The Documentarian's Documentarian - A Tribute to E.J.Applewhite by Bonnie DeVarco Presented at: "Cosmic Fishing" The Third Annual Synergeticists of the Northeast Corridor (SNEC) Symposium George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Saturday, March 20, 2004 What does it take to collaborate with Buckminster Fuller, the "James Joyce of Geometry?" Ed Applewhite is a man of uncompromising rigor and devoted pragmatism. He has a love for all things cryptic and a precision for gathering intelligence or, as Fuller would say, "harvesting cosmic fish." He was steeped in both literary and philosophical traditions, but not so much that he could not embrace fully the unconventional sweep of a great but idiosyncratic intellect. Especially if, in getting this original voice accessible, he could also "make it soar." In Buckminster Fuller, Ed had met his greatest challenge. I can remember in one of our very first conversations 15 years ago, Ed told me, in no uncertain terms, to "document everything!" I have found that an amazingly useful practice. Although we know that Buckminster Fuller was a self-documentarian extraordinaire, it was Ed Applewhite who took the practice to its pinnacle; his zeal for documentation exceeded even Fuller's own, for Ed was a "documentarian's documentarian." E.J. Applewhite's Cosmic Fishing, his lively personal account of his unusual collaboration with Buckminster Fuller on the writing of Synergetics, begins with a wonderful quote from Johannes Kepler. "I care not whether my work be read now or by posterity. I can afford to wait a century for readers when God himself waited six thousand years for an observer. I triumph. I have stolen the golden secret of the Egyptians. I indulge my sacred fury." This invocation of Kepler is quite apt, for Kepler too was a man with an uncommon and universal mind, who in the 17th century explored brand new territory -- close-packing, the nesting and stellation of the family of polyhedra, quasi-periodicity on the tessellated plane, symmetrical relations on every scale from the atomic to the planetary. And on that path, Kepler stumbled upon some of the most enduring contributions to the history of science such as the three laws of planetary motion, the first use of the term periodicity and the discovery of the family of rhombic solids. Fuller too covered the micro and macro in his quest to define the intricate pattern of universal energy. But, with his exorbitant use of poetic license, Fuller shared his ideas with a tone that verged on "cosmic ecstasy" and, out of necessity, created a language uniquely his own. Indeed, in reading Kepler's corpus of work, one can see how his own often ecstatic prose stood in contradistinction to the unprecedented leaps he made as one of our earliest proto-scientists. His work was timeless and relevant far beyond his lifetime. Similarly, Ed Applewhite faithfully recorded Fuller's unique speech and idea generation with the same assurance that it was an essential part of a much more historically important gift. Without trying to tame the ephemeral writings of this unfettered muse, or to minimize his exhaustively generative prose, Ed indulged Bucky's "Sacred Fury." It is no accident that Ed ties Fuller's work metaphorically to Plato's well-known "Allegory of the Cave" where those imprisoned inside believe the shadows on the surface of the cave walls were reality, without ever walking outside to see the light. This ancient and classic metaphor is unapologetically updated by Ed's suggestion that Fuller submitted his tetrahedron as the proper exit path to the "sunlit truth of geometric reality." We now know that in this book, Plato's Timaeus -- although one of his most widely read works in both early times and in the Renaissance and now hardly mentioned in Philosophy 101 -- that the power of mighty triangle and the archetypal significance of the five regular polyhedra are first set down for posterity. Fuller himself stood his work apart from the Greeks whom he contended imprisoned us with a cubic frame of reference. But Fuller could have just read the wrong books, inadvertently omitting Plato's homage to the triangle. Ed Applewhite poetically made a bridge back to the early Greeks through his own philosophical training. Even with Ed's quick wit, his own skillful and seasoned writing style, and his editor's sensibilities, instead of shaping Fuller's words, of trampling his flight, he let Fuller's articulations and their refinements take their own shape and cadence. He was devoted but unsentimental in this quest. He characterized his collaboration with Fuller as "a project of intimate collaboration, symbiotic interdependence, fine-tuned articulation and painstaking labor." With a deft approach to historical documentation, but not without a sense of humor, Ed had to create unique ways to bring Fuller's multitudinous writings on synergetic geometry together, to draw him out, and, as he wrote in Cosmic Fishing, to "confront the author with himself." To do this, Ed launched into hypervigilant cross-referencing, a practice that resulted in the 22,000 5x8 cards that now comprise the Synergetics Dictionary. He also created the topical section number system of both Synergetics and Synergetics 2. I remember my very first reading of Fuller's work 25 years ago - it was Synergetics 2. And no, it did not scare me for some reason. I opened the book from an arbitrary but seemingly cosmically relevant place in the middle and proceeded to go outward. It was only much later when I read Cosmic Fishing that I understood that that was the point of Synergetics. Ed writes of Fuller: "As always, he wanted to begin -- like a spider - in the middle and work out to the circumference and work in toward the middle." Ever true to this "methodology," in what became an elaborate dance of encoding and decoding, I believe the book was not really written, rather it was brought forth through a process almost biological -- it "evolved." Fuller always felt that his artifacts were "tools to instruct" or could be read as texts, Synergetics conversely, was more artifact than book, becoming, along with Ed's Synergetics Dictionary an anonymous prototype for what we now commonly refer to as "hypertext." Now, through the labors of Robert Gray, and with the solid support and help of Ed Applewhite, Synergetics resides in this hypertext form on the World Wide Web. Just try any Google search on omnitopology, tetrahelix or cosmic hierarchy and you will land right inside of Fuller's online Synergetics. Other terms are becoming common in our lexicon as we collectively shape ephemeral consensus thought in a place we now call Cyberspace. This emerging perspective was modus operandi for Fuller and Applewhite's work on Synergetics. Terms and practices such as biomimicry, dynamical systems theory, Six degrees of separation (Small World Theory), self-organization, autopoiesis, and multidimensional scaling resonate with Fuller's notion of the "omni-expanding scenario universe" and bring it to life in contemporary times. But in the early 1970s, during the last stages of writing Synergetics, these terms were not yet coined. It was as if the objective of every paragraph of Synergetics, indeed every sentence and many of the words themselves were set to defy convention. Ed recognized the internal consistency underlying the myriad thoughts Fuller expressed over and over in hundreds of iterations and his "layman's eye view" enabled him to record without bias or refute ideas, but rather to find where they confirmed each other and to identify the continuity of theme. With an intuitive understanding of the "deep structure of organization," he tried to make sense of the sequence without being linear, to organize the whole from the parts while Bucky remained in the consistency of the Whole. Through their years of collaboration on Synergetics, Fuller and Applewhite's respective working styles seemed to converge with a type of collaborative integrity in such "cosmic fishing expeditions." Still unsure of why Ed prefers to call himself a layman, to defer credit for Synergetics exclusively to Buckminster Fuller, it is clearly evident that his deep understanding of synergetics is profoundly precise. Ed's humanistic leanings have continually enabled him to articulate Fuller's ideas with a striking eloquence: Of Fuller's understanding of persistent regenerative bliss of energy as the capacity to rearrange elemental order, Ed writes: "And it is the task of his synergetic geometry to identify energy with number, so it seems not only reasonable to him, but essential, to relate man's thought processes-his way of knowing-to the syntropic-entropic tidal flows of energy, the largest patterns in his cosmology" And Ed's own thoughts on the book, Synergetics. "I know that the whole structure of Fuller's cosmos is a poetic one of vast harmony and subtlety. If the book is nothing else, it is one of the most complex literary and pattern metaphors of the age." Applewhite's sensibilities elevated Fuller's contribution in a way that history will bear out. His work, I believe, will make Fuller's contributions to science historically verifiable. Through his devoted documentation during Fuller's life and posthumously, Ed has built his own extensive archive filled with records of the writing of Synergetics synergetic geometry's intersection with mainstream science and scientists such as Donald Ingber, Arthur Loeb, H.S.M. Coxeter, Harold Kroto, Richard Smalley, Istvan Hargittai, Aaron Klug and Donald Caspar and so many others. Applewhite's extensive records, going back to the 1940s before the Wichita House, not only follow Fuller's work, but also chart the relevance of collateral ideas and histories -- these include elaborate documentation on the early history of precursors to Fuller's dome, and the evolution of the earliest research and writings that surround the discovery and application of buckminsterfullerene, the third form of carbon (and Fuller's namesake). The Applewhite collection includes extensive documentation of the work of Fuller's colleagues, students and contemporaries referred by Fuller and Applewhite as "neighboring disclosures," by Shoji Sadao, Thomas T.K. Zung, Keith Critchlow, Edwin Schlossberg, Amy Edmonson, Robert Grip, Chris Kitrick, Howard Brown, Medard Gabel, Joseph D.Clinton, Bill Perk, Jay Baldwin, Kenneth Snelson, Ann Griswold Tyng, Peter Jon Pearce, Arthur Loeb, Donald Ingber and so many others. His donation of the Applewhite Collection to Stanford University will someday become a resource as important as and intricately entwined with Fuller's own papers on the evolution of synergetic geometry. His trusting support of the work being carried out by Roberto Trujillo, Steve Mandeville Gamble, Sean Quimby and Michael John Gorman have offered a rare gift as both collections become situated in such an important repository and home. Finally, Ed Applewhite serves us all as a model for rigorous devotion to the integrity of the work. He has supported and collaborated with no less than three generations of students, colleagues and those inspired by Fuller's work. He has also provided a new generation of synergeticists (a list far too numerous to include here) the encouragement and validation for our continuing work to define, refine or expand Fuller's catalytic canon. And for that, Ed, we thank you.