Endless Knots

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

The Persuasion 70 (Margaret speaks)

Margaret Intercession 1

I am growing impatient, waiting for Mariana’s soul to mature suitably to take upon this duty. She has, so far as I can discern from this remove, solved the problem of Love, having experimented with different numerators and denominators. She has found early what I could not, an opposite who holds her attention fast, whose mind is large enough to keep hers intrigued, and of greater import, a being with whom electric current runs left and right so as to produce a They and a She and a He, each full, whole, beyond its capacity a moment before. Would that she knew it!

This is what I agonized so to express and still now, a century and a half later, they banish me to the prison, yes, it feels such, the confines of Feminism. Of course! What Woman is not a Feminist! “I love most to be a woman,” I wrote, and meant.

Now I reside in a greater prison still, on the reverse of life, where I can identify the quotidien, examine the Progression of Existence, what you name life, see the patches sewn to style this Mariana, this young woman whom I’ve chosen as my pen yet I am unable to bathe with her in books, thought, and imaginations. The Twenty-First Century is nigh and what I scribed in 1845 must for the sake of Humankind’s Future, receive renovation, rejuvenation.

Beyond the body, my boundaries are without limit and with great boundary. If only I could dial Mariana on her telephonic device—how I love that simple contraption, recalculating the physics of communication!—and discuss, as she does at extensive length with her soul mate Red Bird, this endeavor in specific.

Instead, I dwell on the far side of earthly movement and endure the inching of time as Mariana becomes accustomed to her adult self, assembles her life community, commits her heart to what evidently is a Great Love, until she finally dons the cloak in which she will convey Woman in the 21st Century.

Would that I knew how to hold the wand to anoint her! Would that this greatest undertaking find its womb! Would that It be born!

—“The Persuasion,” p. 70

The Persuasion 69

The next morning, we loaded Tonin’s drafting table and my big desk, which we’d dismantled and brought with us from New York, into the fire engine with him managing the placement of each item in relationship to all the rest.

Packing a vehicle was, for Tonin, a lengthy process I’d first observed at Pale Brook that required my saying very little, preferably nothing. After many hours and when the fire engine’s interior looked like it had been assembled from a fine blueprint, Tonin hopped into the driver’s seat and we headed north to Sonoma County.

There we moved in with Treasure, my roommate at Barnard who’d changed her name from Donna after our sophomore year. Treasure was a founding member of a commune that raised organic garlic.

Everyone was focused on the land, even those who hadn’t put a coherent sentence together in several years, people like Jimbo, whose vocabulary was limited to a few phrases, like, “Far out, man,” and “I’m stoked,” which may have explained his problems with clear articulation. Life revolved around the earth's needs: planting, watering, harvesting, weeding. We rotated the chores from cleaning the bathrooms to turning the compost to cooking the meals. Naturally, we had the dish washing slacker, who managed to finish the dishes but avoid the greasy pan, and the laughable grocery shopper, who skipped a third of the list with excuses—“Hey, sorry, man, I didn’t know that baking soda was different from baking powder—they’re both for baking, right?”

Even while some people acted more like householders than others, overall we lived in the kind of peace typically reserved for our dreams, where conflicts fly by on bananas or get pulverized in a blender.

--“The Persuasion,” p. 69

The Persuasion 68

In spite of Ernest’s moments of withdrawal, those first few months in San Francisco were idyllic but of course they didn’t last. The fractured Movement was imploding even further. Our underground newspaper met sudden death when the male founders sold pornographic pictures “to raise money for printing costs” and, in one electrifying meeting, all the women, including me, quit, leaving no one to put out the paper.

And much as Tonin enjoyed seeing regular paychecks and not touching his trust fund, pumping gas and waiting tables had very little staying power and, after the cops burst through the teen crash pad door with guns drawn and hauled the 14-year-olds off to jail, he had enough of counseling.

We talked about whether to move on or not more frequently than we ate. We walked from the Mission to Golden Gate Park, from the Legion of Honor to the Embarcadero discussing it. We talked about it on the trolley from one end of Market Street to another. 

In the most haphazard of ways (we made our final decision the night before) and for the flimsiest of reasons (our upstairs neighbors, the theatre folk, were moving out), we impulsively decided to leave.

--“The Persuasion,” p. 68

The Persuasion 67

On reflection, it all sounds so sane, but there was another quality to Ernest that sat in the passenger seat, sometimes taking over as driver, a sadness, a melancholy I’d never lived with before. I remember coming into the apartment one day, burbling because the new issue of the paper had just come out and I had the lead story. Ernest was sitting in the kitchen, a cup of tea and a piece of toast untouched on the Formica table, his hands in his lap, his head down. His body shivered when I walked into the room, but he didn’t say anything, continued to look down.

“Ern, what’s wrong?” I said.

He shrugged, at least I thought I saw him shrug before he got up from the table and went into his corner in the parlor. I followed him and found him lying on his bed, face down.

“Ern, what’s wrong, sweetie?” I sat on the edge of the bed and put my hand on his back.

“Sorry, Mari,” he said, calling me by the nickname that he alone used, and speaking in such a soft voice that I had to lean in. “Sorry. Can’t talk. Will be better later. Don’t worry. Please. Let me be.”

Today, we would have known that Ernest was depressed, that he needed treatment, perhaps medication, that hiding in one’s room face down and refusing to talk to one’s closest friends was not normal, that such behavior required attention, that friends shouldn’t ever go away when sent. We didn’t know any of this then, had no frame of reference for what to do, and our lack of wisdom would live with us as a sad ghost forever.

--“The Persuasion,” p. 67

The Persuasion 66 (Wine, water, and war)

Ernest’s shy giggle filled the room and we spent that evening (and many more) making dinner together, at the end of which he often asked not for more wine but for more wine glasses.

“You think our glasses are dirty?” Tonin said the first time he asked.

“No, I want to play you a concert.”

We gathered all the wine glasses we could find, including a half-dozen dirty ones scattered around the apartment, a few sedimentary drops staining their bowls. Ernest filled each with a different amount of water, dipped his finger tips, then slowly ran them along the rims. Every glass sounded a different note, another pitch, and soon he was moving fingers on both hands quickly, expertly, from one rim to another, releasing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” from wine, water, and war.

Two weeks later, Ernest gave up his room in Richmond and moved in with us.

Tonin partitioned off a small area in one of the front parlors, a cubbyhole that Ernest kept extremely tidy, rarely a book or paper out of place. He was a generous housemate,  cleaning up the kitchen, never taking the last drops of milk in the container, always calling to let us know if he were going to be late or staying somewhere else.

Ernest and Red Bird hit it off too, entering into a few weeks of sleeping together, then realizing that it was not romance that bound them but the reflected glow of our love for both of them, and, in an act of unusual maturity for those times, they managed to re-distance themselves without losing their friendship.

--“The Persuasion,” p. 66