Bucky: A Portrait of Buckminster Fuller

Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to make it economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do. It can only be accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological revolution.”

—Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

I had the extreme good fortune to know Bucky, to see him in action, and try to put his teachings into practice. He influenced and changed the direction of my life.

1970

I am in my early twenties, living in Tokyo, when someone sends me Stewart Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog. I order all of Bucky’s books and read them in my tiny tatami room. This futuristic city is designed to accommodate and service the needs of its teeming population and therefore seems like a good place to think about how to make the world work for everyone. In a world convinced that scarcity is the norm, Bucky is the first person I’ve ever heard who is certain the world holds abundance and that by employing design science we can raise the standard of living for everyone. Sitting in a temple in Kyoto, it occurs to me that Bucky may have taken the vow of the bodhisattva.

1972

 I visit my folks in Champaign, Illinois. I’ve been invited to a luncheon lecture at my mother’s Art Club. As the red Jell-O is being passed around, the din of silverware on china is hushed by a loud noise as the speaker bangs his shoe on the podium. It is Buckminster Fuller. “It’s 5 minutes to midnight! This is humanity’s final exam!” Shocked silence. Inwardly, I cheer, “Go Bucky, go!” Afterwards, I hurry up to meet the great man.

1975

In San Francisco, I sit around the kitchen table with a friend planning a series of events to be called “Guardians of the Planet.” Bucky Fuller, Jacques Cousteau, and Frederick Leboyer are on our wish list. We start with Bucky, but after hearing him speak, we went no further down on our list. 

1977

I arrange my life so I can work on events and films with Bucky; anything to be in his presence. During filming at Pajaro Dunes, Bucky walks along the beach. Suddenly he stops, stoops down, and scoops up a handful of white foam from the surf. “Dear boy, you don’t think Nature uses pi when she creates these magnificent bubbles?”

1978

I’ve had the good fortune of sharing a July 12th birthday with Bucky. We were able to celebrate it together a couple of times. Once was in Bali. He invites friends and colleagues to a mini-conference he calls Campuan (the meeting of two rivers) to share global or universal experiences. Attendees include Kenneth Clarke, Werner Erhard, Lim Chong Keat, Nina Rockefeller, Arie Smit, Shirley Sharkey, and others. 

I attend as a “junior varsity” member and tape record the event. At the birthday party, the Balinese surprise Bucky with a bamboo dome, blessings, flowers, and offerings, which they present in his honor. Bucky loves the Balinese. He says they exemplify natural cooperation and, like the crew of a sailing ship, spontaneously know what to do. This suggests to me a natural knowing and interconnectedness: something Bucky and the Balinese have tapped into.

—

“When we speak of the integrity of the individual, we speak of that which life has taught the individual by direct experience… It was [this] realization that brought the author to reorganize his life to discover what, if anything, could the little, penniless, unknown individual, be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that would be inherently impossible for the great nations or great corporate enterprises to do.” 

—Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

—

When we return from Bali, a group of friends hosts a dinner for Bucky. After dinner, Neal Rogin and I perform a shadow play we wrote for Bucky. I make a shadow puppet that in silhouette looks like him. As I recall, the story takes place in heaven as a being is about to be sent down to Earth on a mission to save the planet. Bucky sits in a lawn chair, surrounded by young people, totally transfixed by the shadow play. Then Morgan Smith sings a song she had written for him called “Great Grandfather,” which expresses for all of us our deep affection for Bucky. He doesn’t say anything, but I can see tears well up behind his thick glasses.

One beautiful October, as the leaves change to red and yellow, I visit Bucky in Maine. He has just returned from a stint in the hospital and is anxious to get his beloved sailboat “Intuition” back into the water. We film him sailing around his house on Bear Island for an interspecies communication film called Dolphin. We watch in wonder as dolphins ride the bow wave, weaving in and out below us. “Beautiful, just beautiful. Nature wouldn’t have given the dolphin such a large brain unless she was doing something quite extraordinary with it.” This statement reflects my own understanding, and I spend the next couple years making films on dolphins, taking this message to the world.

1979

As a mentor and teacher, Bucky is inexhaustible. At dinner together he fills the tablecloth with drawings of tetrahedrons and tutors me in synergetic mathematics. I tell Bucky that I just don’t get it, but he persists, knowing that unless we all understand how to employ Nature’s principles, humanity will be doomed with its antiquated way of thinking about the earth’s resources.

1982

Even at 86, Bucky is still traveling around the world, speaking to an average of 2,500 people a day (He keeps track of these things). He is giving a big public lecture at the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Marin Civic Center just north of San Francisco. The event is sold out. I hadn’t planned to go, but at the last minute I do. It has been arranged that someone will drive Bucky back to his hotel after the lecture, but the young woman who had agreed to do it drops the ball and doesn’t show up because she heard that John Denver (Bucky’s friend), who she wants to meet, is not going to be there after all. 

When I learn this I go backstage to see if new plans have been made. Bucky isn’t in his dressing room. I find him tired, lost, and confused among theatre flats backstage. Bucky has given his all. Morgan and I take him to a restaurant in Sausalito for his favorite: steak and potatoes.  When his strength returns, he makes Morgan sing “Great Grandfather” a cappella! He doesn’t care that the restaurant is packed with people.

1983

I am with Bucky a few days before he dies a conscious death. His wife Ann is ill and goes into a coma. She has told Bucky she is afraid of going first, and so Bucky has promised her that he would go first and meet her on the other side. He sits with her, holds her hand, and then dies. She dies shortly thereafter. In Boston, I attend the double funeral ceremony in the country’s oldest cemetery (where I learn of Bucky’s great love for Ann. He had built the great Montreal dome—his Taj Mahal—for her.) Later when I tell friends about it, I keep having a kind of Freudian slip: I say I was in Boston at a “wedding,” because that’s how it felt to me.

2011

I am no longer a young man. Without knowing exactly when it happened, I’ve become an elder and find I have to step up to all that this entails. I think of Bucky, how he’d taken me under his wing, allowed me access, and mentored me. What an opportunity.

I meet 18-year-old Simon Olszewski in an Ayahuasca ceremony in the Peruvian Amazon. He comes from Australia and is interested in plant medicines and filmmaking. Unlike most teenagers I know, he is open and curious about everything, and ready to learn. He reminds me of me, and his generation will shape our future. I invite Simon to Bali to assist on a film I am making about Balinese “taksu” (divine inspiration). We pass where Bucky’s dome once stood, but it is no longer there. The insects, the rain, and sun have recycled it.

I re-read and remember Bucky and feel the magic is still there. With the example he set, I too continue to try to “see what the little man can do on the behalf of all humanity that the big corporations cannot do.”

Michael Wiese is a publisher and filmmaker. His company Michael Wiese Productions (mwp.com) has impacted filmmaking worldwide by publishing a line of over 200 “how-to” books on filmmaking and screenwriting that are used by all the major studios and in over 600 film courses around the globe. The company has launched a new imprint – Divine Arts (divineartsmedia.com) which publishes books on art, spirit and culture. Michael’s recent ‘personal journey’ documentaries include The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas (Tibet), The Shaman & Ayahuasca (Peru), and Living with Spirits (Bali).