Right around the time Alec’s new Bucky bio showed up from Powell’s (shipment to my home address vs the local branch was somehow mandatory if I used PayPal) I had gone back into studying Ouspensky + Gurdjieff in earnest, again through a Jungian lens, although this time not that of Maurice Nicoll, whom I’ve featured a few times on my YouTube channel for his Psychological Commentaries.
I’d earlier blogged I didn’t expect the new bio to get into any Bucky-Gurdjieff relationship, but I was wrong, it did. Apparently they met in Greenwich Village, at Romanie Marie’s restaurant, then a gathering spot for Bohemian intellectuals.
I’d already found the note to Claude Bragdon, to go with Bucky’s first major foray into promoting his own brand of futurism: 4D Timelock (1928). The 4D meme was already hot back then (1920s). Ouspensky had written about it, in Tertium Organum (1912), a book Fuller considered important.
Fuller’s note to Bragdon thanked him for bringing this latter work to his attention. Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s book, on the fourth dimension in modern art, relays a few more of these details.
According to Alec, Bucky later came to see Gurdjieff as a fraud (page 123). I plan to follow up on that (Alec cites Shoji Sadao’s monograph, page 82). What implications would that have had regarding his respect for the Ouspensky…
