A Polymath’s Halloween

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love the costumes, and the spookiness, and the sense of fun and playfulness that seems to me to be more entrenched in Halloween than any of the other major holidays.

This year we had plans to head up to Seattle to attend a Halloween party with Sean’s dad, but that fell through and we were left with about a week until the big day, with costumes arranged but nowhere to go. I did some searching online to find out what was happening in Portland, and found a great solution.

Portland Center Stage is currently showing a one man play about R. Buckminster Fuller – 20th century American architect, inventor, and philosopher, and namesake of the Carbon 60 atom, or buckyball. The play is running until December 7th and we had already determined that we wanted to go, but when I started looking around for a Halloween activity I came on a coupon code – in order to get some people into the theater on what would likely have been a very quiet night otherwise, PCS was selling Halloween-night tickets to Bucky for $8.50 each! Plus, they were throwing a party afterward with free snacks and drinks.

So on Friday night we got into our costumes and headed out to the theater. I found the play to be not only entertaining, but also inspiring… Fuller was a great proponent of “doing more with less” (which he called ephemeralization) and structuring things for the benefit of humanity as a whole. We were treated to a number of gems from his philosophies, his inventions, and his explorations of geometry, and it was overall a fun, interesting, thought-provoking evening. The play did a great job of covering the subject matter in a way that was very accessible, without being at all ‘dumbed down’, and if you’re interested in a kind of brainy, non-traditional play I’d highly recommend it.

One of the things Bucky says in the play that really stuck with me, particularly given what I was just writing about in here last week, was essentially that everyone is born a generalist, with vast stores of curiosity – we have to be, to handle all of the things that we learn in the first handful of years we’re alive. But then society knocks it out of us, encouraging specialization because specialists are easier to handle, more predictable.

I think I’ll be doing some more exploring into the writings and other creations of Mr. Fuller, and I’m also contemplating adding a tribute to him in my product line now.