More Show & Tell

(The Play of Analogue & Digital Process)


Tetrahedron




Buckminster Fuller’s basic building block.
Looks like a triad but there’s four of them.

In his imagination & in his modeling, he could
flip the middle triad in & out: now you see it as
figure, now you see it as background.
Now it’s a pyramid. Now it’s a triangle.

This structure was the basis for his various
building projects: domes, housing, even
transportation, which he was pretty sure might
could solve many of the world’s basic Mazlovian
problems except there was never a good mesh:
the Bucky-Fuller cogs & wheels never fit the
larger eco-systemic & local feed-back looping
so as to be sustainable.

Timing is all & Fuller was out of it.
(Black Mountain College not with standing)

Liberal Art

What I know as “possible” eclipses if not
occludes what actually is Possible and so I
invite Impossibility into the process, almost
as comfortable with the play of “impossible”
as with the necessity of contra-diction and
of course the practicality of paradox.



Articulation Articulating

(“to divide the beast at the
joints with minimum
blood & gristle”)

I’ve been generously & presumptuously trying
to drive a grand wedgie: cleaving & articulating
liberal arts and the liberal art through the heart
of this community to lay bare for consideration the
ancient unceasing dichotomy traditionally talked
about in terms of the
“instrumental” & the “academic,”
“practical” & the “theoretical”:
vocational people on the one hand and them
connoisseurs understandably considered dilettante or
eclectic by professionals, work-programmers &
service-project Get R Done-ists,
Green-ers & Leeds Certified



liberal art going on
liberal arts going on

2 natural born “evils,” of course, & a box on both
houses: they don’t ever Just Get Along and every
one knows PROS wield the Upper Hand (always so
much to get done, so little time) and it makes good
sense that they do: the sound of one hand clapping. .

Nevertheless: “amateurs” & their fun-loving academic
whine & wiggle will inevitably “come up from below,”
like BB Wolf knocking on doors to interrupt the ongoing
clean-up & bridge-it building & securing of home lands
& towers of trade & exchange.




And the more neglected, the more sub-versive they become
and antic, hey! they’ll bring down the house of usher if
possible, and eco-logically,too.

Ralph Nader felt bold
enough to announce
the obvious: that the
lesser of 2 evils is still
evil, of course it is, and
anyone can wonder where
the 3^rd choice is located,
seeing, as Rosanne Rosanna
Danna accurately affirms,
(& who can deny): if it’s
not one thing it’s another.

Killing people by scraping their flesh
from their bones was an idea that lived.
In the fifth century, Christians killed the
wellborn lady Hypatia, according to
Gibbon, in a church: they stripped her
flesh with oyster shells and threw the
shellfuls of flesh, “quivering,” in afire.

Her problem was Neo-Platonism, says
writer Hal Crowther: also she studied
mathematics. “After this,” comments
Bertrand Russell, “Alexandria was no
longer troubled by philosophers.”

(Annie Dillard: For the Time Being)