Endless Knots

"Bucky and [really] Me" - and Ed Hauben and Jeff Stamps on Feb 2

Unless we're blizzard-ed out on Wed, Feb 2, Jeff, Ed, and I will be the post-performance discussion folks following "R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE" at the A.R.T. in Cambridge.

Specific focus is Margaret Fuller's influence on Bucky - but I would never have met Bucky had it not been for Ed, who worked with Bucky in New York and Carbondale, and Jeff (who introduced me to Ed), whose work, like that of so many others, has been profoundly influenced by the man whose self-description included this very sensible idea: "I Seem to Be a Verb."

Annie DiMario, production dramaturg, will lead the discussion.

Bucky on Brattle

Just up the street from Brattle House, where Margaret Fuller lived with her parents for a short time (known to us as the Cambridge Center for Adult Education), her grand-nephew is holding forth. "R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe" is the one-iconoclast/one-genius show at the A.R.T. (runs through Feb 5).

If you're wondering what to do with your life, see this show. It's all-Bucky, 100 "topics," and completely engrossing. He thought about the history of everything, how stupid it was to call it sunrise (that's seeing things from precisely the wrong perspective); and how love is primary, primordial, pervasive.

Staging is terrific--an old-fashioned steel table, an overhead projector with transparencies, a big roll of white paper that Bucky pulls across the desk (and stage), a blackboard, a Victrola, a screen...a pen, a high-back wooden chair, family photos, and, of course, artifacts from Bucky's design science revolution. At the end, there's the night sky.

For those who know Bucky's work, you'll likely find yourself nodding at many points; you may even hear yourself completing certain sentences. Hats off to D.W. Jacobs, who wrote the play, who inhaled and then exhaled Bucky for the rest of us to enjoy and learn again.

Having listened to Bucky for many hours, I watched the show with my inner Buckolator on. Does he sound like him? Look like him? Gesture like him? Enough, Tom Derrah, who plays Bucky, more than enough. Very well done. Impersonation is tougher than characterization, I think, and Derrah, tasked with doing both, is definitely very Bucky-ish. The single simple improvement that could be made, to my mind? Walk more like a penguin. Derrah-Bucky has a more graceful gait than Bucky- Bucky. Quibble quibble.

Loved it. And then it was capped off with the second in the after-play "Bucky and Me" conversations, on the night we saw it with Allegra Fuller Snyder, Bucky and Anne's (Hewlett) daughter, who answered questions from the audience (she also appeared in home movies during the play--dancing at about age 2; she went on to be professor of Dance and Dance Ethnography at UCLA). Among the questions, the usual one for the children of famous people: what was dinner like in Fuller household? Funny, she said...

Go. Maybe twice. The monologue and visuals will stay with you, asking questions long after the performance is over.

And speaking of Bucky and me, I repost this picture from 1977, taken at our house on the night Bucky came to dinner. The newspaper folded on his lap? Boston Globe, Feb 8, 1977, my cover story in Focus (the old Ideas section), "Bucky: The Prophet Returns." He inscribed it; I framed it.

 

Margaret's memorial service, a bit delayed

How many people show up at a memorial service, say, 160 years after the person's death when it's a Sunday in the middle of July and the temperature is 95? In the case of Margaret Fuller, a chapel-full, as per yesterday at Mount Auburn's Bigelow Chapel, perhaps as many as 75 (sorry, I failed to count).

The Rev. Rosemarie Smurzynski led the service, giving the eulogy (please publish it, Rosemarie), which was followed by Jessa Piaia, portraying Margaret and reading a sampling of Margaret's premonitions about her death (there were many; Jessa read from a letter Margaret had written to her mother), and original "rememberances" written by her contemporaries: Emerson (Wendell Refior), Thoreau (Richard Smith), James Freeman Clarke (Rob Velella), Elizabeth Peabody (Dorothy Emerson), and Julia Ward Howe (Deb Goss).

From the chapel, we walked to the Fuller Family Plot at the cemetery, where I made  brief remarks,* read the cenotaph, and encouraged people to step forward, take a snapdragon, bouquets of which my husband, Jeff Stamps, and I had carried from the chapel in baskets, to say a few words about Margaret. Many came forward, including one of Margaret's descendants and her namesake, Margaret Fuller. Rob Velella placed a wreath at the cenotaph that Fuller's family had erected in her memory in 1854.

Jeff and I took two snapdragons and placed them on the marker for Bucky and Anne Fuller's graves, about twenty feet away.

Many snapped pictures during the service and at the plot. Please post them, friends, or send some to me and I'll post them here.

*I can't recall exactly what I said but here's the gist:

Margaret liked to walk and she also liked to push people to their limits so the long walk from the chapel to the plot in the terrible heat was fitting. (I then read the text of the cenotaph--above). After people had placed the flowers, I noted that it's customary among her biographers and admirers to say that Margaret's life was cut too short, that she should have lived longer than to 40. But, perhaps, she had lived just the right number of years because here we were, 200 years after her birth, dozens of us, still celebrating her life and works. And perhaps 200 years from now, when she will be 400, there will be a similar number gathered to honor her remarkable spirit which fills the sky.

Margaret Fuller Memorial Service - Sun, July 18 - 160 years after fact

 
Margaret Fuller, along with her husband and young son, died in a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island, NY, on July 19, 1850. The Rev. Rosemarie Smurzynski, a student of Margaret's life and a member of the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial committee, had the brainstorm to conduct a proper memorial service for her at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where her memorial stone stands in the midst of the Fuller family plot. I thought it was a brilliant idea, and barring unforeseen circumstances, which seem to be my lot at the moment, will be part of the group, speaking a few words at the actual plot. Here's the press release.

This Sunday, July 18th, at 12:30 there will be a memorial service in commermoration of the life and legacy of Margaret Fuller Ossoli at Mount Auburn Cemetery, 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA.  Actors will appear in costume to pay tribute to this significant woman.  The doors of Mount Auburn’s Bigelow Chapel will open for a reception at 12:30.  Bree Harvey, Director of Education and Visitor Services for the cemetery, will welcome guests promptly at 1:00 P.M.   Rev. Rosemarie Smurzynski will lead the Memorial Service and Eric Huenneke will provide the music.  After the service, participants will walk to the Fuller family lot for a wreath-laying ceremony at 2:00 PM.

The actors participating in the program are as follows: Jessa Piaia as Margaret Fuller, Wendell Refior as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rob Velella as James Freeman Clarke, Dorothy Emerson as Elizabeth Peabody, Richard Smith as Henry David Thoreau, and Deborah Goss as Julia Ward Howe.

This event is part of the Bicentennial’s Conversations Series, supported by a grant from Mass Humanities and modeled after the “Conversations” Margaret Fuller offered for women (and later men) in Boston in the late 1830s and early 1840s.  It is co-sponsored by the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee and the Friends of Mount Auburn and is part of a year-long series of events celebrating Margaret Fuller’s life and work.  This event is FREE and open to the public.

Morning at Mount Auburn with Margaret and the Fullerenes - Sun May 23 8AM

Sunday, May 23, 2010, 8:00 A.M. 

Begin Margaret Fuller's 200th birthday with the Fullerenes, admirers of Margaret Fuller and her grand-nephew Bucky Fuller, for our annual birthday meeting at her memorial in Mount Auburn Cemetery. As per tradition, we'll mark the dawn of Margaret's life with music provided by John Halamka on his Shakuhachi (Japanese flute) and with brief remarks by me, who counts both Fullers as inspirations.

Procession begins at 7:45 from Mount Auburn Cemetery parking lot; ceremony at 8 at Fuller Family plot, Pyrola Lane.

The Persuasion 75

Yet after I hung up, I thought and thought and thought and, by the time Tonin came back that night, something had clicked. Then when we talked about it together, something clicked for both of us.

“World Game. Think about it,” Tonin said. “That it’s a game makes people want to play. It’s straightaway brilliant.”

In my case, I was more intrigued with Fuller’s story—an architect without credentials who wrote poetry and built bubbles of love so big we could see them from the sky.

We’d been searching for several years now for something that made sense, at least had some of the compulsion of the anti-war movement. We weren’t certain that we wanted to pick up overnight and speed back to New York but we were sufficiently infected with Teddy’s enthusiasm to want to learn more.

Already a Fuller fan, Tonin was more than happy to update his knowledge. And so the following week, we hopped into the fire engine and drove the fifty miles to the cavernous public library in Knoxville where we found a mountain of material about Buckminster Fuller. It appeared that his adherents were widely distributed.

We discovered that Fuller had written more than a dozen books; countless pictures had been taken of him and his zany inventions; for the past 15 years, he’d self-published bulletins of the World Design Science Institute, also his creation, and the Knoxville Public Library had copies of them all. Just the "chronofile" of his life was fifty pages long.

—“The Persuasion,” p. 75

The Persuasion 74

“We’re playing a game to redistribute the world’s resources so that everyone has enough.”

He took a breath and I saw the small door to gaining some context.

“I don’t get how it’s a game. Is there a board with players or what?”

Teddy laughed. The “board,” such as it was, comprised a huge floor map of the world the size of a basketball court. “It’s the Fuller Projection,” Teddy said, “not the stupid Mercator Projection, which really distorts the land mass relative to the size of the ocean.” I’d never thought whether those great big maps of the world with their bumpy mountains that hung on our elementary classroom walls were stupid, distorted or otherwise.

“OK.” Fuller had his own projection. “So what about the players?”

Teddy didn’t seem to hear my skepticism, going on with more detail than I could absorb: Players took on the roles of governments, corporations, NGOs, and religions; they assumed their proper places on the map, equipped with the resources they had. Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America had most of the people and most of the natural resources. “We’re playing World Game all the time,” Teddy said, “whether we know it or not.” He said that everyone had common responsibility for the whole thing and that when you played it, you got to see what was involved “in making the world work, all of it. It’s really intense.”

He was very intense, very emphatic, far more certain than Teddy had ever sounded before and I was absolutely certain that I couldn’t comprehend much of what Teddy was talking about.

—“The Persuasion,” p. 74

The Persuasion 73

“Call Teddy,” said the note in Tonin’s handwriting taped to our front door.

Yelling for him (I thought he might be out back in the garden) and getting no reply, I scooped up a handful of coins that we kept in a mason jar on the bureau for just this purpose and headed to the payphone outside the dining hall. I dialed Teddy’s number, which I’d known by heart since I was old enough to use a phone. His exuberant hello was clue that something very exciting was happening in New York, the very city we’d left two years earlier because nothing was going on.

“We have the capacity to provide for the material needs of everyone on the planet by 1980,” Teddy squealed into the phone.

He’d just finished his first week in a month-long seminar with “Bucky, you know, Bucky.” Right, I said, Fuller, the one with the domes.

He was talking so fast that he sounded like he was calling a horse race: He was attending Fuller’s World Game seminar in New York, which he’d heard about in advance from Marvin Gable, another friend, who was studying with Fuller at Southern Illinois University where he’d finally gotten an institute devoted to his work in Carbondale. I was losing track of which who “he” referred to but that hardly mattered as Teddy quickly change the topic to ask if it were true that I was with “that guy Tonin,” whom he’d met during those first few weeks at Columbia and did I remember that Tonin had met Marvin in 1968 when the latter was traveling through Paris, and, naturally, I, Mariana, knew Marvin because of course I remembered that Red Bird had met him in London and when Teddy said he wanted to attend the seminar, Marvin suggested that Teddy write directly to Fuller, who answered back immediately, inviting him to join the crew producing the event, which Teddy was now doing as floor-manager for the group of thirty invited to spend the month with Fuller.

—“The Persuasion,” p. 73

The Persuasion 72

Three days later, we had moved into a two-room shack with a wood stove and an outhouse on a farm with a hundred and fifty other people in the Smoky Mountains. It was Mendocino without the weed and with a purpose, in this case, a little Utopia for its inhabitants. Buckets full of brown rice replaced politics, thanks to Red Bird, who'd also fled the west coast after Ernest's suicide.

By the time we arrived, she’d already affiliated with David, the farmer whom the community had bought its land from, and, who, most astonishingly, was unmarried, not even divorced. “I think he might be the last one,” she said by way of introduction. “You’ve gotta tell me honestly what you think.” 

As fussy as Red Bird was about where she bought her clothes and which brand of marinated artichoke hearts was acceptable, she could be startlingly easy-going when it came to her day-to-day activities. She found it satisfying to plant and pick and cook. Tonin and I meanwhile scavenged everyone’s bookshelves for something more substantial to read than Mother Planet News and early drafts of Spiritual Adulting. Our communards in Tennessee were equally concerned about the appalling state of global affairs but their approach was considerably grainier than ours.

Respite came a month later with a call from my grammar school friend, Teddy. I’d just come back from a day at the local newspaper in town near where I had a part-time job, wedging fillers into lines of lead that the typesetter missed.

—“The Persuasion,” p. 72

The Persuasion 71

It was a day like any other, up early to weed and pick, breakfast at nine, back to the fields, lunch at one, a drive into town for supplies, dinner at seven, and while we were cleaning up, the phone rang.

Red Bird, screaming words I couldn’t make sense of. I heard “Ernest” and “draft board” and “rifle.” “Birdie, calm down, slower, honey, calm down.” It took several sobs before we could understand that she’d had a call from Ernest’s mother. After years of haggling with Selective Service, Ernest had learned that they finally denied his conscientious-objector status. He’d received notice that morning to report the following week for active duty in Vietnam. He’d shot himself in the head at noon with his father’s hunting rifle.

When I look back today on those hours and days after Ernest’s death, I wonder that Tonin and I didn’t split right then, that he didn’t take his life, too. We wept, walked in the woods, wrote long letters to Ernest. We screamed at each other and at ourselves, hurling horrid insults that only the torment of sudden needless death begets.

“You never do anything for anyone,” I bellowed at my generous husband, who replied with the sound of a wounded animal.

“Ungrateful bitch,” he lobbed back at me, his agony searing my gaping wound.

We accused each other of not paying enough attention to Ernest after moving up north, of not doing anything after noticing that he was unstable, and when enough strikes had been met with counterstrikes, we wept together, Tonin berating himself for not using his money to hire Ernest an even better lawyer, me for not forcing him.

Most disabling was the guilt we shared with our peers: We hadn’t ended the war or reformed the system that caused brilliant, sweet, young frail men like Ernest to put bullets through their beautiful brains.

We did nothing on the farm and everyone respected our withdrawal. If I needed to account for how long it took us to resurface as functioning people, I couldn’t. Ernest’s death buried many details, including eventually our talking about it. Perhaps it was a month, maybe two, but one day Tonin said, “If we don’t get out of here, you’re never getting a decent byline and I’m never building anything.”

—“The Persuasion,” p. 71