Jet Stream

UNTITLED EPIC POEM ON THE HISTORY OF INDUSTRIALIZATION by R. Buckminster Fuller. 240 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

"God is a verb,

the most active,

connoting the vast harmonic

reordering of the universe

from unleashed chaos of energy."

Spinoza for Aquarians? No, just Architect R. Buckminster Fuller taking time out from designing, teaching, lecturing, pontificating and philosophizing to release his gas-filled balloon advertising the glories of technocracy.

For the poem, Fuller has transformed himself into a transitive verb, skimming furiously from the 17th century to that place where all architects hold large estates: tomorrow.

At 74, Fuller has constructed a work as idiosyncratic as his famous geodesic dome, an ego projection that seems at once flamboyant and sterile, like a pavilion at an Expo.

For all his sense of history, Fuller is an old man in a hurry. No idea interests him for more than a historical instant. He begins--and stays--far aloft, in a jet's-eye view of a world where the fastest vehicle appears to crawl. From this vantage point he views the phenomenon of U.S. industrialization. He divides industrial growth into three "telescoping" periods: 1850 to 1890, 1890 to 1920, 1920 to 1940. Each, he notes, was shorter than its precedent; each contained part of its successor. Yet from the beginning "people thought of changes as normal adjuncts to an agricultural and craft economy--the only basic one they have ever known." To anyone who has been struck by a gust of Bucky Fuller's technocratic sales pitches, the cheerful implications are clear: yet another extension of the telescope is contained within our society. Things like space programs are not the limits of technocracy: they herald the as yet undiscernible beginnings of some fresh epoch.

To Fuller, industrialization has gone from comparative primitivity to corrupt sophistication, manipulated by public relations men, villains whom the author describes as "furtive, meddling buffoons," as if p.r. had somehow been the Iago and not the imago of the industrialist. Other Fuller ruminations seem more pertinent: his insistence, for instance, that work never disappears, and slavery is only abandoned through the substitution of machines, lends computers a certain moral purpose. His account of technological society's constantly increasing energy is, he admits, a striking reinterpretation of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. One of Fuller's practical prescriptions--the recycling of used-car parts into the construction of new airplanes--could provide the basis for a 21st century ecosystem.

Yet the hysterical optimism of Unfilled Epic imparts the uneasy feeling that Fuller's last clear year is 1940, and indeed that is the last year analyzed in this "futuristic" poem. "The only difference between the face of the earth today and millions of years ago," he writes "when all the elements also existed, but as seemingly static resources, is the harnessing of energy."

Perhaps Fuller's delusion comes from his viewpoint. In his notebooks, Albert Camus once described the airplane "as one of the elements of modern negation and abstraction. There is no more nature . . . everything disappears. There remains a diagram--a map. Man, in short, looks through the eyes of God. And he perceives that God can have but an abstract view. This is not a good thing."

No, it is not. Seeing the earth's doings in vast perspective is intended to make local pitfalls and disasters seem small and temporary. Yet Fuller's distant, denatured view, perceptive as it occasionally is, too much disregards what has happened to the face of the earth, to the rivers, the air--and the people.

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