects Congress, so there was a student exhibition of the competitions. And the this was done really on the old Bozar (?) basis, of competition, and I proposed that instead of competing one with the other, they were to do a cooperative study on how we might be solving world problems by design and developing the right artifacts and so forth, and so this was published by ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN MAGAZINE and then it got somebody put up the money for them to put it in all the different languages, and they sent it to all the different architectural societies that were members around the world. For instance the American Institute of Architecture is a member of the International Union of Architects. They take the different countries, and it is the only society I know that actually involves all the ideologies around the world, really quite completely the Chinese, Japan, and very thoroughly and so forth. The different countries around the world, then, responded regarding the proposition of putting this Design Decade which I proposed. That there would be cooperation for ten of the five-different International Union meetings, and I was amazed that the response from China and Russia were very favorable. I think the Russians were rather slow. The Chinese came in quite quickly in approving it. Russia thought it might be some kind of a Western world trick, and they began looking into it, and then they approved. The United States was the slowest to come in, but they finally did, and so it became, really, actually, a world round project, and then we were given it had great interference after Paris, we had Paris and then Prague. The Paris exhibition we were given a very large section of the Tuilleries Gardens for the Exhibit of the students very well done.
And then, as a consequence of the Congress taking me on, the next one after France was to be in Mexico to be in Cuba, and the, I received a letter from the Cuban architects saying that, as I knew, that my proposition had been taken on, and they were going to feature the student side of things at the Cuba Congress, and I was to be their guest of honor there in Cuba. So I, at that time, this was fairly early in the Kennedy Administration, and George Bundy who had been at Harvard the Dean at Harvard, and he had been Head of the Charles Elliot Norton Committee and he was the one who notified me that I had been chosen to be Charles Elliot Norton Professor at Harvard. I went to George Bundy, because of his being on the whatever Security Council, and said I was going to have to have official permission to go to Cuba, which I couldn’t do on my passport. And he said, you can’t do it, we can’t let you do it. And would I not try, there were a number of American, the Central American, and so forth, and their American alliance business who would not be able to go to Cuba, and so they were going to have a hold-over meeting in Mexico. I said that I had a world initiative, and although that is really a credit to our economy, that I did, and I ought to be allowed to go, and I thought it was going to make a great deal of trouble if I didn’t. He said they just couldn’t let me go because the this was the Democrats, because the Republicans were always claiming that the Democrats are Communist and we can’t make any move like this that would in any way be friendly acquiesce on Communism and so, I talked to Dean Acheson who had been the Secretary of State previously, and he was in the State Department. He said, the only thing you can do is to go to the Republicans, and if they because this being apparently, Cuba was some kind of a battleground between the two of them, so I did go to Henry Luce and others that I knew well, and they came back and said that they couldn’t possibly do it because the Republicans were going to make Cuba an issue in the next Presidential campaign, and if they approved my going they would lose all their momentum. Nobody would let me go. I have had, I had also been invited to China for something else, and I was not allowed to go there to help on structures, by the Chinese Government through Canada. I never do do things, I use on what I call “front doors” I don’t try to do any “back doors”, I don’t try to be subversive, I just really try to get things to work, and this didn’t work, and when I did go to the hold over meeting in Mexico City, and Sir Robert Matthew of England was the President of the International Union of Architects at that time, and my wife Anne and I were sitting there in this big hall in Mexico City when they opened there, and Sir Robert Matthews said that he reported to the Congress on the success of the Cuban meeting, but he said there was one very important flaw, and that was that I was not there, and that the South American students the South American and Central American students had come there really in very great numbers because the Cubans were featuring it as a students phase emphasis for the World Congress, and they found that I wasn’t there, so they said that this proved that the United States Citizen was not a free citizen at all, that this really proved that this kind of democracy didn’t work. They turned it into an enormous hassle the whole Congress about this. And, I think they made a very, very great mistake not letting me go.
At any rate, this did upset the Design Decade quite a lot and so I lost, I really really couldn’t carry on the way I wanted to before. I’ve had this initiative and I was doing everything in my own office, doing everything at my own expense, no money given to me by anybody. I took care of my own publication. John McHale did a lot of the writing for me, and he did a very good job.
Now, I think that’s about all I can tell you about that. If you do look at the Decade documents you will see that I did have it in 5 phases and they are, in effect, that is all over, but it really did peter out I’m sorry to say. It started very, very strong.
Jeffrey Hoare. “It has been stated that the Universe can be completely described in terms of energy, associative and disassociative, and information. It would seem that synergetic geometry provides a means to do this all with angle and or frequency. Has there been an effort to explain all known generalized principles in terms of this form of mathematics? Also, do you feel that it has enabled you to discover any new generalized principles, or restate known generalized principles in this significantly different way?” I hope you will read my book SYNERGETICS, and I do find I’ve been amazed how much philosophy it has generated. I’ve been really quite astonished at how many times I’ve been able to understand social phenomena that I haven’t understood before seems to be explained by the principles that are disclosed. That there have been a number really of mathematical discoveries that I am sure they go well over a hundred that are in there, and there is really no way to get them except to read that book. I think that is about the only I say really do read the book, and I hope you will, you sound as if you would be interested in it probably.
Let me see, this is from Timmy Timothy. “You have frequently spoken about the rate of industrialization taking place in the world. Wouldn’t a fully industrialized world result in a crisis of over-production capacity and waste?” I talked a great deal about disassociating the word “industry” from money making. And I don’t think this does, Timmy, as you talk about industry here. I talk about industrialization, remember I defined tools. I spoke about the many creatures producing extra-corporeal artifacts as part of the species, the birds having a nest, so that, and I said, when the energies given off by systems entropically are also part of apparently a species they perform a species function. And the species could not persist without the alterations of the environment, the discrete alterations of the environment that are associated with that particular species, then I called the a discrete modification of the environment into this complementation of a species life, I called it a tool. So I said the humans were not the only tool makers, but then I divided all tools of humans into two main classes, the craft tools, all the tools that could be made by one man starting nakedly in the world just out of his own discoveries, and then all the tools that could not be produced by one man, and I called the industrial tools the ones that could not be produced by one man. I said the first industrial tool then was the spoken word which could not be produced by one man, and this up to this time you have then one man in his own experience in his own lifetime, which is a very limited affair and I saw all he has to make his tools. But the minute we have the spoken word we began to integrate experiences, and this man could tell another he could tell his son, or he could tell another person and very rapidly the knowledge increased about other resources elsewhere and other ways of employing principles, and then with the written word a sort of comprehensive memory of all men began to be building into the production of the tools.
Then I pointed out, then, that the I gave you Synergy itself, or behavior of wholes unpredicted by behavior of parts. There are then the great complementations one of the other, and so coordinated intercomplementation can produce more effectively for the whole than all the people working separately for themselves. That one is quite easy to prove. So I call, this is all industrialization, and it is something absolutely separate from the idea of making money out of tools the risks where they just run the tools eight hours simply because they don’t want to pay overtime, when the tools could produce for man 24 hours or whatever it is. This is not “industrialization” but is “money making.” And it is money making because the money makers were assuming there was nowhere enough to go around therefore they go hard at it to really protect their position, and they hoard it and, I cannot get any good information about industrialization if I look at it in terms of the example of the people who have exploited it to make money. So that I must be sure to disassociate there.
Very frequently I have spoken about the rate of industrialization taking place in the world I have shown that as the advantages accrue, that, and the life expectancy increases, then the numbers of the baby-making go right down. And that this is absolutely incontrovertible. We have many of those curves, you have seen there at the office, that has been well plotted. So that I see that the population explosion which has been talked about is not going to ever get to the kind of figures that we have been hearing about, I am quite confident it will stabilize somewhere around, or under 5 billion people, and nothing like these kinds of pictures doubling and doubling on and on and keep on, all the nonsense like this. There would only be over-production if stupidity were operating. That is, if you were really using the tools competently to make humanity a success. That is our way to carry on to try to make some sense. First place, I’ve already introduced many thoughts for you on how we would cut down on the energies used very, very powerfully if I really just used principles I know about and go for savings of energy in structures and operations, propulsions everywhere, then I would say that we would be cutting down very much because we would be continually doing more with less. So you get to suddenly communicating across the ocean with a few hundred pounds of material. So I say, I don’t see any reason for ever having over production outside of a certain amount of safety factor, allowing for storms and things this should always be in there. But I do not see any hazard. Somebody might be able to confront me with some figures, but I have looked at so many so much figures, I am so used to the pattern that it does not look that way to me Timmy, in any way that there would be any such risk if we just talk about using the industrial tools for humanity. That is exactly what Russia realized and Karl Marx saw, that we were probably going to have to use industrial tools. And China saw it the only possible way of getting out of the anarchy and exploitation of the human beings by the great military war lord utter anarchism that existed in China. And they said, there is just absolutely no way, except industrialization, and there is no way except Communism to really hold almost a billion people together to go through all the long deprivations of the five year plans in doing first things first and not greed. You’ve got to have certain amounts of people that are going to be able to work, but it was a very tough thing to undertake, and to hold a billion people together so that they can’t be subverted by people from outside is an incredible matter. At any rate, the industrialization, or using the right tools wherever possible was of the essence. They went right after the water power in a very, very big way. And they went right after energy. They used the same five year planning that the Russians did, and so I I do not feel apprehensive about the industrialization in this way if it is used for humanity, and not for how to exploit. I do not assume an exhaustion of the world’s fossil fuels. I am quite certain we are going to turn around before we get to, in other words I think we will be doing it very, very shortly but I think you have read the piece that I gave you last night, yet Timmy? Oh, I wish you would because I do talk about what I think seeing happening really quite rapidly in there. And I expect this turn around to be able to shut off nowhere near the end of the fossil fuels. That they really will be comprehensively comprehended by humanity, that this is the savings account of nature for an entirely different purpose. We are supposed to be living on our energy income.
Now, I think when you get to you bring about questions give questions about the income, I’m confident that we can operate at a very high standard of living with very much less energy, and just the kind of life we have on Bear Island is typical of how you really can simplify and come down to very small, very small energy in addition to what we have we have been able to get on Bear Island with nothing more than the wood and the wood grows very much faster than we really want, we get, the woods are swallowing us up you can’t really cut it fast enough, and that will take care of all of the energy and that is energy income. And,
“Income energy sources must first be concentrated and stored in order to be of use in industrial society. This added energy ” No, I don’t think so because I say whether we are going in the grasses and so forth, yes we may process it, concentrate it, make the alcohols out of the grasses, but I think that there are small storages and whether I am doing something just by handling in the great systems of the earth, no I don’t see any trouble there Timmy. The structural energies that are implicit in our planet are incredible because you do have to realize that the real magnitude of energy where the, I’m confident of this figure, this Navy figure that one minute of one hurricane releasing more energy than the joint stock piles of atomic bombs of Russia and the United States one minute of one hurricane. These magnitudes of energies being employed by Nature are incredibly high, and I do not I do not, because Nature is always moving things around her own way, I do not think that a dam holding water takes very much energy to make compared to the amount of energy it can conserve for you and make available. As a dam or anything else. We have done things in unusually expensive ways many times because of then again the industrial thing, enormous amounts of government money, fantastic waste in doing these jobs, but now we find we can make a very good dam just with the water sausage , just a rubber bag full of water and makes a dam, don’t have to pile up a whole lot of earth. Many, many things can be done that I find with the expensive very powerfully big expensive ways of great utility companies wanting to have this thing just get the government to spend all the money possible, and then they are going to take off the cream with their meters.
If we free this thing from the very unhappy state of conditions that you have been confronted with as a consequence of exploitation, carelessness, start off and spoke to you about the collecting of the fumes coming out of the stacks, the concentrations of energies, that does cost energy, but when we then take the sulfur going out of the stack and found that the amount of the sulfur coming out of all the stacks around our earth annually exactly equally the amount of sulfur we are taking out of the ground to keep industry going, to keep making automobile tires and all, and we find then we’re letting that go off in the sky, and once it is diffused you can’t afford to collect it again. But you can catch it when it is already the process of concentration has occurred so that the thing is precipitation and precipitation I went through this with the combustion engineering company who make all these boilers who said that it is absolutely completely perfected. All it would do was increase the cost of the electrical generation 25% as far as the bill goes, but the cost is almost, that’s nothing, because the actual value of the sulfur, then the incredible savings we’d have of not getting in people’s lungs and all the things that go on the medicare the disrepair of society occasioned by the carelessness. When we begin to get down to the “stitch in time business,” it is a very important way to look at things, and I find that the more I go into the extension of what I’m saying to you Timmy, about doing the logical thing, you have concentrated it, it is in need, sulfur Nature has no she has no unwanted chemicals. They are all needed to make the Universe regenerate. They are all part of each one of them is a pattern behavior and not a thing, and all those pattern behaviors are essential to all the intertransformabilities, so that I feel then as I said, some things, Nature is separating herself she is separating the liquids and solids, just in the human process for instance, something like that, and here we get the separating out of years of first thing I don’t like burning the fossil fuel, that brought about the sulfur content, but I’m using this in principles.
Part 10
The point is something has been separated here by Nature, and in the process man was after this and man uses Nature to that extent and suddenly this is in concentrate, and it is diffused in the sky, and it brought about all kinds of trouble rather than being useful. So, I do not think storage is a gravity is in operation, we are not expending anything, we’re just having gravity holding something in a pile, so that I don’t think the holding of valuable concentrates that are going to be needed by nature somewhere, possibly in man’s own direct process, or in Nature’s own process, that Nature has separated a great many of them, and she uses all of them in the Universe and then man has been given a mind to be able to learn how to do it, and I just cannot question at all the wisdom of the Design of Universe or the fact that humans are on board of this tiny little planet, and with their mind capability and the ability to discover principles and employ them, and I know that when I begin to use those principles and employ them properly, I get the same kind of results that I do, not getting down to the environment control of the first Dymaxion House I was 3 tons, against 150 tons, and that is a nice saving, but it is nothing along side of getting where, I’m now to the point where I know I can give you, I can get to from what have I said, 300 for 1 for the same environment controlling clear-spanning, if we are given the same loads and so forth. So that, in magnitudes that are enormous. And I have spoken about us having a unit cover for human activities such as the size of New York. I don’t want to have to eliminate human beings, I don’t see any reason for that at all. They are going to have to be accommodated, and I see then that when I have a unit cover like that, reduce the shell, the enclosing forms 80-fold. This is no fooling this is an 80-fold reduction in the heat and the energy losses of a great city like New York. 80-fold! These are not little tiny magnitudes, they are really very large Timmy, if we really began to behave properly. So, I don’t find that we’ve been designed into Nature with a function and so forth, and I am quite confident that the there is adequate resource to take care of us, and to take care of us to do whatever we are supposed to do if we are supposed to be flying or rocketing or whatever we’re doing we’re supposed to be able to do those things. But we do things incredibly wastefully today really deliberate waste. Very, very deliberate waste.
When you say, Timmy, “In your discussions of entropy and syntropy, Why haven’t you or have you mentioned that all biological life and industrial systems require sources of low entropy for their survival?” What do you mean by that? What are SOURCES of low entropy? (Timmy, from the audience, “biological forms have to feed themselves, and to feed themselves they have to find a source of food, and the source of food is a concentration of low entropy, it’s a very unlikely structure to find?” Bucky “But I don’t know what the requirements of low entropy are, what exactly are you saying?” Timmy, “usability, it’s not usable if the entropy isn’t low enough, you can’t eat the air or you can’t you would starve eating crumbs off the floor you couldn’t get enough of it quick enough to maintain yourself. It’s better if someone hands you the whole loaf some bread, rather than breaking it up into crumbs on the floor so a loaf has a lower entropy than the crumbs on the floor, the crumbs on the floor have a very high degree of entropy.” Bucky, “Well I’d have to see some fairly large system of study to show me what you’re saying here. I’m, you’re simply saying that I don’t eat a whole coal mine at a meal. Timmy, “Copper ore you’re taking something of a relatively high entropy instead of deposited copper, ” Bucky, “You don’t eat it though,” Timmy, “You don’t eat it but in order to get the copper sheet you have to get the low entropy from somewhere else, some energy some coal or some oil to do that smelting, and the metal working, in order to get your copper sheet.” Bucky, “Well I don’t see, I don’t call these low entropies” Timmy “Uh huh, I think it is a necessary condition for life.” Bucky, “I don’t like using the words really low, I just like to use ‘different magnitudes’ the words ‘low entropy’ is not very clear to me. We use a certain amount of energy to do various tasks, and so forth, and I’m interested in the relative efficiency of how much we get out of the work we do, whether we get to an advantage, because you get to a lever and see whether you really get your there is no question about it, the entropy you’re going behind but we do have this enormous energy income, enormous energy income incredible! And I don’t think, when we get down to the total energy income there’s, we can’t even possibly get near expending it all, Nature has things she does herself with that energy income, but there is ample for us to participate without in anyway upsetting Nature’s own basic patterning. By my figures, so at any rate. We can’t. I don’t ever like sort of debate on an opinionated kind of basis, and I feel that our terms are not close enough here to make it, I’m not going to be able to reply to you in a way that is very satisfactory to you or anybody else, because it seemed to be couched in a way that I don’t use I don’t look at this kind of increment. You’ve written very clearly and very well in here, in a language of your own. And actually, you and I have never talked about things like this before, I am very interested to see your couching your questions so well, but I would need lots of tools, here, lots of information to, and I think you would too to really confront me properly and for me to give you what I see. I know you know I know you’re convinced as I am convinced that we really can carry on, and I have done lots and lots of study, and I feel that it is that we have a great bounty of energy advantage in our income, that man has been given these bounties because he does not start operating very well, but he does improve, there is no question about we have been doing more with less, we have been taking care, in my own life, there is an incredible step up of the numbers of human beings who have been looked out for. And where they haven’t died where they used to die, and where they have been able to go on doubling that life span practically in my life, and go on from less than 1% to more than 50% of humanity really getting on fairly well. But I know that can all be accomplished and a great deal more with very much less waste and fantastic that we are able to carry on and do that and the nonsense of the guns and the wastes of just blowing up things we do. It’s incredible what we put into that armament. That we are able to do all that stupidity and still double the number of people not double it is actually, the population has almost doubled during that time so that it is, we’ve gone, it’s almost we’ve practically a hundred folded the number that is being taken care of in just my lifetime a hundred folded! It’s a very big thing. And despite increase in waste the armaments thing gets to being more and more wasteful. So apparently we have been given a very big cushion to make mistakes in, but I’m saying, that the cushion is coming to an end the CUSHION is coming to an end, and we were allowed to make mistakes up to a certain point, we’ve come to a point where everybody in the world must be terribly aware of the mistakes, and the people who will be making the most mistakes, I’m sorry to say, have been making them for this very big money. But fortunately, both the to-be-bought energy and all the money itself is going into the same pocket, so there is nobody to buy it, and the game is all over. There is no way to get it redistributed again, also, so we are in for a very new deal. But Timmy, do read the piece that I have written that I handed out, when you have time (COMPLEXION, 1976) because you haven’t had time. We’ve been terribly, terribly busy, you’ve worked very hard for this show.
I don’t think that we were designed here to be just a great big flop. The experiment of biological life and the biosphere of the little planet earth where there is some water and the only one who knows about, has it, that this very complicated thing was designed to be a flop. Universe is so extraordinarily impressive in its integrities, and we do not have any indication of energy being created, or being lost, and it is apparently eternally regenerative. So I would assume that this is just some phase of the eternal regeneration, that we are certainly here for some very important reason. It may just to be, to you and I look like a mess, but maybe it needed to have that kind of a mess locally for some other part of the great astrophysics regeneration I don’t know. But I can’t read I can’t really read, nothing that I have in data indicate that we do not have a full option to carry on and carry on very well. I seem to have dropped oh, underneath here, that’s right I couldn’t respect anybody more than I do Timmy. And I would like to have had a better answer for you, but I, it’s a kind of, they call for really very, very scientific language and presentations so it must be, I would think, I say, I don’t like beginning games with opinions, I certainly don’t think that I have all the answers in this Universe either. But I’m trying not to be dishonest with myself or anybody else, and so far the picture I have would give me the feeling that we have a very real option of carrying on for a very, very long time. That we are needed for something very much more than is of yet in evidence.
This is from Bob, then. “Please relate the outstanding people and places which have influenced your work.?” That is question #l. #2. “What in 50 years will you best be remembered for, or in other words, what do you feel your greatest contribution has been?”
Number 2. I’ll answer that first and get that out of the way. I don’t have the slightest idea I will be remembered, and I have been, I hope, a faithful custodian of information and I’ve tried to carry on my function, but I, if I am really very successful in what I’m trying to do, I will have been able to convince people that I do represent what anybody can do if they will be disembarrassed from the idea of earning livings and so forth. That if I am remembered at all, then, it will be, as then, that I did really insist on proving this, as I really began, I spoke to you a little sort of then about rather mystical things, where you really sometimes you really know that you are hearing from some greater intellect than that of human beings, and I realized that if the individual who would commit himself to this way, could be entrusted with the because the minute you did you really would have extraordinary insights you would really be looking at the big pattern. If, when, as adults, would you be trustworthy not to try to exploit it for self? Not only not exploit, not just for money, or for glory and so forth, but simply to exploit it, just to be “Mr. Big.” Or just even to flatter yourself. Could you be trusted, really, with that kind of very extraordinary, very extraordinary riches of humanity? Which this information really could be, so, this was the question I had really to put myself through. Was I trustworthy? And I decided I really was, but it had to be, I was either going to do away with myself, or commit myself really unreserved. But I was going to be living with human beings, so you’d see me having to carry on looking like a human being alright, but this was my commitment. And I really am confident I am trustworthy. There is nothing nothing could now a number of times young people say, “Will you run for politics,” things like that, because I am popular. I will not do anything with the popularity, I assure you, it just would not be so if I am remembered at all it is because I will have really made a good case, that anything I can do you can do better. And that I’ve been able to do quite a lot, therefore you ought to do a lot more. And that’s it. It’s a human break a humanity breakthrough, not me.
“The outstanding people and places which have influenced your work.” I also am asked many times, what are my favorite places or my favorite people. I don’t have any. I really love the whole show. I love the rain and the sun, both, and one makes the other the SYNERGETICS of it all! It’s so wonderful! And there have been a very large number of beautiful people, sometimes well known, sometimes not known at all and just a wonderful Irish cook, an old lady who really taught me a very great deal. And when some human being really wants to let a kid have it, they really are beautiful, the insights they can give you and how you can really arrive at this result and that result. What you could do with your hands, and how what you can just do whipping whipping up this stuff, you know. It’s very different when it’s whipped up properly. Now. But I do know that all my indebtedness to other human beings is just incredible, of things they have done in enlightening me and inspiring me, and giving me confidence in that there is such a thing as love and consideration for human beings. These people most of them, are not very well sung. The heroes are everywhere, and they don’t get many markers. So, I hope that is the right answer to that one, I’ve certainly been very privileged to meet extraordinary people like Einstein, but I think that he, himself, would like to feel pretty much the way I am talking here too. Probably that is part of what made him so very beautiful.
Jeffrey. I did that one didn’t I? Ed Applewhite. “You don’t seem to use the word “culture.” Is communication independent of culture? “
I use the word culture as a in a biological sense for the things, there are growths and so forth, and in the complementaries and the there is a lot that is referred to as culture in human affairs, and there the accumulation of the poetry and the paintings the art, and the increase of our knowledge and our inventory of understanding. But much of what has been called culture, I find to be highly conditioned reflexes that are often very impeding. Such as, I think that most people who talked about culture yesterday would certainly think of the educational system as the very essence of it, and this is where it is understood and well known, and I see the really the organized educational system right now holding up education more than anything in the world. So I question the word “culture” as always meaning that the, what happens in the gathering is all very beneficial. I think the idea of culture is used as being something, as an aesthetic, as a net gain all the time, but I don’t think so. It is so full of ambiguities and contradictions that I don’t like to use it. I don’t like the old class system. I detest it and being brought up as a kid, and being, and I really saw there were two classes of people there was the carriage trade and these are cultivated people these are “cultured” people, and these are uncultured people. I didn’t feel that way. So, the word has been used so, I say, it is very ambiguous. Therefore I just tend to avoid it as a word. I recognize what people are talking about, but I’ve given you some of my viewpoints about the different values that really are there. There is some synergetic interaction of all humanity that is very, very difficult to identify, but, personally I use the dictionary as my one measure that human beings have, as I’ve said, discovered 100,000 nuances of experience that merit 100,000 different words to identify those unique nuances of experience. And that they have agreed on the 100,000 words agreements being something that is very difficult to come by the public that we have 100,000 agreements on the right words for 100,000 nuances of experience that we feel to be unique. I think that is a very great memorial of gain of humanity. And there are many languages involved, there are alternate dictionaries, but those meanings seem to be pretty well around the world. There is a little difference, you get in the orient, due to the concept of there still is quite a holdover of the synergetic viewpoint that I mentioned the other day that went along with the ideographs and so forth, where you are asking the one looking at to do his own generalization, what’s in there that is common to all, and to do a whole lot of thinking, they precipitate a lot of thinking. And in our western world with the Phoenician with the phonetics and so forth we have come to looking at a lot of little details and getting really, this fine little specialization but went with the man really breaking up I haven’t mentioned to you this business about specialization and I’ve talked to you about specialization a great deal, and how it came about, but I didn’t mention to you as a group, here in Philadelphia, it’s quite a little while ago, I would guess, as my memory now goes, it must have been twenty years ago, there was an annual Congress of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In more recent years, the American Association has been broken up a little, but at that time all the scientific societies of America met under the joint auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and this is when they still were so doing.
And they used up filled up all the Philadelphia hotels, and different hotels were more or less categories of sciences, and then different floors were different categories of sciences, and special rooms of the floors, and so that I was very lucky to be able to, I was looking over this sort of very enormous mass of papers presented, and I found two papers that many times I’ve found myself very “lucky,” this is really a mysterious, stopping seeing two things together, stopping at the right page. When I was Science and Technology Editor in fact of FORTUNE MAGAZINE but called a Consultant on the staff, I took in a great many publication, TIME-LIFE and so forth you automatically get anything you want in the way of publications, so that I looked at for instance, the PATENT GAZETTE coming in, and I went through many of these things in a hurry, and I found it absolutely an extraordinary matter, with the PATENT GAZETTE, there are many, many illustration each page is something going on I would really spin that with my fingers, and I’d stop and I could inspect that book very clearly, that’s the only thing in there in a sense that I would really be interested in, but my eye could spot it so fast, much faster than I could possibly analyze what I was looking at, my eye something in me was really doing that.
I was asked to tell a little more about this particular capability of man the other day, and I forgot to do that, and so that calls for it yesterday’s being asked, today we were talking about integration and border-line case and ways that you can program your subconscious to do tasks for you. When, my very first my second set of jobs Armour and Company when I worked in those 28 branch houses, and then got into an enormous amount of accounting, I told you about then, how the auditors showed me then how you could make the “casting out nines” checkage. But he also said, I see you adding up column after column here really very slowly, and you’re being really very, very careful, and you’re saying “37 and 6 is 43, and you’re seeing it with your eyes,” and he said “I’ll tell you at your age it is possible to do something much better, but you’re going to be scared about it, but the point is you can really simply say 37, 43 that your subconscious had done the adding already when it seen that it absolutely knows it, very, very deeply, and all you have to do is say the top thing,” he said “It’s really like surfing, you have to get up there and just ride it, and just say the number itself and you go down the column just like that,” and he said “you go through so very fast that I advise you just to go through the column twice if you came out twice the same you just let it go it’s pretty sure, and you go through it twice the way I’m telling you to do it you can do that twice while you’re doing half of one column the way you’re doing it.” And I began to try it and it is a scary thing to do, but it works, I’ll tell you that. This is then the same thing that made it possible for me when I am rushing through a book, my eye was really seeing the shapes there, because I was so familiar with industrial forms and being around those factories, I really knew what I was looking at, and my eye was going “You know that, and you know that, and you know that ” and it’s the thing you don’t know that jumps out at you. And I could check it time and again, a book and I seemed to open, I even have it happen quite frequently I need to look something up at the dictionary and I go and open the dictionary at the right page, where the word is there! You do know the slice where the p’s would be, but I have, really then found myself opening, quite a few times at exactly the right page of the dictionary. I don’t know whether you have ever done that, but I am surprised to such an extent that things happen in my life this way, that I finally have said “Only the impossible happens.” Life is that mystically strange and so that
Now, we’ll come back to, will you help me as I got into talking about just saying the right thing at the right time (From the audience “The triple AS Convention). Yeah. So, I picked up the right, out of thousands and thousands of papers presented, I really picked out the two that really meant something. And what it was, the one was the report in the biological section and the other was over in anthropology. And the biological team had been working for a number of years on analyzing all the know cases of biological species that had become extinct. Looking for something common in all the extinction. And the anthropological team was going over all the known case histories of human tribes that had become extinct. And both of them, completely independently, different hotels and not knowing about each other at all, both came to the same conclusion, that common to extinction was over-specialization. And over specialization coming about then where, as you could inbreed fast running horses, by marrying two fast running horses, and the probability of concentrating the genes of the fast running, you don’t know what they are is high. But you do it always at the expense of outbreeding general adaptability. And you keep outbreeding general adaptability, and because of the energies frequencies business I speak about that the big things happen very rarely, and the little things happen very high frequency.
As you breed out general adaptability you breed out the ones for the big one and just take care of the things that happen very frequently and you get along great, but all of a sudden it had not happened for a long, long time, but along comes one of the big ones, and you’ve lost that capability, and the species is all through. So, I see all of humanity getting in over-specialization incredible over-specialization, developing the ability to blow itself to pieces and nobody in control of anything leaving it to a few where really a madman could get on the retaliatory button and its all over. So that I saw that we are really very much on the brink of it, and if it would have been something natural, that we were naturally designed to be specialists, then I would have been, I would have said, well then the quicker it’s over the better, but I saw that we weren’t. We were designed to be comprehensivists. And we had been simply, that original power structure, and this was a phase of humanity that we had to go through, had to learn that yes, a big man could do certain things and he was a good fighter and so forth, but that’s not what you wanted to be doing fighting, and so he had, and is still doing it, is still making everybody specialists. To divide and conquer keep conquered. That’s how he’s a very few people can run such big shows today.
Part 11
I saw, this to me was an incredible danger that we are in. That was why I was interested in “What can the little man do?” And what I could do then, I saw, had to do then with these tools, and nothing could really stop me doing these tools, and I’ve never been considered subversive by anybody because I’m apolitical, I’m not talking about that. And nobody could possibly know me without knowing that I’m not calling anybody bad, and I would like everybody to win. I’m not at all biased. Right, the little fellow can do something, and, now,
Another question. “No matter what age one is, the following question is of immense importance. You are near 80 years old. What do you think about death? What do you think death is? What do you want to do, or what do you see is the most important thing to do the rest of your life?” I went in with you, quite carefully into my the data, the reasons why I am convinced that I am not the physical or that I am not the telephone, I am not the medium. And, for the same reason I am convinced that all the life, then, is absolutely immortal. That the thing that is life was not the physical, so that I see it ALWAYS as metaphysical. And I see the metaphysical as part of the eternity and I don’t have any death. I have absolutely no feeling of death. I know that you may not be able to see me pretty soon, or something like that, but that is a time and again I have written a letter to an old friend of mine, and his widow writes back and says, “I’m sorry you didn’t know it, but Jack died three years ago” or something like that, and it’s really awful that I didn’t know it, but I didn’t. The point is, I write back and say “It can’t be, because I wrote to Jack. You’ve informed me but I didn’t know that, and I don’t know it now. I’m still writing to the same Jack. That’s my friend. They can’t die. It is really so.
At any rate, then. “What do you see is the most important thing for you to do for the rest of your life. Well, just our friend INTEGRITY. That’s all. And whatever confronts you, try to attend to it. There are a lot of thoughts you have that need attention, and there are a lot of unexpecteds that are going to need attention. I would like to leave that, with this one, I think that I’ve been telling you what I’ve been trying to do, and I hope I’m going to keep on doing it for as long as I can. This piece that I’ve given you, THE TWILIGHT no the one I call COMPLEXION has, the second half is what I am trying to do, and I have rewritten that, WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO with my life, and I have rewritten it time and time again that would tell you what I would like to do for the next years I may have.
The, I wanted to switch off here, I overtalked about that point. I’ve been talking about friends that didn’t die, and immortality there are certain areas of thoughts that I keep realizing I haven’t touched on and I would like to say a little more about. Can any of you remember a clue in anything I was saying there? About immortality. (From the audience. “You said that life was not-physical. and that it is eternal.”) I’m going to hope I know what I was going to tell you. I had said a little earlier that as far as I could see everything is “Only the impossible happens,” and I’d like to give you two-three experiences in my life that make me say this. There are thousands and thousands of things that happened in my life that make me say it, but these are these seem to be very outstanding kinds of items.
My wife and I lived in an apartment in Forest Hills New York, they were called the Tennis Apartments, they were right next door to the Forest Hills Tennis Club for quite a few years and we were on the top floor 4 floor building it had an elevator but also a pretty easy walk up and down, and the we took the apartment during the war was still on W.W.II so it had rent control and the landlord didn’t like most of us in the apartment house because he couldn’t raise the rent. As long as you kept you were the original people in there at that time, the law at that time protected us, so we were paying $70 a month for really a very nice bedroom, a very nice living room, kitchen bath, and in a nice building, nice neighborhood. So, here, there are things like our ice box, and ice box would be, anything we had in the way of facilities, the building had been beautifully built originally and had good copper plumbing and things like that so that actually it went on very well a man named Grover Attenbury (sp?) was the architect, I was trying to think of his name the other day that’s it Grover Attenbury and, at any rate, the electric icebox was a General Electric with the old cooling device up on the top a big open thing, and it had an engine down below, a belt going around pumping and continually getting out of order, and the owner of the building then had a repair man, and he put in very poor parts anything that needed service in there they would make it do it very poorly, hoping it would annoy you, hoping we would finally move away. And so this icebox was one of those things, that it would just, day after day it would go wrong, and you didn’t want to put your own one in because he said he’d own it. Well, Anne and I were going off on a trip. At that period I was covering many universities around this country and we used to drive all over the United States, and I gone off on a trip, and I invited my partner Shoji Sadao to stay in our apartment while we were away, and he decided to do so, but he said he was not going to eat there. He had someplace else that it was more convenient for him to eat, so he was just sleeping there, and, at any rate, Anne and I were coming back from California via Texas and Louisiana, and we had left New Orleans and we were driving north, and on the state highway, a State Highway Policeman overtook us with this big siren and stopped us, and he had our car number, and he had my name, and he said “I stopped you because your apartment in New York has just burned up, and my lawyer had wanted me to know about this thing, and so he knew where I was, that I would be going from New Orleans at that time, and so he told the State Police and they caught me.
At any rate, we worried very much because Shoji had been staying in the apartment. And I called up Shoji was alright, but he said it was a complete burned out mess. So we got back, and before we went away Anne had wanted to have the apartment painted, and so we had hired the painters to come in and paint it, and she had taken all our furniture and things and put it in the middle of the living room, and put sheets and things over it so it had a mountain there, but these big sofas you could do that, they were by the wall, there were book cases full of books, and she had put coverings over that, so the paints would not get on the books. So, at any rate, the fire went on, I’ll tell you about the fire, when we got there and found out what happened, the icebox had caught on fire. Shoji knew we were coming back within a couple of days, and he was going away so he thought he ought to start the icebox so that it would be cold when we got there. So he started it up, and it, as usual, got in trouble and caught on fire, and the whole kitchen burned up, and then went into the hall way and into the bedroom where, if he had been in there he would have been caught in there then started into the living room the living room actually didn’t get the sofa that Anne didn’t like also didn’t get burned, but our books were all blackened up over at the office you’ll find a lot of my books you’ll see smoke on them, in the archives there that came out of the fire. But, they actually didn’t get burned up but they were very messed up, and the some beautiful old furniture got smudged and the fire engines were pumping water and chemicals in there made an awful mess, but we were able to have the old furniture fixed up and things like that. At any rate, the icebox, the kitchen was burned and the icebox fell down in the apartment in the kitchen below of the people down below.
The people below, I never knew, but I used to walk up and down for years and they would always have on their front door, very ostensibly, in political campaigns they would have all the people that I would think would be very obnoxious politically they always wanted. They were always for what I wasn’t for. I wasn’t very interested in politics, but these were the most obnoxious people. So quite clearly we were different kind of viewpoint, and I used to work that is where I developed the first geodesic domes did that took the two years of time off to do my mathematics longhand and all, and I’d be often making models at night out in the kitchen and they’d hear me around working, because I would work till 3 and 4, I really had to put in time, and they’d keep knocking on the ceiling that I was bothering them, that noise up there. They clearly didn’t like me, and I apparently would not have been very enthusiastic about them from their political viewpoint. But we never met them. Never saw them face to face.
At any rate, after this was over, it was agreed that the apartment could be fixed up and we could move in, but Anne had decided she had had enough of it, she didn’t want that anymore. And I would have been perfectly glad to go back and have the low rent. She decided we were going to move, so we did really move, and we went out to California. This all happened in around April, and we were at Christmas time out in California where our daughter is, and I decided to get my daughter a good watch. This was before they were the kind of watches we have quartz watches and things like that today, and watches really needed quite a lot of repair, and in the old days it was a pretty good idea if you got a good watch to get it at a good place where you could count on repairs, at some establishment that would be there when you come back the next time. And so I wanted to get my daughter then a good watch that she could get repaired.
I went to a place on Wilshire Boulevard not far from where they lived, and it was one of the big department stores, a very fancy department store, in Los Angeles if any of you are Los Angeles people you would know it, but at any rate it was a fancy one, and I found the jewelry department. They had watches alright, and I found just the watch I wanted, and so I said to the lady, “Would you call the head of the department because I am going to have to give you a check.” And she said “I can take care of that. What is your check on?” And I said “It’s way across the country in the east.” And she said “Where abouts?” And I said “Forest Hills, New York.” And she said “Oh, I came from Forest Hills.” And I said “Where did you live?” And she said “Number 6, Burns Street, that’s our address.” And so she said, and I said, “Yes, well we still have I’m from Forest Hills” it didn’t say Burns Street on my check. But it turned out that she and her husband lived in this apartment house for a long time and the people upstairs were horrible. And suddenly there was a great fire and the icebox crashed through, and they had enough so they decided to move to California. (The audience breaks into uproarious laughter.) This was in a couple of months, and clear across the United States! So I didn’t tell her I was because she wouldn’t have approved my check. But this is typical.
Now, I was, one of the boys I spoke to you about a picture of the Butler Grain Bin Dome in the Hains Park in Washington, I spoke about Wally Saunders, the architect and his wife sitting out in front. Wally was quite a long time head of the Architectural Department at the University of Michigan. But he was a very dear friend through many of the years, and he comes into this story. Another time in California I had to leave my daughter’s house on Christmas Eve on Christmas night, the night of Christmas to get to the airport and I was off for Europe, or for wherever it was And, I needed to get a yellow taxi, and I did, and they lived in Pacific Palisades a long way over to the airport, and I had noticed that the expressway which is now called the San Diego the Santa Monica Freeway was not finished, but it was partially built, and I had noticed where the last section had been open. I knew that. At any rate I started telling I saw the taxi cab going one way, and I said if you go this way in Santa Monica I’ll get you on the freeway a little quicker, because I happen to know that it just opened yesterday, and he said it’s not very often people tell a Los Angeles taxi driver how to get around. And he said, how did you happen to know that? And I said well, I’m sort of interested in things like that, I’m more or less of an engineer. And then he got talking, he said “You know, the men that can design these sections going like this and going like that, and then they are going to come together just like that,” he said “they really have my greatest admiration, I don’t see how you could possibly do such beautiful things and get things to work out like that,” and he said “Did you ever hear of a man called Buckminster Fuller?” And I said “Why?” and then he told me all about he was a great engineer, and he really knew a fantastic amount about me. We were going along the expressway at 65 and I didn’t want to say I was Buckminster Fuller, I was afraid he’d turn around and we’d crash, so I didn’t say anything until we got to the airport, and then I told him I was Buckminster Fuller, and I gave him some reprints of things that I had written, and he was very grateful. And that was that.
Then, a few years later I got a I gave him my address and I got a letter, he had gone to Mexico, he had left Los Angeles. He might come back, but at any rate. Then, now we covered more years, and Wally Saunders, the Head of the Architecture Department was put in the AIA Visiting Board to visit different architectural schools, the accrediting board and he had never been to the west coast himself, and he suddenly had to go to the west coast schools and Berkeley and down, and he was in San Francisco and I was there, and so we met, and I, for some reason or other, I told Wally about this man he was a very dear friend, and I knew it might interest him that I had gotten to the point in my life where a taxi driver might know who I was. And so he was very interested.
Anyway, Wally had to go down to, then, UCLA, and he was going to do and USC accrediting. He had never been at the west coast. So I left him, I took him out to the airport, and about a week later I got a postcard from my taxi man again, saying “Thank you for sending Professor Saunders to see me.” He had picked up Saunders at the other end of the airport. I had just told him about this thing. I’ve never heard from him again, but these are typical to me of the absolutely impossible things that go on.
Part 12
Your thing that you told me about yesterday is like these things happen, and when they do happen they really do happen at quite high frequency in my life and I say, it must be somewhere this sort of great mystery of ours is sort of clarifying so that like a fog lifting from everything so that you feel the connections, that really are there. Something strange goes on here.
I have plenty more of these, but there are so many of them in my life, that I think you can really finally get with me here, I know the kinds of things that might happen. I have a pretty good idea of the kind of things that are going to happen in the next few years, but where they’re going to happen I haven’t the slightest idea. The event, there are precipitating events that seem to be absolutely unpredictable. So I find that the important really does happen, so I say “Everything important just happens.” You can be in the right area but that’s all of the happenings. And so I think “happenings” become when you are living as I do very deliberately live in a frontier, and I really do live in a cresting wave, you give me information, a very important information and so forth, and I really am living and putting that together, and do my kind of a thinking there, and because I deliberately live on the frontier, things happen to me earlier than they tend to happen to the rest of society, and when things begin to go rather adversely for me, I feel rather apprehensive for society, because I know I’ll get through these things, but I think society is going to be in trouble. It really always happens that the my curves are anticipating the curve of general society by a little.
Now, I’ve come to the end of the questions that have been given to me and I’d like to come over to something I told you I’d bring with me. This is in the, “How many of you read my book INTUITIONS? So you are familiar with the Lord’s Prayer in there, in the back? Did you read that? So, I’ll just read the first introductory paragraph, and no more then.
I feel intuitively that what is now identified as the Lord’s Prayer, was digested through ages from many philosophies in many lands. Also I feel intuitively that in relaying the Lord’s Prayer from country to country, from language to language, from one historical period to another, that many at first small, then later, large alterations of meaning may very well have occurred. It seems unlikely to me that the Prayers’ original conceivers and formulators would have included a bargaining proposal such as asking forgiveness of our trespasses or debts, because we agree to forgive others. It also seems illogical to remind God of anything or to ask dispensation for self, or to suggest that God doesn’t understand various problems, or that God needs earthly salesmen for his cause. Before going to sleep, even for short naps, I always re-explore, and re-think my way through the Lord’s Prayer, as I thought it through tonight, August 13, 1966, I decided to describe it on paper so I did that. That’s what you read. But I want you to think about just this would be more or less the most recent do any of you really remember reading that, and reading how it went? I find it really extraordinarily fascinating, but I could not conceive of just having reciting something, just going through a ritual. I don’t operate that way anymore. I was brought up to go through rituals and do little things, symbolically, but my life, if I’m going to do my own thinking be responsible, I can’t do that anymore, it must really be thought through.
EVER RETHINKING THE LORD’S PRAYER
Thinking as best I may
of all humans
who have in all time
dwelt upon our planet
Thinking swiftly of all those I have known
family, friends, unfriendlies, antisocials,
successful and unsuccessful,
exalted and tortured
And thinking of planet earth
as I have come to know it
by direct experiencings, and 36 encirclings,
thousands of continental criss-crossings,
and millions of local to and fro-ings
And thinking of our planets bigness to me
at almost negligible magnitude
our planet of only one small star
in our galaxy of 100 billion stars
which is only one of the now-known
billion such galaxies
And trying to think omni-inclusively
on behalf of all histories earthian humans
I say in my thoughts
ever reminding myself
as I progress in thinking
that I am speaking only
on behalf of all individuals
present and past
and to come
I say
Our God
Who art in we even
even we who know most intimately
of our own weaknesses, failures, faults
and outright sins
our selfishnesses, fears, and cupidity
our moments of jealousy, rage, and hate
secret cover ups, lies and self deceits
God even of we
our God
our intuitively apprehended
comprehensive admonisher
and Omni-experience is your Identity.
You have given us
because You are Omni-experience
overwhelming manifest:
of Your complete knowledge
(There is that Universe working there)
Your complete comprehension
Your complete concern
Your complete wisdom
Your complete responsibility
Your complete coordination
Your complete competence to cope positively with
any and all problems
And Your utter reliability always so to do
Yours, Dear God
is all the glory
(people talk about glory and say but without thisthis extraordinary Thing, how are there even words, even the word glory whatever it is awe, every credit, is completely God’s we have nothing to do with it)
You are the utterly mysterious Integrity
Of omni-regenerative Universe
We have absolute confidence and faith in You
You are the Synergetic Integral of All Truths as
best we can see
And we worship You
awe-inspiredly,
thankfully
rejoicingly and
lovingly
For it is humanly feasible
To be in awe of Truth
humanly feasible to be thankful for
and to rejoice
and to love the Truth
(I found this very beautiful, this is when I knew I could really love that Truth so it isn’t just vapid words)
All of which lead to Absolute Truth
beyond the comprehension of humans.
(A leading, that is all we can see)This is the way I have most recently said it. Every time I’m continually thinking of my words, what I and I find it very extraordinarily satisfying when I suddenly realized that when I the nearest I could really identify God was this Integral of Truths that there were a plurality of truths, because there were a plurality of these generalized principles, but they all seemed to lead, to come together synergetically. But to realize then when I could identify God as the Truth, then, that you that that IS loveable. The Truth is so extraordinarily rejoicing and so grateful because there is a truth. MY GOD, how grateful we are! There is a Truth. And to find those truths, then you really have something to go on. That’s all we’re really looking for.
I’ve talked to you about lags, just the lag in the rate in which I could recall a word. Then I start speaking along here I pull them out, and one reason I concentrate so hard, is to be sure to have them coming up on time, not to interrupt the flow of the thought, and discovering there are lags.
There is a lag, you have to take a second look to realize it is there. We’re just full of lags, and my geometry giving me the vector equilibrium the great isotropic vector matrix and really a great purity of railroads, but also then showing very clearly, I saw there are pulsations where it goes askew. And you can really see then that there were limits of aberrations, that Nature never allows you to catch on dead center. She absolutely abhors the equilibrium. The airplane comes in the stall, and you’re off in a direction she won’t let you stay in nothingness. She’s going to take you in some direction right away. I just feel this time and again myself it doesn’t make any difference what you do to but I don’t have to look at it anymore, Nature knew just what to do, and it is, it is, you just cannot catch Nature off guard, but she doesn’t do it on dead center, she doesn’t hesitate in neutral ever, and say, I don’t know what to do. She never will do that whapp! she goes there. So, it’s finding then that everything you and I have any apprehending of, is always off center. That we’re always a little lag, this makes a really great significance, and I’m sure that each of our lags are a little different, because my own lags even vary, so I think that what makes a very great difference in the lives of the relative aberrations, that everything we call lags is just an aberration, and we find that the positive and negative they’re balancing superbly, and in physics you find, then, the positive and negative weights, and the average of all the weights is Zero. The Universe is inherently Zero absolutely pure principle! That there is sensoriality. All of this has something to do with there is an inherently, also in the somehow in this generalization the principles that there is aberratable. So the phenomena we call “life” seems to be a set of aberrations where we are just off center. And I wonder at this being incorporated because as I come into Synergetics it seems to be absolutely this is generalizable that there is aberratability. There was generalizable that there were the degrees of freedom, and you can have different position, you could be different distances. The aberrations could be compounded with successive frequencies of reoccurrence of an event. So things can get seem an enormous distance away all the great distances in Universe and everything seem to be accommodated in principle here. How all the separate dispositions really occur, yet everything is still following the rules.
Now, we have to think a great deal about how an eternally regenerative Universe, the Extraordinary Comprehending Intellect and Integrity that is absolutely weightless is just the only word is Integrity, there is no other way to identify, because what we’re talking about is purely metaphysical. That, how would they happen to be then, this kind of “life” phenomena going on, and I began to, at the time I wrote NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON, I found myself writing what I call THE GAME OF LIFE where I said the Great Integrity of Universe must want to test its own integrity, and whether it goes on and tests all the time, or it tests from time to time, that I, in my book, I then said, we have then the Great Integrity tearing up all the cards. They all had been beautifully organized, tearing up all the information cards and all the files in bits, and can it be put together again. And so, I went through some, there was some diagramming at that time, so I had whole completeness, and, using the circle for that diagram, and so, I said, “Well, we’re going to have to take a little out of this perfection and let it loose. I’m going to have to break the circle.” So we break the circle and consequent of breaking the circle, this little section, in an enormous circle it looks like a little straight line, such a small arc of such an enormous circle looks absolutely straight. So this little straight little thing here, and it falls out. And the big show keeps getting away from it, so at first it’s this enormous thing, and then it’s this little tiny thing in here, but then as it gets farther and farther away the big thing looks smaller, and it looks bigger, and it finally gets farther away, and it is getting to be very big. It only knows itself, and finally, instead of being the little “i” that you and I are familiar with, with a dot over it, to heck with the dot, and so it’s just big “I.” So we get to where it is just the big “I,” and if there is any possibility that this big “I,” can ever really get back together again, so, fortunately the big “I” begins to realize it couldn’t be anything unless there was something to be aware of, so there has to get it gets to it is very interesting in the for instance the Russian language goes back to where “U” is two “I”s. I find there is lots of indication of this being some kind of well into the thought that you and I are really the same, and that it has to be U-I, and finally the game is, “can the Universe get itself back together again?” And, I just say these things to you because I find this is a thought that I can’t really get out of me, and I have gone on with this since 1937 at the time of NINE CHAINS TO 1935 at the time I was writing it there, and when I was publishing NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON, my page proofs came back and I didn’t do several things I don’t know whether I told you about this, but I think it should be in our record here.
I had felt very much that it must be explicable that humanity does have such vanity that it always knows so “show off” once something has happened “I knew that all the time” “Everybody knows anybody can go to the moon,” that’s crazy. And we’ve been doing that all the time anyway, it’s just a matter of my taking a little trouble, I knew how to do that all the time.” There is a vanity that is given to human beings so that they may not be too mortified by all their errors really knowing how absolutely ignorant they are, so she made human beings to act as if they know a whole lot.
Now I’ll come back then to the when my first book was, I told you about Einstein the other day, about this same book, and when the page proofs came to me for it, Einstein said O.K., and then it is really two years before it actually finally is getting out, books take some time, there are many things that can go wrong, and the author has you can make changes, but it costs you quite a lot of money, and I made really quite a major change. I had the page proofs, and it was just ready to go, and I put up in the front of the book a set of I did two things, I took out the “Game of Life”, I decided when I saw that page proof that people I was talking about industrialization, and many things like that, I thought it would seem too mystical and far out, it was a whole lot of fun “The Game of Life,” because I then got into male and female letters, and then all the round ones were the females and it began to get things together. I did get into that symbolism you talk about, Jack, it is fascinating how much really sort of fundamental symbolism there was in the letters and in the communication tools. So, I took that out, and it said in the text that if you wanted the text of the “Game of Life” it was printed independently.
I kept my page proofs and Ed Schlossberg a year ago, ran an offset of it called “The Game of Life,” and so you can get it if you would like to read it. At any rate, I also put up in the front of the book a set of prognostications, because I knew that if any critics looked at my book they would look up at the front and see that set of prognostications and that’s exactly what they’d pick on, that’s good and simple. And I had 22 prognostications, and sure enough, there were 100 book reviews of it, and they all went up and took those prognostications some of them went into the book much deeper and that, but even if they went into the book deeper, they always talked about the prognostications. Frank Lloyd Wright wrote a beautiful piece for the SAT old SATURDAY REVIEW in those days, and he reviewed each one of the points, and he was very, very friendly to me about it, but it was quite we have a copy of that don’t we, Timmy, over at the office?
Part 13
I put in 22 prognostications, and the 21 of them were very carefully chosen, the 22nd one I simply said no change in the way man with a maid and vice-versa. but then the other 21 I very carefully, having at that time while I was the Science and Technology Editor of FORTUNE, I had just arrived there, and I picked everything I wrote I was confident that everything I wrote had never been in print ever. I got researchers at FORTUNE to check with me, and nobody could find any suggestion of this having been said before, so they were absolute novelties. And so, sure enough, all the reviewers came at them. I kept, and bound I have in the chrono file, you’ll find the binding did you look for that, ever? the hundred reviews are there in the Dymaxion Chronofile and they all pick on these reviews on these prognostications. When I came to the paperback of it, that book was 1938, when I came to the paperback of this in the ’60’s, paperbacks they would like to have, there are so many folios that it is a more economical way of publishing, they don’t like to get odd numbers of the signatures, so they asked me if I could take out some pages, and what I took out was the prognostications, but everyone of them was so absolutely everyone of them had happened, and if you’d have said “that’s a prognostication that I made that year,” nobody would believe you at all, they would have said “That was always so.” They just seemed trite and stupid, and yet I have the documentation of those hundred in that volume, all of the experts, because it wasn’t just a general set of critics, I was in a power industry, so the magazine POWER, THE ELECTRICAL GENERATOR, they made their main editorial, the first editorial on it, so it was very prominently reviewed, and it was runner up for the Book of the Month Club.
O.K., I wanted to get in with you then, this concept of humanity being a problem to cope with due to this quick way in which he says “I knew it was going to happen.”
In FORTUNE MAGAZINE, they ran a I wrote another poem and you’ll find this other poem in the it’s in NO MORE SECONDHAND GOD, and they ran a set of paintings by Scheiller (?) and this poem. Here again I said, “When the Almighty amused himself with shoot the works and started evolving the hot valve and the cold valve and so forth, I’ve gone into quite a number of times that I have gone into the idea of absolutely scrapping the Universe and then putting it together again, as a test of its own Integrity. But I can’t help but feel, as I said to you the other day, when we get to taking the relative abundance of the chemical elements in the different biological organisms, and we find that the amoebae just doesn’t have enough chemical elements to make the other biological organisms. That not until we really get to the human being has the largest number of chemical elements of any of the living species, and the relative abundance of those chemical elements and furthermore, if the chemical elements are available in the environment in the right way for instance, you and I cannot take copper on directly, it is toxic. However, if spinach as it grows in the presence of copper, which it does in Michigan, you take on that spinach, and the copper is then compatible, compatibly assimilated. We find that all the chemical elements in the trace element studies of I have a number, I have several scientist friends who are in this particular field. All of them are assimilatable by the human beings, we only have 91 of the 92 available on our planet, but everyone of them, then, are assimilatable by the human individual and as much as just one chromium atom in the human being makes the difference between whether they will have what do you call this sugar? diabetes just the presence of one chromium atom difference to tip the balance between diabetes and no diabetes. So these are very delicate matters. Finding then that the relative abundance of the chemical elements, if I use that as my fingerprint to try to find something where something is the counterpart of the human being in relative the only counterpart is the Universe the same pattern of relative abundance of chemical elements in the Universe. Therefore, we apparently are a miniature Universe. And then I began to reason, “Well, it is an extraordinary game that Universe, that you have all those degrees of freedom, it has all these associabilities and disassociabilities, it has the incredible high frequency of occurrence, and it is omni-directional, therefore if you begin to play that kind of a chess omni-directional, and at fantastic high speed, all these permitted moves, I said, it could be that each one of us is one game been played, the Universe is now being played, and each one of us is one way the Universe could come out, but because we are such a complex of the generalizations and so forth, that we come out many generalized conformities, but absolutely individual.
Or, I’ve given you the kind of speculations that I do find myself in, and the all I can say is the more I think, the more I can find out, the more I know how little I know. The mystery gets ever more, ever more entrancing, and really just incredibly beautiful. Thank you.
(Break )
You may recall my talking about the tetrahedron with a where I had rubber edges, elastic edges, and I stood on the floor, and I held one edge of the tetrahedron between my two feet on the floor, so that was fixed. Then I had a groove in the floor parallel to my line between my feet, and I have a tetrahedron’s vertex in my hand, and rubber legs from here to here, down to there and all one is a fixed length and it can be metal, but all the other five of the six legs of the tetrahedron can be rubber. So I’m going to have somebody move this top vertex, keeping it parallel to the floor. The floor is part of our earth so keep the same radius from the center of our earth all the time, and it can go anywhere it wants in any plane like this. There is a line on the groove here, it goes, it is always parallel to my feet here, so it makes a triangle on the ground whose bases are always the same, between my feet, and its altitude is always the same, because it is the distance between the two lines, so this triangle could go on clear half way around the it could go all the way to Venus, and then this top one can move anywhere in this plane, and all it means is it is parallel to the surface of the earth and so the altitude of this tetrahedron is always the same, same base triangle so it is always the same volume so it’s the same tetrahedron. Now these two points can literally be, I can arrange a tetrahedron where these two points can diverge from one another so that I can connect any two points in the Universe. And the everything really goes back to the one fixed line, which would be my wave length. This could be microwave, or whatever it is. This is wave length, so I want to identify a way in which a tetrahedron is one unit of volume, one quantum, can interconnect any two points in Universe. And I am quite certain that this is what goes on electromagnetically as we do tune in between points in Universe.
I also gave you the “A” particle and the “B” particle. And we saw that they then made all the other forms. In fact, the “A” particle, we take it the icosahedron is 120 triangles, and we can drop it down, the sharp point into there. This is very fascinating this is “A” and “B” are everything. And so that they were then, they were different, their energy holding properties were different, but they were the same energy as this the same volumetric value, but had different behavior. And, now I can go to the, if you want to go to the center of gravity of a tetrahedron, give me an asymmetrical tetrahedron, or a symmetrical, and you remember I showed you that it didn’t make a difference whether the triangle was asymmetrical or not, it had the same properties? There, where no other the rectilinears will not do that, but only the triangle does it, the same way a tetrahedron can be just as asymmetrical as you want, and it’s volume always stays the same. So, there really you don’t have to talk about the tetrahedron as really being regular or irregular. It is always regular. It may seem to be aberrated, but it is the same phenomenon.
Now, the way you get the center of gravity of a triangle is to bisect the edges and take the opposite vertex and connect it to that mid-edge. If you want the center of gravity of a tetrahedron, you then do the center of gravity of each of the four faces, and then you connect the center of gravity of each of the four faces with the opposite vertex and you’ll find that it goes through the center of gravity of that tetrahedron. Asymmetrical or Symmetrical, it is always perfect. Now, when you get to the center of gravity of a tetrahedron, then there are formed upon each of its four faces, an asymmetrical tetrahedron which interior vertex is at the center of gravity of the tetrahedron so there are four faces, you will get four of them. So I take the “A” particle and I get four very much thinner getting very thin tetrahedron, but each one is one quarter of an “A” particle. They look quite difference. So each one of those I can get a center of gravity, and they get thinner and thinner and thinner. It gets very exciting, but each one is always the whole fraction, in other words I find that I can then get down to there are tetrahedra that really will fit together, not only two points in Universe but at four points in Universe. And they will always be the same value, I want to get there I can get there, any kind of aberration I want with the different kind of tricks I have been giving you here, to connect any four points in Universe and everything comes out great. So that I want to indicate, that it is to me, a very extraordinary thing we have we’re tuned tuning and electromagnetic wave interconnection to points in Universe to do with our quanta, and here it is. I’m going to come over to something you asked me at the interval today.
Talking about spaces and their effects on human beings and wondering, you said, “Can we design something that has an effect on people that is profound, giving them a sense of the mystery of life and things, and I am quite confident, Yes, we probably can. But Nature itself does it. The Chinese have two words, Fung Shui. I’m sure that you have experienced as I have, you are traveling along, you are climbing a hill, you are doing something. All of a sudden you come to a spot where there is a very special thing, looks absolutely you come out of something not too interesting and you come to something absolutely sublimely beautiful. I have also noticed when I have been a traveler around the United States, a great deal with my wife in the old days before we had the expressways, when you really were having to climb mountains and so forth, that as you come to where the different states are the state boundaries, there really is a look of difference. They really seem to have a different quality as you cross from Massachusetts into Vermont. There is just no question about it. And those points were really apparently the Indians, they must have thought it quite strongly that this is where this thing divides. At any rate, the Fung Shui of the Chinese, there are certain places in the world that are much more beautiful than others. You suddenly step into it and there it is. Going back to the Shinto I spoke to you about. This ancient, ancient you see all around Japan, the Torii you see two red columns and on top of it is really the keel of the boat the water people. And, that’s a gate. And maybe somebody would be out in the middle of a pond, or something but what you do, you go through that gate, and then suddenly, and at that particular they put it where if you go through it, the Universe at this particular point is almost sublimely right. Everything is very, very beautiful, so I am combining the Japanese and the Shinto, but the point is, that there are places that are just right, and the Chinese must never build where there is not you must have Fung Shui it must feel very special. But the Shinto, this is an incredible thing, this is their cathedral, so they have those Torii, you go through the door of the cathedral, and there is your cathedral. What a cathedral. And when I talked about the beauty of that Shinto, and its simplicity, I can’t get over it. So, then, thinking about your spaces, I am confident there are spaces much more beautiful than others, there is no question about that. They wanted to dismay us, just as you are entering a tunnel or something like that, or suddenly the sense you have at Grand Canyon. These are very extraordinary feelings that you have no question about it.
So I’m sure that there are spaces that can be I know it in my own dome. I just know that like my Expo Dome was a very extraordinary space sensation. It felt really quite wonderful, and that ten story high escalator, was a wonderful sense of scale of the human beings coming up it to a platform, we had the platform at the mid-height of it, but it was actually ten-stories high the longest escalator ever, and standing up on that platform, you really could see, it almost felt to eternity. You feel the people outside enjoying the Fair, you could feel the thousands of people inside enjoying the Fair, there was something there was a flow of humanity through the walls.
Now, I’m going to bring in one other item which I my daughter is a dancer. Allegra was the second child that was born, the one that was born in 1927, and whose birth, after the death of her sister five years earlier, at her fourth birthday, really brought about my changing my whole pattern of life. At any rate, Allegra, from the beginning, her name Allegra was right, because she really was “happy girl.” She was just full of smiles, as a little tiny baby, and couldn’t have been healthier, and all it almost felt like God had taken our first child and somehow or other removed all the terrible things that the poor little first child had to go through. At any rate, it was very mysterious. And Allegra was a spontaneous dancer. She just really loved handling her body, doing things, and just a little tiny child she was dressing up and doing all kinds of things around the parlor floor. And so, very early she wanted to go to dancing school, so my wife took her to various kinds she went to many different kinds of dancing school, to expose her to a lot of teachers. But she wanted to do that dancing.
And, when she was twelve, she said “Daddy,” we were living in New York at that time, she said “Daddy, you were brought up in Boston with the custom that it is ill mannered for men to make gestures that the man who is properly cultivated is well in possession of his movements, and he just doesn’t even move his head, he just talks and sits very motionless, beautifully disciplined to do that. And she said, “I’ll tell you, I don’t know if I really am a dancer, but whatever I am, my body wants to talk all the time.” And she said, “Daddy, I like your ideas very, very much and I want them to prevail, but I think you are frustrating your ideas by your disciplining yourself to sit motionless. I think if you’d just let yourself go things would happen way better for you.” She was used to my having a lot of hard luck, nobody was paying any attention to me in those days. And so she seemed so wise that I think I did everything I could to free myself up. If you see me moving around today it’s because she this was part of my like recapturing my childhood and so forth. But she did make it perfectly clear, a child does move comfortably and uses his body, so I began to let myself do I am utterly unaware of the motions, I assure you, but I have had moving pictures taken of me I’ve seen myself when I’ve been giving a lecture and I’m practically going all over the stage like a ballet dancer.
Part 14
Now, Allegra, then went on different. She was exposed, really, to all kinds of dancing schools, modern, and she, also, was very interested in my SYNERGETICS and she loved the numerology and we had great companionship over it, and I thought she was going to be an engineer she wants to be an engineer, she seems to be so good at mathematics and so forth, so I got her entered for MIT which was quite difficult in those days for a girl to get into MIT. At any rate, they accepted her, and that summer, before going to MIT, she did what she had been doing every summer she went to she danced all summer down at the Balanchine School, and I said, “I’m forcing you to be an engineer, you really do want to be a dancer.” And I was just thinking about that episode you told me, “I think you better be free, so forget about MIT.” So she did, she was in the Balanchine Civic Repertoire for two years, and then, all the years of her childhood I was also making great charts of the history of science. I would like to get big charts, and using a quarter of an inch to the year, and going back to the earliest known scientific discoveries, I plotted them, and had these very long charts, and gradually you could really feel the acceleration. More things came in.
And on the scientific charts, then, I also superimposed the technical history the technology began to come in, and I was able to, by giving colors to the items that are really very purest in scientific intellectuality, I would give that purple, and then I worked down into the blues and finally down to red mechanics were red. By giving color to the different items, it became quite clear all of a sudden, I could see the where it was the mind over matter. I could see the intellectual that occurred long before, if it hadn’t been for the atmosphere of that kind of thinking, this one wouldn’t have happened, so I was really able to make a very beautiful demonstration of the mind before matter importance.
And, at any rate, my charts were very, very long. Finally I was asked to give a lecture at the Bureau of Standards when I was with Phelps Dodge in 1936 and my charts went all around the auditorium wall, they were so long. But it was fun, I could walk up and down these charts and do things. During that time, Allegra continually studied dance of people around the world. She kept tearing things out, anything she would read, anything she could find, pictures of people dancing in Africa, anything she could find, it was always in there. And she began to work out a history of the dance. Anything she could find about Biblically, the way they were dancing there, she had these on there. So she had when she was in the Balanchine Civic Repertoire Company, she said that, Lincoln Kirstein and Eddie Walberg who founded the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art, who asked me after that Marshall Field Show, asked me to come to Harvard to put on an exhibit and give talks at Harvard on my Dymaxion House, it really saw the beginning of its moving around quite rapidly, and Eddie Walberg and Lincoln Kerstein were the with John Walker who later became now he is the Head of the National Gallery, these three undergraduates, had started the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art and it was really a very good place, but these are two very wealthy boys Kerstein and Walberg. Kerstein and Walberg but particularly Kerstein financed the Balenchine School and this was all his doing.
And, so, Eddie Walberg and Lincoln Kerstein had collected enormous archives about dance around the world, and they gave their archives to the Museum of Modern Art, and at the Museum of Modern Art, they were just a collection they hadn’t been in any way sorted out. So Allegra was asked to come and she put together, organized the Archives of dance at the museum. She did this during the dancing season she said, all the dancers were so tired, they worked them so hard physically, they really had nothing left over for intellectual interests, and, but she was not happy with it, so then she began doing both the dance and organizing these archives whenever she had any time. She became fascinated that no dancer ever came to look at those archives. They really got into a special teacher and a special class, and really tended to be specializing. So she said, she really decided she would like to have some more intellectual development. She suddenly hungered for more of that, she plunged hard at that dance, so she decided to go to Bennington where she could graduate, and there were not many schools at that time where you could graduate in the dance, but she did.
And while she was there, they had not only these out work periods and so forth, but she had to do, really, in effect a masters’ thesis, and her thesis was of great fascination. She, in her out periods, would work with motion picture companies in New York, and she, her thesis was on the future of the dance in moving pictures and in television which was to come. Everybody knew that they already had it in England, but it was not operating in America, but she felt these were the two very important mediums and the future of the dance in the television and TV. and documentaries in general, from the viewpoint of the dancer, and not from the viewpoint of the entrepreneur or the exploiters of the dance, or from the moving pictures viewpoint. But from the viewpoint of the dancer, what the dancer wanted to do. What how did the dancer really communicate in these kind of mediums and so forth.
So, in doing that thesis, she said, and those of you who are anthropologists then begin to be very interested in what she began to turn up, because all the anthropologists became really fascinated with what Allegra turned here. She said that all life, all biological life, when in perplexity, in fear, would congeal, and all these animals, creatures, just they are beautifully camouflaged in nature, and they just don’t see them there. And she said, so, there was so much perplexity and so much fundamental fear, that they were in this state a great deal of the time. But she said, the only thing, then, that would make them move, is an overriding force to that of fear. And she said there would only be two. One would be hunger, and the other the procreative urge.
So she then was developing this concept of the procreative urge or the hunger then gets into the concept of early man before he has evolved his much, any languages or anything. He’s got a little tribe and they’re very hungry, and they are looking for some food. Now she said, they’ll come then to, here’s a if you have spent anytime in the wilderness, it is a very extraordinary matter that you know when you see the trees waving all around, if there is an animal, the motion is different from a tree, and you realize, really quite intuitively, you suddenly realize that something else is going on here other than tree. There is the presence of some living creature. And if it is a human being you are terribly aware of that. Their motions are very different from the other creatures. So that, every once in a while, human beings in the wilderness realize there is another human being there, and it couldn’t be their family their family is back over here, and so they this is a very bewildering thing because they find human beings tend to be very dangerous. Because they are scared to and so forth, so both these, the other one becomes aware, and they are way two hilltops apart, so they freeze, and they are just lying there for a long time. But then one of the hunger of his tribe, and his own hunger is very, very great. Finally his hunger is so great that it could be that this other man is a hunter and he might really know where there is some food, not a hunter but whatever it is, he might know where there is some food, so he decides to move, and tries to say “Do you know where there is some food?”, “I want food.”
Now, she said, this brings you to two kinds of human beings two lives of humans on our planet. She said, there are the people who live, they are the agrarian people, they’re up to the south and the hunters are pretty much to the north, where the meat spoiled in the hot country but in the colder country it would keep better, so that the hunting prevails in the north, and the agrarian to the south. So she said that if you were of the cold and the hunting world, and you wanted then, to talk about something to eat, you would talk about, you would really do because the hunter mimicked the animals, and they really learned how to do what the animals so they mimicked the animal that they would like to have that they could eat, and so the other person signals back, “Yeah” and so forth, and makes the same signal, and this way, and off they go. So the tribe is saved.
Now, if it were in a country where, not hunters, if they were agrarian, then the signaling the tree stands there, and you would like to then, the wheat and the rice wave like this and so forth, so that you would dance with your top. She said all the dancers in the world dance either with their bottoms or their tops there are absolutely prevalent the bottom-type dancers of what you find very much to the northern part of our planet, as to the pre-traveling days, and people who dance primarily with their tops and it gets into tongue dancing even (Bucky demonstrates this for us). With the clicks and so forth. So, that seems very interesting. So then we find the tribe gets saved by virtue of the effective communication, and food is found, and everybody feels pretty good about this. This goes on time and again because you just don’t know where the food is. There is no store to go to. It is a continual search. And this happens time and again that you communicate about the food at a distance, so finally the tribe is very used to the idea that, this is what you do when you are in trouble about food. If you see some strangers, how do you act. So they begin, then, to teach everybody in the tribe how you act because the tribe is often hungry like this. So everybody is learning how to do these kind of acts.
Meantime, there is a man sitting there, one of the tribesmen has broken a leg, or whatever it is, and he starts spontaneously making scratching pictures of what they are doing. He tends to like to scratch on a stone, or he may scratch on a piece of bark, and he begins, then, to represent how the animal runs and so forth, doing this. So then it turns out that the chieftain finds that this is very good representation, and this can be sent much greater distance with a messenger, so one way or another, communication about needs like this reaches greater distance and lasts longer, because the point is the dance is so ephemeral you have to do it all over again, but you’ve got it now memorialized and you don’t have to keep doing that all the time, you’ve got the picture of it. So she has, then, gradual obsolescence of this way of communicating, yielding to the graphic medium which reaches much greater distances, and is not ephemeral. It lasts. So this is the quality of greater distance and greater lasting. However, the tribe doesn’t know that, that the chieftain is being successful with this thing, they don’t know really it is a very gradual thing that it begins to replace it is very, very slow obsolescence, so they keep on learning to do this, and gradually the chieftain is operating a different way about the problems of getting the food and where it is coming from, but the tribe has been learning to do this, and they have been doing it from generation to generation, so they keep on doing it, and then they say “Why are we doing it?” Well it was something to do with the tribe being saved, so it gets to be really a mystical matter, so that this is what you do, gets to be very symbolic we are talking about. These are the things you do, there is a ritual that goes along and this will bring succor from some great understanding God. So the mystical connotation begins to develop into what so as we have then people who were hunters yesterday, because man had to hunt, or otherwise he would be starving, but then they don’t have to hunt anymore but they keep on hunting, and they may wear red coats and do it on horses, whatever it is.
She sees then, things that human beings do becoming really obsolete as a necessity but carried on for other reasons, where it is considered sort of fun, or it is a habit, and maybe it is a symbol of prestige or somehow or another is a struggle of life they carry it on for other reasons. So, she then said, we would like to see, we can see this thing, then going on. She has the dance then carrying on in two different kinds of ways. One was, then, I said, for procreative urge, and the other was for food. I have taken care of the food part.
The procreative one, we get very much the Chieftain and the female really doing things selectively, and the excitation you get with the birds, there are many Allegra made enormous studies of the different creatures and the mating dances that go on, and what goes on very spontaneously as human beings under various conditions like this, so she has the one that gets to be almost a theater where the male, the mating kind of dance, or excitation that relates to the chieftain who everybody decides he is a God and he needs to reproduce, and they have all kinds of ways to try to entice him to reproduce. And, that one you can understand.
Part 15
Now, Allegra then having introduced a, because she started off by saying the only way we’re going to be able to make any prognostication about the future of the dance is to find out what the function of the dance is. So she had to go before it is called dance at all. But it did have a functional origin that has long, long, long ago been lost. And out of it comes graphology, all the ideographic and so forth very, very much are out of this kind of gesturing.
So, she said, then, thinking about the future of the dance, and the moving pictures, and the television, she said I we now have, the moving picture came along. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford also had some moving pictures cameras of their own because they were very wealthy and they liked having them, and very luckily because they made the only no there are two they made some very good footage of Pavlova, and Pavlova, then, became the first of the great dancers to be actually have any documentary of her. Her brother also made some footage in Paris, but it was rather poor compared but the best is what Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford made themselves as amateurs. But this was the beginning of very great change where whatever the dance did actually died with the dancer. Suddenly the dancing could carry on. Just like a Caruso’s voice suddenly goes on.
And, so she said, this is different, because now, this is a lasting quality. At first it was utterly ephemeral, but now suddenly the dance can last. Then she said, if it gets on the television, going 186,000 miles a second and we suddenly, then, have it able to go, as a message, incredible distances, between planets, and it can last. So suddenly it was a very new quality of this kind of communication, so she said, supposing you were really trying to communicate. Now we really get, then, to scientists trying to communicate to other planets. Allegra says, she as a dancer is pretty sure that if you really wanted to communicate to other planets you’d better do that, have the dancers do it and not have the scientists trying to make up some kind of nonsense alphabets, or dots and dashes.
And, at any rate, she said, “I feel that”, she used to tell me this long, long ago, “that if there ever came a time with a complete impasse between Russia and the United States, she was sure, as a she could get on a television and talk to Russia as a dancer and things would come out alright. At any rate she saw that the dance might return to function. In other words it might become a Universal language, with all kinds of things breaking up with the sovereignties, the intrigue kind of mess, the dance might really be there again with the documentary. She’s done, since those days, Allegra Allegra is now the Head of the Department of Dance at the University of California, UCLA, but she is really the great dance anthropologist of the world and I am sure the absolutely leading dance historian, but she has traveled around all the world, and she has such a feeling, she really has danced with all the dancers in Africa and India really all around, and I’ve been around a good deal with her, and it is astonishing, but just dancing with the Greeks the Greeks couldn’t believe it, because she their best dancer suddenly found Allegra just she under she feels these things so, so deeply.
I thought I’d give you these two things, your space business, I want to really talk about that, and the great mysteries of the things it does to us, you’re quite right in bringing up the subject, and then thinking about, then, the dancer, versus the space this way, in India I have been so moved by the oldest of the Indian people India where we get to the south India, where the people came, they were water people, and there are two places in India on the water, that are incredibly incredible acts of humanity.
Majabali Puram in the southeast and in Bombay, the, called the Elephanta the Elephanta caves. In both instances we have people who take a whole mountain of rock. It is a mountain. At Elephanta, they were designed, then, it was a man made cave, but in designing the cave you design it for all the things that are going to be in it, so they are all part of the same rock, so they are lovely columns in the designs, if you were, and it is just the same as one solid piece of rock. You just left that rock there, and then they come, to the great niches, and within the niches all the extraordinary shivas and so forth incredibly beautiful things! Imagine the Portuguese soldiers getting in there and using it for a shooting range! Some horrible things like that happened but, when you see the work that has been done there, it is something that must have taken a thousands years with the kind of tools you had, but nobody knows when it was done. And it looks as though it had been designed by one man and executed in one day, it is absolutely so superbly, the integrity of it.
Now to the others in Majabali Puram in the southeast and they’ve taken the same rock mountain it was a quite lovely granite and they’ve gone the other way. They cut it down and left they’ve got standing temples, and elephants and everything. It is a whole temple complex of a number of buildings, all out of one piece of rock. And then they even get into lacy rock, where the rock is seemingly detached in rings and so forth. Again designed by one man in one day. It is incredibly beautiful. This seemed to be the Dravidian and they really are the water people. The Majabali (Maja big; Bali the Bali island; and Puram city, it is the place Puram. It is the big Bali Place.) And I think these are the same water people exactly, and I’m able to really show that in many ways of the boats and in southwest in the Karave you will find the exactly the same kind of little valleys is kingdom after kingdom, and each kingdom has little walls and special kinds of gates, and all the gates have something you see much in the Orient later on, that there is a little roof over the gate so it keeps it you know, the rotting at the top of a wall. So as you come to the gate there is a roof this way as you are going through, coming out at you and going both ways, and a ridge pole set of tilings and stones.
The you see the Bali, the Balinese in Southeast India there, but I want you then, here is the extroverting and there is an introverting. And I’m sure the same people did it. I’m sure the same water people.
But, to do with your space, it is incredibly moving, and think of the stimulation there must have been in the minds of people working on that for the thousands of years, the whole thing, and their conceptioning and inspiration. There are many, many other cave things in India but they are much later, and they are Buddhist, and they changed all kinds of things. This is a magnificent conceptioning of some very early men.
There is no way for us to really make comparative statements, because we really don’t know, but certainly in my own childhood, I really did feel myself I felt so my family seemed to have I felt that more love seemed to be freely manifest, love seemed to be terribly spontaneous, and I felt things were more formal with my other little friends sometimes, but actually love is manifest in so many different ways that you know the way that it is being expressed by your mother, and the other mother in expressing it to her child, may express it in a really different way, so there is no way for a little kid to know, but certainly, through the most, the most really very difficult times in my life, nothing carried me out like my sense of the power of love that I had felt. I knew there really was this power. Love seemed to be something so very, very big. And, I’ve always felt, and then I had this, when I really questioned myself, the absolute faith in the Great Intellect operating, that other people are not marking your papers, you get marked elsewhere, so you really do do the thing your way.
I’m, I can’t get over having had this experience with you. It’s been a very extraordinary thing that has happened. It’s an extraordinary thing there is a video, extraordinary that our times are such that I suddenly find myself invited to Philadelphia, and here we are from many places really, and very, incredibly stirring times, and as we talk in here the news outside doesn’t mean anything right now, really. I hope you’ve really gotten into that frame of mind with me. And, it’s just the opposite of really feeling terribly important. But that everything is important, that’s all.