{"id":43258,"date":"2015-03-01T01:03:21","date_gmt":"2015-03-01T06:03:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=43258"},"modified":"2015-03-01T16:26:47","modified_gmt":"2015-03-01T21:26:47","slug":"the-second-death-of-mr-spock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/the-second-death-of-mr-spock\/","title":{"rendered":"The Second Death of Mr. Spock"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Leonard Nimoy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s death (yesterday as I write) was an awful blow, though no real surprise after his recent hospitalizations. I doubt if there could be a better eulogy for him than the one Admiral Kirk delivered at the end of <\/span>The Wrath of Khan<\/em>. It may sound as if I have lost any ability to distinguish between Mr. Nimoy and the character he portrayed to such great effect. And I suppose I have. But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Nimoy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fault. Leonard Nimoy brought the Spock character to life in an almost literal sense. Just after the bone-headed NBC cancellation of <\/span>Star Trek<\/em> (just as tragically inane a move as CBS\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s turning down the show in favor of the insultingly stupid <\/span>Lost in Space<\/em>),\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nimoy wrote a book titled I Am not Spock<\/em>, hoping to avoid being typecast, or, really, being obscured and absorbed by the character he played. But that is just what happened. (Come on! The cover of that very book had a photo of the actor making the Vulcan \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Live long and prosper\u00e2\u20ac\u009d hand sign!) Actually, Nimoy wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t type-cast. He played various roles over the years on Mission Impossible<\/em>, In Search of<\/em>, and Fringe<\/em>. But he knew good and well what had happened decades later when he published a second book called I Am Spock<\/em>. He was.<\/p>\n

\"Nimoy<\/a><\/p>\n

I think of moments from two non-Nimoy movies. In Batman Begins<\/em>, Ras al Ghul tells Bruce Wayne that, in order to fight crime as he wants to, he must \u00e2\u20ac\u0153become more than a man.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In Captain America: The First Avenger<\/em>, Steve Rogers returns to camp having liberated hundreds of soldiers from a Nazi work camp, and Bucky Barnes exhorts the crowd, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hear it for Captain America!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In that moment, Steve has become a living symbol, something \u00e2\u20ac\u0153more than a man.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It tells us the crucial thing about the myth of comic book super-heroes: that we have the possibility to transcend mere individuality. Not in the wretched collectivist sense, merging into the mass, which is to become less<\/em> than a man. Rather, it is to incarnate a myth and an ideal. Not just a patriot, but Uncle Sam.<\/p>\n

This is what Paul Tillich said characterized the person of Jesus as the Christ: he had sacrificed what was Jesus in him to what was the Christ, the Anointed. In Jungian terms, one could say that Jesus had become a Christ figure! And he had done so by virtue of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the inflation of the archetype,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d becoming lost in the Christ Archetype (already available in the Collective Unconscious).<\/p>\n

Anyone remotely familiar with the Star Trek<\/em> episodes and movies knows that Mr. Spock was a Christ figure. Nor was this simply a matter of his death and resurrection. Throughout the series he had been a perfect blend of spirit and reason, of cross-bearing and selfless duty. He was a kind of demigod along the lines of the Jesus of Matthew and Luke, not a divine incarnation but rather a hybrid of heaven and earth. In Spock\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s case, the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153heavenly\u00e2\u20ac\u009d half was his space alien heritage as half-Vulcan. (Keep in mind that in the Bible, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153heaven\u00e2\u20ac\u009d simply denotes \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the sky.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Jehovah was what we would call a space alien, much in the manner of the God-entity in Star Trek V<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Star Trek<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Romulans and Vulcans were supposed to share a common origin, diverging after Vulcans colonized what would come to be known as Romulus (at least I think that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the history). Once they went their separate ways, the Romulans symbolized the martial ethos of the Roman Empire (the Klingons, on the other hand, are the Mongol hordes). The Vulcans represent the Roman Stoicism of Cicero and Seneca. Spock is the perfect Stoic, setting aside emotion in favor of dispassionate reason. But Spock and his fellow pointy-eared philosophers also display elements of Zen Buddhism, as when in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country<\/em>, Spock explains that he displays Mark Chagall\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s painting of the expulsion from Eden to remind himself of the fleeting character of all things: that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the Buddhist tenet of anicca<\/em>, impermanence. Vulcans are sometimes depicted in Roman togas, sometimes in Zen monastic robes. A key moment in The Wrath of Khan<\/em> is when Kirk finds Spock in a black Zen robe meditating in his quarters. (Zen is even more prominent in Star Wars<\/em>, no great surprise given the Japanese cinematic inspiration of that movie.)<\/p>\n

All this suggests that perhaps Trekkies are not quite<\/em> so pathetic as they seem. I love Star Trek<\/em> very much and have watched it avidly since the very first season of the show in 1966. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m talking about fans who dress up in Starfleet uniforms and Klingon armor, the geeks depicted on that classic SNL skit with William Shatner telling off a room full of pimply conventioneers wearing Spock ears. This creeps me out big-time. To me, such antics suggest an inability to find meaning in the mundane world, though I could be wrong.<\/p>\n