I started off in bed at 10am with a decent cup of black coffee, 3 different kind of toasts and a yellow bathrobe with a red button at the collar reading “slob”. I felt very much to rehearse the benefits of doing nothing – and failed as I decided to surf the net and read articles for inspiration. This is the account of this day´s online path and its bifurcations: To begin the day I jumped in at Wired, always an inspiring realm. The first story that intrigued me was not the latest tech buzz (a sceptic article if blue ray versatile players might not be that future-proof…), but the featured article about “This day in Tech”, boasting a date not so much futuristic: April 15, 1452.
That day Leonardo da Vinci was eventually born – fair enough. An enchanting biography boasting the importance of this multifaceted talent, the prototype of the “Renaissance Man”. Then I was stumbling over the notion of the well known “Vitruvian Man” drawing, and could not quite retrieve instantly why it was called Vitruvian (“Der vitruvianische Mensch”). A tiny black hole in art history was suddenly manifesting, so I decided to dig out more about this well-known icon of nowadays eclectic Logo society.
After a wikipedia hop-through this quickly brought me to a wordpress blog called “thelearnersguild” link. There the usefulness of diaries for learning was illustrated by the all different sketchbooks or diaries of Leonardo da Vinci, and of course the link to the Vitruvian Man. By the way, Bill Gates owns one of the original journals of Leonardo. The second protagonist for such notebooks they mention documenting a special life is Buckminster Fuller. One citation intrigued me, so I instantly had to post it to the pool for innovation & novelty, because it summed an attitude which seems all too idealistic nowadays. But Fuller is a living (now dead) successful example. I again dug deeper into Fuller´s life and came up with his strong legacy, revisited. You can overestimate repetition for forming memory, but here it felt fresh and reasonable. The Manual for Spaceship Earth (Operating Manual for spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller (1963) text displayed at the BFI ) which resonates with my passion for Manuals and other topics surrounding this character. Fuller calls himself a verb – how telling and true – I would plead all living mankind to be more a verb and less a noun. Counterbalance the “nounification” of humankind!
“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.”
Buckminster Fuller in “I Seem To Be A Verb” (1970)
Turning Bucky into an accessible stream of information including this article here as a kind of “journal of a associative decision tree of clicks”, adding in some paths of research and copy left an -right, up and down, well, took till 2:07 pm.
Still in bed, laptop heating my belly, in a yellow bathrobe. Still slobbing out…