I am not Spock

“Change is the essential process of all existence” – Spock

In 1975 the actor Leonard Nimoy published his first autobiography. The book took its title from one of its chapters: “I Am Not Spock”. The phrase comes from an incident at an airport. On running into the actor, a mother tells her daughter that the man in front of them is Spock. The girl didn’t look very convinced, so Nimoy explains that he isn’t really Spock, just the actor who played the character. From that anecdote Nimoy builds a text about how he came to develop the character.

Nowhere in the book does Nimoy disown the character; he even says that given the chance to play any fictional character he would have picked Spock without hesitation. In time, Nimoy admitted it was a mistake to pick that title for the book. As usually happens, nobody read the book or bothered to check anything, and the myth was born that the actor despised Spock as a character. The mistake keeps being repeated to this day, after the actor’s death.

In 1995 Leonard Nimoy wrote a second volume of his autobiography, titled “I Am Spock”. The foreword of that book is a letter from Spock to Leonard Nimoy expressing his confusion at how illogical the title of the first part was. In this book Nimoy repeats that Spock has always been a part of him, as an actor and as a person.

But it doesn’t matter. Very few people have probably read his autobiography, and the obituaries will tell over and over how Nimoy had mixed feelings about the character of Spock.

The end of my vacation caught me off guard with the sad news of the death of the veteran actor and film director. My son sent me a WhatsApp message, with a sad face: “spock died :(”.

Those who know me know I’m a “Trekkie”, one of those fans who has watched many times over the series created by Gene Roddenberry, who imagined a future world where science and technology have eliminated most of human greed, where replicators can hand any food to any person just for the asking, where computers converse with people looking for solutions to transcendental problems, where exploring new worlds and the mysteries of the universe is the main motivation of the species. Where wars are over because we have reached a high degree of maturity as a society. A techno-socialist utopia, as some have labeled it.

All of us Star Trek fans are dreamers. We would like to be able to visit strange new worlds, to stop worrying about money, debt, poverty, hunger and war, and devote ourselves to fulfilling our dreams as people.

If you hear Star Trek’s optimistic message at a very early age, and you are able to take it in, it’s impossible not to be moved by it.

But if you are a kid with deeper concerns, one who questions his father’s beliefs (“if God is love, why does he allow suffering in the world?”), then not only does the message get stronger, the character of Spock becomes a role model.

In the episode “Dagger of the Mind”, Spock and McCoy have the following exchange:

Mr. Spock: Interesting. You Earth people glorify organized violence for forty centuries, but you imprison those who employ it privately.
Dr. McCoy: And, of course, your people found an answer.
Mr. Spock: We disposed of emotion, Doctor. Where there’s no emotion, there’s no motive for violence.

I suppose that shaped the way I saw the world as a teenager, because for a long time I really did repress my emotions and considered Spock a role model.

In “Plato’s Stepchildren”, an episode that went down in history because it features the first interracial kiss in the history of American television, there is this other exchange:

Dr. McCoy: The release of emotions, Mr. Spock, is what keeps us healthy, emotionally healthy, that is.
Mr. Spock: That may be, Doctor. However, I have noted that the healthy release of emotion is frequently very unhealthy for those closest to you.

These exchanges cemented the image of the Vulcans: peaceful but serious people who try to remove all emotion from their lives, a harder task for Spock, because being half human he had emotions, just like the rest of us, which made you identify with the character even more.

But Mr. Spock himself gives the answer in the 1991 film “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”:

“Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”

In the process of growing up and maturing I learned this.

Emotions are part of you, as much as logic is. You have to learn to express them, even the most violent ones, because otherwise you can get seriously ill. Depression, which has affected me too, has its origin in repressed anger. In time I learned to express my anger, much more than I used to, and I overdid it. I became violent and irritable.

Learning to calibrate my feelings, to find a balance, is still a permanent quest in my life. I can’t deny that Mr. Spock was a big influence on my personal development, but fortunately I grew up, matured and discovered that I am not Spock, that nobody can be like Spock, really.

Nimoy’s great achievement was to embody this very strange character, one we could only conceive of in an extraterrestrial. But don’t try to take him as a model of personality; that’s childish. The best part of being human is the emotions, the good ones and the bad ones. We are what we are thanks to them, and trying to repress them is not good.

What we should take from the character is his wisdom and his ability to look for peaceful solutions to problems. Sometimes it’s good to step back, think with a cooler head and use logic, which is nothing more than looking for the most reasonable solution.

This post is to express my affection for the character and for the man who played him, the great Leonard Nimoy. His death made me sad but, as Spock would say, it is the logical consequence of his age and state of health :-).

I just wanted to write this to say goodbye. Goodbye Leonard Nimoy, goodbye Spock, “I have been, and always shall be, your friend”.