Thoughts on Spock

From an early point in my Star Trek obsession, I identified with Spock. Exactly why and how is a topic best treated as an underlying theme in this blog, because whenever I try to address the subject as the main theme of a single text, it goes out of hand. This influence is such a vast one that it seems to have bearing on every single aspect of my life, and an analysis of my identification with Spock would in effect end up as an exhaustive autobiography.

This identification was, and is, important to my love for Star Trek. There are many other things I love about TOS: what it reveals about its own time, the visual appearance, the drama, the humour both intended and unintended, Captain Kirk. I don't think the show would have sparked so much thought and self-reflection in me without Spock, though.

With identification, or any other kind of strong feelings for a character, comes projection. The way I see everything Spock says or does depends on my own experiences and reactions. This obviously means that I'll probably dislike the majority of other people who identify with Spock, because they are different people with different personalities and histories and understand the character in different ways.

In keeping with this, the person who annoyed me the most in the Star Trek club I joined, and promptly left, a couple of years ago was a man who identified with Spock. Sure, he was tall with an impassive, unsmiling face and prided himself on not being emotional, but from my point of view, the similarities ended there. I smile a lot and believe in being friendly, and I don't think I'm an obvious Spock to most people I meet. I don't want to be, either. What I connect with in the character is his general mentality and his experience of being different, not fitting in anywhere. It annoys me when Spock is seen or represented as being all about an impassive, unsmiling face and pointing out when things aren't "logical", and it infuriates me when fans of his do that to make other people seem stupid.

This man - I'm going to call him Al, because I've completely forgotten his name - committed that unforgivable sin, in my book of Spock identification, of assuming that everything he himself said and did was "logical", while whatever other people said and did that bothered him or he didn't agree with was "illogical". Now, logic is actually a formal science, a branch of mathematics, and the term is used quite loosely in Star Trek, since neither the script writers nor the actors were mathematicians. In many cases, Mr Spock's "logic" has nothing to do with actual logic - it's actually rational thought, or common sense, or practical-mindedness - and logic doesn't apply to most aspects of human daily life. When it comes to functioning in that context, being logical, in the true sense of the word, equals being dumb, in the same way that a computer is dumb.

Al worked as a conductor on the local commuter trains, probably not a very stimulating job, or one that boosts your self-confidence, and he liked to point out how stupid (or, in his words, "illogical") the passengers were. For example, he could loom silently over some passenger in his uniform for an arbitrarily long time before she realised that she wanted to see her ticket. Proof of human stupidity, in his opinion, that he had to ask to see people’s tickets. Here’s one of the basic traits of logic, though: it’s objective, not based on your knowledge, what goes on in your head and the view from where you happen to be. Useful logic must be based on the right assumptions, in this case the assumption that the passengers on a train are reading, listening to music, talking, or lost in thought. Expecting every single one of them to be constantly vigilant and prepared for the conductor’s round isn’t logical, it’s wishful thinking. If this behaviour is repeated, it also signifies a lack of ability to learn from experience and adapt to a recurring situation. Those aren't obvious Spock traits, if you ask me.

I’m not a natural people person, and that’s probably the common denominator for all of us self-proclaimed Spockoids. Instead of providing me with an alibi for interacting with other people as little as possible, though, the character inspires me to make an effort. Addressing somebody or making a phone call, especially to a stranger, is associated with a mental threshold, it takes some effort. However, Spock would never hesitate to approach somebody because he felt lazy (or awkward, or nervous, or what the case might be); if something needs to be communicated, Spock communicates it, regardless of personal feelings, and he makes sure the receiving party understands what he's saying. Anything else would be - irrational, impractical, and opposed to common sense.

Fandom and the Borders of Reality

During my obsession with Star Trek, I cultivated an interest in astronomy and space travel, but it was frustrating. Here and now, launching a space shuttle is a huge and slow affair, with a train of cars following the shuttle as it creeps out to the launch pad, and the cloud of fire at liftoff shows how exasperatingly wasteful the propulsion is. The interior of a space station is cramped and confusing, like a submarine without floors. The astrophysics course I took was almost solely about nuclear reactions in stars, not really about the universe, nebulae, quasars, exoplanets. The only part of it that involved anything even remotely reminiscent of Star Trek was a lecture about supernovas by a postgraduate whose e-mail address started with "jim@astro". I was quite disappointed, my love for nuclear reactions notwithstanding.

Approaching from the other direction, Star Trek's science and technology are cardboard. Attempts at finding out more about warp drive or tachyon particles slam you up against that patchily camouflaged brick wall of reality. I find this less disturbing in TOS, because it's not trying as hard as TNG to construct a coherent, believable world - something that might well be impossible.

One of the lovely things about Age of Sail fandoms, therefore, is their smooth borders to reality. The characters in the novels of C S Forester and Patrick O'Brian are fictional, but their world is real and continues outside those pages: in other books, in museums, and in the world as we know it, since it's the product of its history. There's technobabble in Master & Commander and Hornblower just as there is in Star Trek, but on sailing ships, the technobabble makes sense; it's not smoke and mirrors. The ropes and pulleys each do something very specific and instrumental rather than being there for atmosphere like the buttons, lights, and levers aboard the Enterprise. I'm surprised by how much that means to me. I can go to the library and find books on masts and rigging, or crucial naval actions in the early 19th century, or the social situation aboard the ships of the Royal Navy around the year 1800, and it's ALL REAL. Or rather, was all real (because thankfully, times have changed). O'Brian sometimes retells historical events in his novels, with his characters playing minor parts, and both O'Brian and Forester let their characters come aboard ships that actually existed; there really was a Captain Edward Pellew in command of the Indefatigable, although there was never a Mr. Midshipman Hornblower under him, and the Shannon really did challenge the Chesapeake in the year 1813 (the event has its own Wikipedia entry), but without Jack Aubrey aboard. Sometimes I come across contemporary portraits of people I had thought of as fictional. It's great.

I was thinking of this as I walked along the row of wet thirty-pound cannon on the upper deck of the Jylland the other week. To some extent it was like visiting a reconstruction of the bridge of the Enterprise: the ship is in dry dock and various steel-mesh staircases and even a lift have been installed to facilitate for visitors, there was scaffolding up the foremast and green exit signs glowing on the dimly lit gun deck. The masts were bare; they probably store the sails somewhere dry in winter. In the waist, the sides were some six feet high, but through the gunports I could see the gift shop and the café; from the quarterdeck, the parking space and the surrounding town. The ship is little more than a backdrop, in some ways, and much of it is reconstructed rather than preserved - the Jylland spent decades as a decaying hull under a tarpaulin. Still, what is there is real in the sense that it's historically accurate and would work if you tried it. There's no styrofoam or balsa wood or plastic; everything you touch is hemp and iron, oak and tar, and it all fits together and makes sense. It's a very special kind of fandom-related joy.