I’m noth­ing if I’m not moving!

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a cat­e­gory. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evo­lu­tion­ary process — an inte­gral func­tion of the uni­verse. R. Buck­min­ster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

Dar­bella and I lis­ten to Audi­ble audio books, and recently I’ve been enjoy­ing var­i­ous parts of the tril­ogy Illu­mi­na­tus!. I won’t even begin to try to explain the plot–click the link if you care to. Yes­ter­day, I heard some­thing like, “There are no nouns in the nat­ural world,” attrib­uted to Bucky Fuller. I did a quick Google on it, and came up with the above quote, which I judged to be close enough.

Fuller had a very Zen way of look­ing at the world, and at him­self. Here’s another quote:

As a con­se­quence of the slav­ish “cat­e­go­ryi­tis” the sci­en­tif­i­cally illog­i­cal, and as we shall see, often mean­ing­less ques­tions “Where do you live?” “What are you?” “What reli­gion?” “What race?” “What nation­al­ity?” are all thought of today as log­i­cal ques­tions. By the twenty-first cen­tury it either will have become evi­dent to human­ity that these ques­tions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be liv­ing on Earth. — Oper­at­ing Man­ual for Space­ship Earth. (1963)

Fuller, more than most, was aware that ‘out­side of the box’ think­ing was required if we are to sur­vive. Yet, we are plagued with exactly what Fuller warns about in the above quote—I’ve often said that grad schools crank out spe­cial­ists in a world des­per­ate for generalists.

Spe­cial­ists are peo­ple who know more and more about less and less.

Gen­er­al­ists see the myr­iad forces at work, and can find new and excit­ing ways to recom­bine the data into some­thing new.

Another con­cept that comes up in Illu­mi­na­tus! is that the authors use the terms neo­phobe and neophile. The words mean, in order, fear of new things, and the love of new things. This con­cept fits both with what we are talk­ing about here, and with Fuller’s con­cepts. The idea is that if one is fear­ful of change, one will look for any excuse not to. If one loves change, then “stuck in the same groove” is repug­nant and non-helpful.

The neo­phobe dimen­sion is cap­tured in the expres­sion, “We always did it that way!” It is also cap­tured in, “Every­body knows…” Neophilia is best expressed in the con­cept of curiosity.

The nat­ural order is a verb.

Get your head around this—everything is a part of the nat­ural order (even things man­u­fac­tured) so every­thing is a verb. A process. Here’s a pop­u­lar exam­ple. Think of a car. Which part of a car is “the car?” Is any one, or sev­eral parts of the car, a car, or must we say that the fin­ished, com­plete car is a car?

Can you find the essen­tial “car-ness” in, say a tire or steer­ing wheel? If a car is a car (i.e. a noun) then there ought to be a “thing” we can point to, that is “always and every time,” a car.

So, you might say, “Yup. There is a car. Right there, Wayne, you ninny.”

Next door, parked in the dri­ve­way, is a vehi­cle (a van, but for pur­poses of this illus­tra­tion, it’s a car.) 2 years ago, I remem­ber hear­ing its owner try­ing to get it to start. Grum­ble, thunk, no go. So, for 2 years, it has sat there, unmov­ing. So, is it really and truly a car?

In fact, my neigh­bour has filled it with junk, so has the for­mer car become a shed?

Now, you might be think­ing, “Well, I’ll just mod­ify my for­mer state­ment to, “A car is that thing over there, and also it runs and moves when you turn it on.”

So, then, is the essence of a car that it moves? I’m ask­ing this: can you reduce a car down to some­thing that makes it a car? Or is a car the process—the “parts” that make up this thing we call a car, plus the move­ment of the engine, plus the loco­mo­tion along on wheels?”

If it is so that the real answer is, all of this, and more, then can you go here?

There is no “thing” called a car, but rather, there is “car-ing.” It’s a process, a verb, an action, which includes all the parts. It is emphat­i­cally not not a noun.

Same with you and me.

This is Fuller’s point, in the first quote. We are not sta­tic things, but rather dynamic processes—evolutionary, evolv­ing processes. We are, end­lessly, in flux.

If you are a neo­phobe (likely 95% of the pop­u­la­tion fits into this cat­e­gory, vary­ing in degree from ter­ror of the new to grudg­ing, half-hearted accep­tance), then this is the last thing you want to hear. Neophiles, on the other hand, are stand­ing up and cheering.

Rela­tional dis­cord comes from fear of verbs. No. Really.

Every sin­gle exam­ple of prob­lem rela­tion­ships I’ve ever come across has had this as a major fea­ture: “S/he isn’t the per­son I got into rela­tion­ship with. S/he’s changed. I don’t like it. How can I feel safe if s/he won’t coöperate?”

I keep try­ing to sell the idea that “Your part­ner is who s/he is, right now—is a dynamic process. So are you. The only way your live is going to work, the only way to live in the con­tin­ual Now, is for you to totally accept the fol­low­ing: “The only con­stant is change.”

Every­thing in the nat­ural world is a verb.

Noth­ing fits cat­e­gories, other than arti­fi­cially. I might be a lib­eral, Zen-ish male on a Stats Canada form, but to know what that means will require that you live with me, and even then, you’ll real­ize that how I “did” lib­eral, Zen-ish male 10 years ago (or 10 min­utes ago…) may or may not be sim­i­lar to how I “do” it now.

Dar­bella is cer­tainly a mov­ing ‘object’ sim­i­lar in some ways to the woman I met 25 years ago, but in real­ity she is the 2008 model, in spades. If I wanted her to stay the same, to make it easy for me, I have had no suc­cess. In actu­al­ity, I love that she’s a verb.

How about you? Who and how are you, these days?