Some more thoughts on Bucky Fuller and William Blake, on reading part of Fuller's new biography

For me it is a work-in-progress to connect the life of Buckminster Fuller a bit more with William Blake. Today I return to this topic prompted by novel information provided in the new Fuller biography (Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, by Alec Nevala-Lee, August 2022), and synchronous and asynchronous discussions with the Trimtab Book Club. I last explored the Fuller-Blake juxtaposition in Synergetics Stream #006.0 in February 2021 (timestamp in the link goes to the start of this discussion).

There are strong resonances in some aspects of the social lives of Fuller and Blake. For example both in-person contacts and written correspondences with technical, professional, artistic, government, aristocratic, religious, and esoteric communities. Yet Blake contrasts strongly with Fuller on other socio-spatial dimensions: Blake never traveled more than a few hundred miles from London, and his marriage with Catherine was childless and quite different from Fuller & Anne's.

​A shared aspect between Fuller and Blake in their work and writing, is a focus on the process of artefact reconstruction/reenactment (e.g. skilled iteration on a methodology). Both of them matured in the context of a lifelong tension around selling different created artefacts -- a tension complexified because both made artefacts of disparate types, some original/singular pieces, some works that could be copied, and everything in between. For both of them, this balancing act resulted in an oscillatory focus towards different sorts of tasks and work (e.g. allocating attention to fulfilling contracts, seeking new projects, upgrading/revisiting past work, dealing with sickness/emergency, doing other things with their time). So for both of them there is a divergent yet resonant material-historical-contextual dynamic in terms of their career-long relationship with artefact development.

Hinging on this question of originals, copies, and multiple perspectives, there is much more to add, some of it hinted at powerfully in the 2012 blog of "William Blake and Enlightenment Media". To quote from the blog (their writing in quoted italics) and expand on a few points of Fuller-Blake contact:

1. "Because Blake was not truly trained as a painter, but rather an engraver, he was never considered a fellow of the Royal Academy and thusly faced a bias from intellectual society towards his engravings.". 
In what ways did Fuller have similar experiences in e.g. grade school, college, the Navy, industries, architecture, his families/friends, and so on?
What experienced cognitive phenomena (of themselves and others) helped and hindered, the development and implementation, of the work of Fuller and Blake? 

2.
"Blake’s Philosophy of Art emphasizes a certain–dare I say, mechanical–precision. He centers his ideal on the fact that “To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”". 
This polysemous use of "to particularize" as to conceptually partition as well as to deploy specifically, is deeply related to Fuller's unique Operationalist approach, and to Synergetics even more generally (e.g. that particular points and space enclosures alone are a sufficient starting place for a dynamic vectorial geometry; a geometry of lumps with symmetries). Blake was always dancing with particulars and the generalities (perhaps related to the physical/metaphysical dialectic of Fuller), especially as applied in human social settings. For example Blake famously exhorted: "He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.".

Note the interesting concordance here, where in Free Energy Principle and Active Inference literature, there is also a richly polysemous use of the term "particular" (as in "A free energy principle for a particular physics", Friston 2019). As with Synergetics, the focal and starting point of the Free Energy Principle, is the particular thing in terms of a time-defined generative model (perhaps a statistical analogue to the Sphere or Vector Equilibrium in Synergetics, considered from a cognitive-behavioral perspective in arbitrary spaces and including quantum effects) as partitioned from the generative process (the field of action or the niche; perhaps analogous to the Isotropic Vector Matrix in Synergetics).

Towards developing this navigational, (information) geometric, and cognitive resonance between Active Inference and Synergetics (which, after all is subtitled: "Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking"), a promising view has been provided recently by Brett Andersen, in his August 2022 blog "Order, Chaos, Relevance Realization, and Mythology". In the article Andersen relates various contemporary conceptual threads, including John Vervaeke's relevance realization and Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning. With this contribution, Andersen has provided an important movement towards in the modeling of multiscale multiagent cognitive landscapes in terms of real & imaginary (which is to say cognitive, generalized, or abductive) spatial dynamics. 

3.
"Blake sums it up nicely by stating that “Every Eye Sees differently As the Eye–Such the Object.”". 
Even beyond the timeless I/Eye pun, this summary aligns with Fuller's situational-perspectival-geometrical view, for example in Synergetics 1005.52 "The eternal is omniembracing and permeative; and the temporal is linear. This opens up a very high order of generalizations of generalizations. The truth could not be more omni-important, although it is often manifestly operative only as a linear identification of a special-case experience on a specialized subject.".

4.
"It is actually an answer of perception: what does the artist see? That is what the artist portrays, as according to Blake “All Forms are Perfect in the Poets Mind.”".
What are the "doors of perception", or "fearful symmetry" for Fuller? 
What is the "4D Time Lock" or "Dymaxion" brand for Blake? 
For you, as it was for them as well:  
What Forms are Perfect? 
Where/What is the Poet's Mind? 
What are you curious about now? 

"Yogic Geometry", Daniel Friedman, Pen & paper, 2020, based upon the William Blake art piece "Newton".