ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 6, 1997 TAG: 9701060097
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: MONTY S. LEITCH
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
A COUPLE of mornings ago, I rounded a curve at the top of a little rise to see, in the hollow below me, a long and slender twist of fog, delicately suspended some 30 feet off the ground, all along the length of that shallow valley. Banks and clouds of fog hugged patches of earth all around - I had driven through several swaths - but this frail ribbon floated alone, as if it were an independent entity moving through Floyd County.
"The Nexus!" I breathed excitedly, naming it immediately from within my experience.
Now, for those of you not as conversant with "Star Trek" references as I, the Nexus is a thready disturbance in the space-time continuum that whips randomly through the universe. Those who are caught in the Nexus experience heaven-like visions, so pleasant and seductive that they never want to leave, never want to return to life in the "real world."
So pleasant and seductive, in fact, that a disturbed and manic individual (in this case, the "bad guy" of the movie "Star Trek: Generations") might destroy entire planets, along with their populations, just to achieve permanent, personal habitation within the Nexus.
In short, the Nexus is nothing real. It is a figment derived from a tissue of lies, derived from the collectively lively imaginations of aging hippies and nerds, who read too much as kids and who now watch way too much TV.
In short, it is a cultural referent for the culturally bereft.
Or, are we?
Culturally bereft, that is.
We "Star Trek" fans, that is.
In short, is the Nexus really nothing real?
I know a Trekkie who argues that all the Star Trek writers, from the originals right down to those who struggle with "Voyager," are thwarted poets, frustrated novelists, and/or unemployable English majors who've nevertheless found a way to put their "canonical" educations to use, despite the publishing world's general literary elitism.
My Trekkie friend makes a good case, too. Remember all those Utopian societies upon which the crew of the Enterprise stumbled (Sir Thomas More, St. Augustine and Jonathan Swift, for example)? And all of those loaded character names, such as "Chekov" (obvious), "Kirk" (Old English for "church"), and "Spock" (from "baby boomers," for pity's sake!)?
And what, other than years of vaunted liberal-arts education, could account for the fact that one of the best lines in one of the best "Star Trek" movies is a quotation from Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"? "To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee!" Captain Ahab "spit" at the whale Moby Dick; Khan - another loaded name! - (a k a Ricardo Montalban) spit at James T. Kirk. (If you don't believe me, see page 721 of the Bobbs-Merrill academic edition of "Moby Dick," used by every college English major since 1964.)
Even the Nexus, itself, is carefully named. The word means "connection" or "link," "a connected group or series" - a rather Judeo-Christian, theological conception of a rip in the time-space continuum, if you ask me.
Oh, yes, we Trekkies know (the titles, at least) of all the classics. We all took "Physics for Poets," too, and most of us passed. We asked not what our country could do for us, but what we could do for our country; and then, soon after the bombing of Cambodia, we realized that one of the things we could actually do, and do rather well, was entertain wild notions.
In an interview in the January Playboy, Whoopi Goldberg - one of our more enlightened and enlightening celebrities - is asked about her recurring role in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." "I love 'Star Trek,' always have," she tells the interviewer. "People put down Trekkies because they don't really understand what they are. The thing is, they are people who want this idea of the future to be real, where there's a united front and a future where all types of people hang together and fly through the galaxy and it is very hip."
What a wild notion! That there should be, in the future, a united front, with all types of people. That all types of people might hang together. That there should be peace and equality among all the nations of the Earth. Under the auspices of a governmental body!
Oh, sure, even then the poor will always be with us. Uh, that is, the Klingons will always be with us. (Or the Cardassians or the Ferengi.) But isn't it just possible - that "nexus" - that connection across time and space?
And haven't we always thought so?
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times columnist.
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