Very Good Paperback New St Martins Press, 1983. First edition, first printing, 1983. Oversize softcover generously illustrated throughout in black and white in photographs and diagrams. Some light cover wear, a little more to the edges, firm binding with uncreased spine, clean pages, no names or other markings.. First Edition. Soft Cover. Very Good. 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall.
Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor.
Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres.
Buckminster Fuller was the second president of Mensa from 1974 to 1983.
He takes an oath to save his life which enables the 50 years of his work from that moment in 1927, like a man born naked, like a brain aware, like the design function "I then found myself saying, "I am going to commit myself completely to the wisdom of God and to realization only of the advantages for all humanity potentially existent in what life has already taught and may as yet teach me."
A lot of it resonates, "so we-my wife and family-have for 56 years realized a series of miracles that occur just when I need something, but not until the absolutely last second" (xxvii), like the time in my own young daughter's life when she left her glasses on the beach with her clothes and swam all day until the tide came up which swept it all away, and later, when the beach was utterly clear, remembered and came in look with dismay. So we went over to where we thought the spot was and prayed. This has happened a hundred times in different ways. Prayed and looked when she saw a glint of gold in the sand and with her hand pulled out the glasses. Do you remember that Elizabeth? She remembers, but doesn't believe. But Bucky Fuller says, " it is these...unsolicited, uncontrived, spontaneous, short-engagement employments...I have classified for you as the "miracles," always unforeseeable-in-advance, which have financed or implemented my technical initiatives."
His notion of the "final examination" isn't science fiction, a piece of Doris Lessing from her Canopus series, "to continue in Universe as an extraordinary thinking faculty" (xxi), "therefore the fact that we are designed to be born naked, helpless, and ignorant is, I feel, a very important matter" (xvii). His attendance upon the nature of the global is moving. He goes from working among men who spit and curse in 100 words to awareness of this fluid communication in which we move, in the "omni-interregenerative Universe itself" (xiii) where every thing is regenerative, redeemable. Again the most important fact is that every human being is born naked, "all humans have always been born naked, completely helpless for months, beautifully equipped but with no experience, therefore absolutely ignorant" (xvi). He calls it an important design fact. I call it a universal particular everyone holds in common and a basis for communication. Did you come wearing galoshes, sitting on a footstool? Then get on with the ego-cide. He wants you free of your material needs in extraordinary mind. Hde and Chuang Tzu http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....
Along with being born naked, another universal is that "no one has ever seen or in any way directly sensed anything outside the brain. The brain is our smell-, touch-, sound-, and image-ination tele-set...has been for all childhood so faithful that we humans soon become convinced that we are sensing directly outside ourselves, whereas the fact is that no one has ever seen or heard or felt or smelt outside themselves" (xxiv).
Waking in the middle of the night to read Inventions the way I read Deaths and Entrances and Twenty-five Poems (Dylan Thomas) and The Necessary Angel (Wallace Stevens), accounts given elsewhere, full of comprehension, things I have not been able to read before, especially, in this case, Introduction: Guinea Pig B*, the last thing he finished before his death, Bucky Fuller's syntax flows downhill and stretches out, only comparable to a Faulkner sentence. His renunciation of profit and peer and the concept of "eogcide," "I see the hydrogen atom doesn't have to earn a living before behaving like a hydrogen atom" (xxv), "if we are any good at problem-solving, we don't come to utopia, we come to more difficult problems to solve" (xxiii). What these problems are surely we will come to know.
If it comes to being born naked, walking naked and leaving without any dress but our choices and character then consider the Insight Statutes http://insightstatutes.blogspot.com/