After several weeks of dense ideonomy content, it’s time to turn to some lighter biographical color on my continuing quest to bring wider attention to unique American futurist Patrick Gunkel.
Over a period of several decades, a series of writers became interested in Gunkel and ended up becoming his unofficial cataloguers and scribes—yep, I’m just one in a long tradition of writers who encountered Gunkel and decided he was worth writing about.
As far as I can tell, media coverage of Gunkel and his Ideonomy Project began with Fred Hapgood’s 1985 article “What Gunkel Knows,” which I discussed in my March 2026 article.
From there, David Stipp’s 1987 Wall Street Journal article picked up the thread.
An article about Gunkel then appeared in the February 13, 1988, edition of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. Titled “Building a Better Cockroach—Or a Smaller Cat,” the article covers a business-related lecture Gunkel gave and features what is, in my opinion, one of the best photographs ever taken of him.
Then, in 1989, when Austin American-Statesman columnist Billy Porterfield first discovered Gunkel—it’s not clear how—a new chronicle was born.
Between 1989 and 1992, Porterfield visited Gunkel and wrote four columns that ran in the Austin American-Statesman, the long-time newspaper for Austin, Texas.
The four articles trace an intriguing arc and spotlight Gunkel’s time in Austin from several different perspectives.
Porterfield, who passed away in 2014, was not just some random newspaper hack, either.
A former producer for the iconic American newsman Jim Lehrer on the North Texas show “Newsroom” before Lehrer was bumped upstairs to PBS, Porterfield became executive producer of the program after Lehrer’s departure.
“When Jim Lehrer was running the program, he would get impatient with Billy because he wanted more work out of him,” Porterfield’s former colleague Lee Cullum told KERA, the NPR outlet for North Texas, on the occasion of Porterfield’s death. “Billy would say ‘I hit home runs’ and that’s the truth, he always hit home runs.”
So Porterfield had a nose for news.
And with Patrick Gunkel, he certainly found it.
Porterfield’s First Column on Gunkel
In writing his first column, Porterfield spent two mornings with Gunkel at his Austin apartment and wrote a column entitled “Writer Tries to Create Synthesis of Knowledge.”
The column appeared on page B1 of the October 27, 1989, issue of the Austin American-Statesman.
Porterfield wrote: “Not since I spent a day with Buckminster Fuller have I engaged such a far-ranging and ultimately liberating mind, powerful and passionate in its vision.”
That is high praise!
Among the various tidbits from the article, we learn that Gunkel is “thin, aristocratic, unexpectedly shy and unsure of himself in social situations… he has no car, few friends.”
Porterfield also describes Gunkel’s apartment as having “floors …stacked with books and charts and maps.”
The column does contain, in my opinion, an important comment from Gunkel that helps elucidate his personal philosophy and abstract spiritualism (Gunkel was not an atheist):
“When his father asked him for his ideas about God, Gunkel replied: ‘In my efflorescent world view of principles and corollaries, there are hierarchies, and the effect is that of lower and higher things, of ever higher gods of which there is no highest God. It's an obscenity to so limit God and to name God, the absolutely infinite and ineffable.’"
Years later, on a computer dating profile, Gunkel listed his religion as panlogism—a reference to Hegel.1
Porterfield’s Second Column on Gunkel
A follow-up column on Gunkel by Billy Porterfield, entitled “No Pick and Shovel Should Send this Mystic Great Wall Tumbling,” appeared on December 6, 1989, in the Austin American-Statesman.
In the article, Porterfield seeks to find out Gunkel’s perspective about the new discovery of a galactic “Great Wall” of galaxies, beginning his column with the statement: “Walls are for breaching.”
What follows is a Gunkelian rant on the cosmos where Porterfield lets Gunkel spin out a long metaphysical rant. His column largely consists of simply reproducing portions of this rant verbatim.
After criticizing current models of the universe, Gunkel attempts to illustrate the fundamental unknowability of the universe by evoking a thought experiment in which humans receive an inter-dimensional message in Morse code from “googol-dimensional” beings in a universe where “time ordinarily runs backwards but sometimes runs forward,” beings “who are constructed of fractals and octonions and who communicate among their negatively many selves by means of cosmic strings modulated by essential singularities and a p-adic language.”
Gunkel concludes his rant with the following moral:
“Our objective picture of the external world can easily be an artificial and synthetic image—a worldlike belief—constructed from minimal actual information in a largely arbitrary way."
“Some walls are not for breaching,” Porterfield abruptly concludes.
Porterfield’s Third Column on Gunkel
OK, so Porterfield had a really good thing going with Gunkel and—I assume—other Austin-area personalities: find an odd duck, go interview them, and turn the results into a column!
For Porterfield’s third column on Gunkel, “Detour on Road of True Love: Romantic Sojourner Turns Heart Toward Mongolia,” which published in the Austin American-Statesman on April 6, 1990, we learn that Gunkel has given up on romance in Austin and has set his sights on—wait for it—Outer Mongolia.
Now, the fact that Gunkel had romance on his mind at all may come as a bit of a surprise.
We haven’t really talked about Gunkel’s love life in the pages of my newsletter, nor do I think it’s all that important to write about when so many other topics bear attention.
What I can say is that Gunkel suffered through periods of repeated romantic disappointment for most of his life, that he never married, and that he often developed delusions about women that he thought could become romantic partners.
There was a tragic edge to all of this, too, as Gunkel was very aware of what he was missing but had no idea how to get it.
“I need a woman,” he told Porterfield. “I need a colleague, the stimulation of companionship, a wife who can talk about ideas. Else I'm gradually dying."
When Gunkel moved to Austin in 1986, he was hurting from his failed romantic pursuit of Betsey Dyer, a Boston-area graduate student in biology.
He then proceeded to plow a significant amount of time into trying to find a romantic partner in Austin, including responding to newspaper personal ads.
But why Mongolia?
"I greatly admire Orientals," Gunkel told Porterfield. "I like the Japanese for their intelligence, discipline and traditionalism, their modesty and courtesy. The Chinese will be the greatest people on earth when they rid themselves of their idiotic ideology. And as for the Mongols, why look at them. They appear to be all the things that Texans pretend to be."
Porterfield: "And that is ...?"
"A land of rugged individuals. That's what I thought Texas was when I came here. But I've found you are a people who worship power, authority, rules and regulations. I don't mind some basic boundaries, but the conformity here is as entrenched as it is on the East Coast. I find that I don't fit in Academe. I don't fit in industry. In America these are the only two choices. So I'm exploring other possibilities.”
Gunkel considered himself a libertarian when he arrived in Austin, but by now, a number of interactions with authority figures had left Gunkel terribly disillusioned.
Based on original documents I have reviewed, Gunkel hilariously sent Porterfield’s column to his funders at the Richard Lounsbery Foundation in New York—as though it would demonstrate to them how much progress he was making on his ideonomy manuscript!
Apparently Gunkel believed, as some others still do, that “all press is good press.”
Porterfield’s Fourth Column on Gunkel
For the fourth and final column Billy Porterfield wrote about Gunkel, our intrepid columnist tagged along to a public hearing at which Gunkel spoke out against a law that would force cyclists to wear helmets.
Titled “Freewheeling Bicyclist Fights for Right to Experience Nature,” the article appeared in the January 31, 1992, issue of the Austin American-Statesman.
Porterfield called Gunkel a “high-octane monk” and described the apartment where Gunkel had been grinding out his ideonomy work ever since 1986.
Gunkel’s grant from the Lounsbery Foundation was on the verge of running out and Gunkel is about to be plunged into depression over the perceived failure of his project, but that doesn’t come up in the article.
As highlighted by the column, Gunkel’s feelings about the supposedly libertarian-friendly city of Austin have continued to sour.
When Portfield points out to Gunkel that the Austin government was only trying to save Gunkel’s precious brain from damage with its new helmet law, Gunkel replies:
“It’s nomocracy. Reliance on legal machinery to govern society is an admirable concept, but it has its fallacies: the fallacy that there can be a law for every problem and need. The fallacy that a mechanical system of laws can equal or supersede intuitive judgment, common sense, or the massive, pluralistic intelligence of free individuals making contextual observations and decisions. The fallacy that laws have no cost, either economic or spiritual.”
This is really how Gunkel talked, by the way.
According to the column, Gunkel almost missed his chance to speak at the hearing because he forgot to sign up at the door.
The comment that Gunkel submitted for the hearing was titled “Why a Bicycle Helmet Law Would Be Absurd” and can still be found online, as well as a follow-up essay Gunkel wrote upon reading a New York Times article about bicycle helmets in 2001, nearly ten years later.
To my knowledge, Gunkel never wore a helmet.
He was twice hit by vehicles in Falmouth while he was bicycling, and one time he was seriously injured, though I do not believe his magnificent brain was ever damaged by these encounters.
(1) From materials found in the MIT Distinctive Collections archive.