Seeing the elephant
Walk in Beauty
My poem “Walk in Beauty” was published by Pulsebeat this month.
You can also find it in my new book Some Notes on the Silence, which you can get on Amazon or from Barnes & Noble or from the publisher.
Seeing the elephant
Christina and I got a chance to meet Indu, the Asian elephant at the Phoenix Zoo…and to bathe her. As part of the Zoo’s “Backstage Adventures” tours program—which also lets you meet the flamingoes, the tortoises, and other animals up close—we got to tour Indu’s enclosure, hang out with her during her daily cleaning, and feed her. It was a marvelous experience and very much worth the price.
Indu is the Phoenix Zoo’s only elephant (the Tucson Zoo has a bunch—and they’re African elephants, too!), and her enclosure is right next to the rhino’s enclosure. It turns out they get along great. In fact, the zookeepers suspect that Indu thinks the rhino is a baby elephant. Evidently she often reaches through the bars to pet him with her trunk.
Armstrong and Getty
I joined Jack Armstrong of the Armstrong and Getty show to discuss the importance of the “leak” in the Supreme Court’s abortion case. I maintain that it’s not as big a deal as people are trying to make it out to be. (If the justices are amenable to political pressure, then they were already amenable to such pressure even without this leak; it’s not news to them that abortion is a controversial subject.) But we also got into some other things. You can listen here.
Debt and demagoguery
I mentioned on Twitter some weeks ago that laws abolishing debts are one of only three categories of laws that The Federalist calls “wicked.” The tweet went viral, with a delightful number of absurd counterpoints being made by people who evidently aren’t familiar with the political philosophy of our Constitution. So I wrote up an article for Discourse to explain.
Quoting Cicero and Aristotle? Gee, I suppose if I must, I must…
Star Trek: The Motion Picture remastered
The new, fully remastered version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was recently released on Blu-Ray, and Fathom Events also put it on the big screen in theaters around the country, so we went. It’s lovely to look at, and of course the music is outstanding—to such a degree that it really does sometimes feel like watching an opera—but there were some odd editing choices. One of my favorite scenes, for instance (which, admittedly, was not in the original theatrical release, either) was omitted, while other scenes were included that are a little too long (such as the scene in which Spock cries; this scene is weird because the audience already gets why this whole thing affects Spock by this time; this scene is essentially a re-do of the “this simple feeling” scene).
I’m on record (with Andrew Heaton and TrekProfiles among others) as saying that I think TMP is an underrated film. It’s not great, but it’s much better than people give it credit for. TMP is really the climactic moment of the Roddenberry era of Star Trek. It’s the last film he did before the franchise was taken over by Harve Bennett and Nick Meyer, whose Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan so thoroughly ignores TMP that it effectively makes TMP non-canonical. And TMP presents Roddenberry’s humanist dream in its most lavish and, as I’ve said, operatic format. In fact, superb as Star Treks II, III, and IV are, they are in essence a six-hour remake of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
What I mean is this: TMP—which, by the way, is Leonard Nimoy’s finest performance—is the story of Spock becoming human. We see him first at the verge of eliminating emotion entirely from his life and becoming a being of “total logic.” He fails in this effort, and he resents it. When he comes aboard the Enterprise, he is cold toward Kirk and others (in the “please sit down” scene, Nimoy gives Shatner the best “please don’t reach out to me” look with his eyes; it’s masterful). He’s actually seething: at them, and at himself, for the fact of their shared humanity.
What he discovers by mind-melding with V’Ger is that it has attained total logic—and it is cold, barren. It asks itself “is there nothing more?” By the end of the film, Spock has realized that his quest was foolhardy and that he is richer and wiser for having not attained total logic.
In Star Treks II, III, and IV, Spock goes through that whole journey again, starting out as a man of solid logic (though not so cold as he was before). He sacrifices himself because logic demands that the needs of the many take precedence over the needs of the one. In III, however, he learns the lesson from Kirk that in fact the needs of the one take precedence over the needs of the many. And that lesson takes root to such a point that the climax of the trilogy comes with Spock’s line in IV when he tells Kirk they must rescue Chekov; when Kirk asks if that’s logical, Spock replies, “No. But it is the human thing to do.” Spock has at last attained humanity. He has learned, as he later tells Valeris, that logic is only the beginning of wisdom.
In other words, The lesson of Star Trek is that Spock is wrong.
TMP tells us all of this, but it does more. At the end of the film, Decker and Ilia merge with V’Ger not only to share their humanity with it, but to share with it something that in Roddenberry’s humanist view is humanity’s most precious jewel: love—and specifically erotic love. This may be a very 1970s notion, but it is clearly Roddenberry’s point. V’Ger doesn’t just want to communicate with the Creator. It wants to join with the Creator—to physically combine with it. To “grok” it, as Heinlein would say. In the context of Ilia and Decker, that transcendence takes the form of sexual union, and the gorgeous light scene at the end of the film is a metaphorical orgasm in which V’Ger—which Spock earlier called “a child”—grows up, and with that maturity attains a deeper, incommunicable understanding of the meaning of existence. It learns that there is more. “What more is there than the universe, Spock?” McCoy asks. “Other, dimensions, higher levels of beings,” Kirk suggests. “The existence of which cannot be proved logically,” Spock confirms.
When the danger has passed, the three stand on the bridge and reflect on what they’ve seen. It’s a birth, they decide: the creation of new life through the merging of opposites. And the parents of that new life form are Ilia and Decker.
As I’ve said, it’s a very 70s idea. But it’s a lovely one—the very opposite of cynical—and presented with such gorgeous music and scenery, that one can’t help but admire TMP, despite its many flaws.
Coming in June…
I’ll have something to say about whether the libertarian support for conservative judges was a foolhardy choice, as some are now suggesting, as well as reviews of Mary Grabar’s book on the 1619 Project and some new books on art. And I’ll have a lot more to say about the Indian Child Welfare Act, briefing in the Brackeen case is now underway.