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Call me Trimtab
Sep. 4th, 2007 01:51 amI went on a pilgrimage to Buckminster Fuller's grave yesterday, though I didn't know I was on a pilgrimage until I'd already parked my bike inside the gates of Mount Auburn Cemetery and purchased a map, dropping four dimes and two nickels into the slot. I left another nickel on his grave, when I found it—there were three nickels there already, and I'm hoping one day to read, "Nobody knows how or why the tradition of leaving nickels on Fuller's grave began..." in an encyclopedia. His epitaph reads "CALL ME TRIMTAB", which set off a flurry of charming mental scenarios that persisted and elaborated in my mind until I got home and discovered the real reason behind it: a "trim-tab" is a miniature rudder set into a large rudder, and by making small adjustments to this apparently insignificant flap one can create an area of low pressure that hauls the large rudder around. Bucky (sorry—Trimtab) saw this as an analogy for the way one person might steer the world.
Mount Auburn Cemetery is stunningly and cunningly edenic, the first cemetery in the US that was designed to be a pleasant place to stroll, as opposed to a place where holes were roughly dug and bodies buried. On its 174 (!) acres you can find a sphinx commemorating the Civil War, a beautiful memorial to Mary Baker Eddy mirrored in a pond, and a tower like a white chess rook on a hill, with 95 echoing stone steps leading up to a panoramic view of Watertown, Cambridge, and downtown Boston. I saw one black marble gravestone in the shape of a truncated cuboctahedron—not Fuller's, oddly enough—and so many beautiful/unique/overdone monuments that my missing camera felt like a phantom limb, an itching absence against my side.
Afterward, I pedalled home, later than I'd planned, with a little bag of 9-volt battery connectors from Radio Shack in my pocket, so I could replace the one in my guitar tuner. They don't give you a lot of room on those little circuit boards, but I apparently did well enough with my blobs of solder, since the tuner works now.
Then, around 3:30AM, I finished chapter 6 of the book. This one was a difficult slog, with a lot of false starts and self-doubt. It took three months to finish, and it will require more of a rewrite than anything I've done so far—if I weren't intellectually convinced that it's better not to look back, what with pillars of salt and whatnot, I'd take another hack at it immediately. On and ever on, I say. The last few pages, at least, were enjoyable—there's one large mystery in the book that I'm planning to neither explicitly mention nor explicitly resolve, but instead leave clues scattered about for anyone who cares to notice them, and I got to drop one of them in last night. Little steps in the long-term plan are like rising thermals, filling my wings for a moment before the next long slow glide begins.
Mount Auburn Cemetery is stunningly and cunningly edenic, the first cemetery in the US that was designed to be a pleasant place to stroll, as opposed to a place where holes were roughly dug and bodies buried. On its 174 (!) acres you can find a sphinx commemorating the Civil War, a beautiful memorial to Mary Baker Eddy mirrored in a pond, and a tower like a white chess rook on a hill, with 95 echoing stone steps leading up to a panoramic view of Watertown, Cambridge, and downtown Boston. I saw one black marble gravestone in the shape of a truncated cuboctahedron—not Fuller's, oddly enough—and so many beautiful/unique/overdone monuments that my missing camera felt like a phantom limb, an itching absence against my side.
Afterward, I pedalled home, later than I'd planned, with a little bag of 9-volt battery connectors from Radio Shack in my pocket, so I could replace the one in my guitar tuner. They don't give you a lot of room on those little circuit boards, but I apparently did well enough with my blobs of solder, since the tuner works now.
Then, around 3:30AM, I finished chapter 6 of the book. This one was a difficult slog, with a lot of false starts and self-doubt. It took three months to finish, and it will require more of a rewrite than anything I've done so far—if I weren't intellectually convinced that it's better not to look back, what with pillars of salt and whatnot, I'd take another hack at it immediately. On and ever on, I say. The last few pages, at least, were enjoyable—there's one large mystery in the book that I'm planning to neither explicitly mention nor explicitly resolve, but instead leave clues scattered about for anyone who cares to notice them, and I got to drop one of them in last night. Little steps in the long-term plan are like rising thermals, filling my wings for a moment before the next long slow glide begins.
