I Seem to be a Verb Making Dymaxion Borsch

“If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,” Fuller once wrote. “But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.”

Read more //www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/09/080609fa_fact_kolbert#ixzz1o4jkh3qZ

De Vinci’s man inscribed by a circle and a pentangle always reminds me of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Man. However, it seems my memory is faulty. Fuller wrote no such book. Nor did he coin the word. Nevertheless he did adopt Dymaxion as sort of a trade name for his line of thinking on how things should to go together. Dymaxion was an adman’s word to describe the three wheeled automobile he displayed at the 1934 world fair in Chicago. It’s combination of dynamic and maximum.

Fuller sought the greatest economy for the task at hand. His geodesic domes, for example, enclosed the most space with in the least material.

So it should be in search of divine ratios. In that quest the first rule is to best use what is a hand. My improvised borsch began with a ham dinner. The ham was further whittled down for ham sandwiches. The final heal end was cut up for lintel soup.

I also had left over Bavarian cabbage I had made nestle next to a delicious stuffed pork roast. In all, the two Tupperware containers of leftovers contained a very generous bowl soup and a healthy serving of sweet sour cabbage. Combined, these created a delicious dymaxion borsch –a soup with an earthy lintel/ham foundation over which, in an almost angelic fashion, floated a harmonious and the delightful sweet-sour tang of the cabbage.

I had a magnificent meal for two created from two and three generations of leftovers. Life in the kitchen cannot be sweeter. I do believe it’s high time for a Bucky Fuller revival. And on that note I will close this riff with another quote.

“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 Universe.”  - R. Buckminster Fuller