Kirk Your Enthusiasm (18)

What do you think?

1. Inspired anatomizing of the psychic purpose in Kirk’s cadences; you’ve given me a greater understanding of Shatner’s motives and means (and Laurie Anderson’s) — it takes a poet to hear what’s here. Some of my favorite Kirk Your Enthusiasm phrases included, especially the “radiating probability tree” — just the other day I was reflecting how, notwithstanding Shatner’s kvetch at not being cameo’d in it, the JJ Abrams Trek movie conveys that reassuring sense that, Avalon-like, every era will have its Kirk…

2. Yes, Albion & the return of the king! Kirk certainly exemplifies a whole suite of kingly archetypes.

3. I never before thought of a particular purpose for Kirk’s signature, much-mocked, halting, discordant cadence! It struck me as an exaggerated case of being distracted by the sound of your own voice.

   But perhaps it’s all this time-travel business. I saw a presentation once, I forgot the topic, about how everything in the physical universe has a speed limit, sound-waves, light, tactile sensations, even thought — it’s all whizzing from whichever of our sensory receptacles receives the stimuli and then shooting up the pathways to the brain, rattling around up there being synchronized into what we perceive as the present. But on a nano-scale, all of this takes time and by the time all of these different-paced stimuli are synced and replayed for us, we are actually, continually living in the recent past. It’s already happened. Maybe Kirk is evolved enough where he is putting things together more consciously and quickly than we mere, a-step-slow mortals. Like Kirk has his own Omega 13 device (if it is not blasphemous to make such a reference).

   And you have provided an explanation for the inspired casting for JJ Abrams’ Trek movie! Not a groaner in any of the choices! I am least comfortable with the incarnation of the new neo-Spock, as it’s hard to conceive of the young Spock as more impulsive than the old, as that was a work-in-progress throughout the voyages, earned through experience and repeated exposure to Kirk, McCoy, etc. Even Spock Prime seemed changed when sharing screen space with his younger self. It was wicked smart of Abrams to reverse fields with his Kirk by introducing him as a much more comic character, who built toward melodrama. The Kirks are ultimately reconciled with each comfortably comic and histrionic, and all is right with the universe, at least until the sequel.

4. Throwing punches and leaping neurons, you may be right about Kirk’s physical thinking, Esoth. As to the personality arcs in the Abrams flick, I think each character was swinging acrobatically along the branches of that probability tree to what they know is their core — each from a legitimately divergent root.

5. great piece! I am yet again soothed by Trek wisdom– it’s not an epic fail as long as one of your multiplicity survives.

6. Or as long as one Kirk takes on the burden of all the rest of our sins, Annie — like in Trek V when he declines the Vulcan prophet’s removal of his driving pain, or Trek: Generations when he leaves his own parallel-timeline paradise to go fight and die nobly. It takes a true messiah to accept that somewhere, someone is making it through, and that someone very likely isn’t you.

7. The post on the edge of forever. Kirk’s temptation to jump and lose himself? A kind of temporal Thanatos impulse without death. Maybe.

8. I think the honeytrap here is for the viewers. This “time” (haha) Kirk is *really in love, we’re meant to believe she’s completely different from all the other soft-focus succubi. That’s because the viewers’ emotional buy-in is needed for the underlying IRL Vietnam-era political point: pacifists cause war, or worse (a Nazi-controlled aftermath). A just peace is only winnable through war.

   Setting the ep in the depression also gives reverse-justification to the Red round-up that destroyed the Old Left, just as the New Left was looking back in nostalgia upon its ideals (and its membership); and remixing its raconteurs in the 60s folk revival.

9. An attentive and depressing analysis, Peggy, which didn’t compute to my childhood mind since it was dissonant with everything Trek was supposed to be about — a cleancut vindication of hippie ideals, at least implicitly in its vision of an achievable utopia, at least in what we were willing to read into it (only when I hit the adolescent age of the hippies themselves would I start to read *out* the colonial and conflict-affirmative implications that are more really there). Of course in context of its era this ep is not entirely out of tune, just a strange variation — WW2 was, for most of us suburban counterculturalists and many of the real thing, the war to which the overseas one we were then currently in was measured unfavorably; a lot of us were fine with the idea of killing fascists in the 1940s and fighting their perceived heirs in the streets on the way to our own just peace-and-love. As someone who was barely 10 when the 1960s officially ended with the Ford-era slumber of ’74, any actual fight was a mere abstraction to me, but it was a pervading presence in all the assassinations and riots piping in along with Trek reruns on the TV, and my older brother’s counting-down draft number, and everyone’s general edgy mood…so another reason I overlooked the anti-peace subtext of this episode was that, regardless of the particulars, it was clear that Edith Keeler couldn’t last, because peace like that belonged to an unreachable past and a future that, for us at least, might only ever be televised.

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