To Seek Out New Life

Long ago, in this galaxy, on our own planet earth, a television show changed, shaped and inspired my tiny life during my “formative years”.  As a young brain forming new connections between feelings, thoughts, and judgments, searching for ethics and for something beyond my own society’s troubled multiple standards of “morality” and even the sense of what should be sacred,  this hour-long nightly play about humanity in the distant future was just the ticket.

It was my ticket out of one place and time and into many others, far out into the reaches of the unknown, experiencing, along with the crew of the Enterprise the greatest adventures of all—understanding the diversity and endless intelligences of the universe.

It’s hard to explain to anyone who isn’t or hasn’t been a Star Trek fan what this constellation of feelings about life in general and your own life in particular can be.  It can be magical, a source of a strange, deep sense of hope—that we are better than the wars we seem to be constantly waging here and now; that we will rise above our petty, planet-bound prejudices in order to take a wider, truer view of all that the universe has to show us.  The certainty that our acquisitive nature can be swept away before our curiosity, and we will make discoveries not for the hope of conquering or purchasing, but for the simple wonder of learning about those different from ourselves.

In escaping the venalities of human nature, we expanded our capacity for higher intelligence, created a more spiritual equation when determining the meaning of our lives.  All this happened aboard the Enterprise, and though her crew changed over her incarnations and over the several spin-off series, my own most beloved crew is still the first one.  I saw some eternal jesting truth in the dynamics and dialogue of the characters of Spock, Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov, and even that awkwardly hopeful Nurse Chapel, in love from afar with the ever-remote Spock.

There’s a comfort in hearing the well-loved dialogue that says so much more than the text, because it speaks of teamwork, and brotherly love, and honor and the struggle to become better than we are in all the ways that count when you’re out in space with only your highest principles calling for your actions.

Like many other people out there, I would hold this singular feeling that is attached to Star Trek: a wide, strong concept of how I wanted to live.  I wanted to be open to the call to adventure, and to the call to understand the unknown, whether it was through science or travel or listening to people different from me that I genuinely wanted to understand and appreciate for their differences.  I believed we were going somewhere, and it was good—the journey was good and so was the destination.  We would wake up and realize that we are all on the greatest adventure there is, so why not do it right?  Do it with passion and humor and boldly go where no one has gone before.  The show was so inspirational that it was almost magic, and not just for this one weird writer, but for many thousands, perhaps millions, of other people.

However, I hadn’t watched Star Trek in years, and I’d lost that magic awhile ago, although I didn’t know it at the time. I was working on the Harrison Ford show as the latest Star Trek film was about to be released, and learned that three of my friends in camera had worked on the new Star Trek.  When I asked them what they thought of the movie after working on it, they all got this look in their eye.  They were unanimous and sincere when they told me it was going to be fantastic.  These guys were experienced cameramen, not Trekkers, and two were fairly young—too young to have caught the first big Star Trek flight of fandom on television.  But they had that look in their eye—-they’d seen something about that movie that affected them—I would even say amazed them.

When I finally saw the new Star Trek movie myself, three weeks ago, as I sat in the theater watching the end credits for familiar names, I realized I had been utterly re-made.  My psyche was energized with a familiar force I’d nearly forgotten.  Those feelings that Star Trek had created in me throughout college and graduate school inspired the idealism that led me to work with dolphins on interspecies communication, and the hope that we as a species were going to grow and become better stewards of our own planetary life and peace.  Yet all the future that I felt every day as a promise ahead of me, the hope that colored every day, that had begun with Star Trek—had, over time and disappointment, and failure of my own plans under a creeping cynicism, slowly, slowly faded until I just didn’t feel the magic anymore.

And my life suffered for it. For years I hadn’t thought much further out than just getting that dolphin book published somehow, just getting that house sold so I could finally pay some of my credit card debts.  Just making a living.  The point of it all slivered away in tiny increments until I forgot what Star Trek had had the power to do to my perception and energy level and sense of hope and meaning.

But when I saw the new Star Trek, in the space of two hours I remembered everything I had forgotten.  Weeks on, I still feel this brilliant, familiar Star Trek energy.  I’m not a fan so much anymore this time around; I’m not heading out to any Star Trek conventions any time soon, but once again Star Trek has enriched my life and psyche in ways that no television show or movie has ever done.  Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Now I can see, over all the years and various guises, over all the dozens, if not hundreds of writers and directors involved in creating Star Trek, with this latest cinematic creation, the magic still works.