...Leonard Nimoy, Writer and Photographer...(1931-2015)...

I did not grow up as a Trekker (or Trekkie, depending on the era or the preferred parlance), but I knew of Star Trek by the Filmation series.  I would not get interested, really, until the films came out and my friends patiently turned me on to the series.  I find, today, the superior nature and true science fiction, especially compared against the space opera of Star Wars.

I fell across I am not Spock by Leonard Nimoy in seventh grade.  For some reason it had made its way to the Brookhurst Junior High Library.  I volunteered my time in putting books away, so I was familiar with every shelf.  Spock happened to be near the south-west corner of the rectangular building, about four shelves from the corner, two shelves from the top.  Colored me intrigued, which was a color I was often back then, and I read it.

[Remember, pre-Internet, there was a time of the 'word of mouth'.  Spock was one of those controversial books, only surprising if you weren't around in the 70s.  There was heated discussions on Nimoy's gall in writing such a book.  No kidding and why my intrigue.]

Having little context of Spock or Nimoy, other than knowing the latter played the former, it was a confounding read.  Come to find later my confusion was not ill-placed: the title was meant to be provocative, not by Nimoy, but by the publishers.  It wasn't even really about Spock, more about Nimoy.  So, um, there it was.

What was more interesting, when revisiting the late actor's books and photography, he had a writer's mind.  Having watched In Search Of... with a fanatical mind of a prepubescent child, his fascinating narration bespoke of someone who had a scientific curiosity, if not some desire for the supernatural.

He wrote poetry.  He was fascinated in the female form.  He craved mythology.  A provocative culmination of these, is his 2002 Shekhina.  It is the visual representation of the God of Moses and Elijah as woman.  Powerful and passionate - these are women as deity and divinity.

He would pen two autobiographies and seven books of poetry.  He wrote three screenplays, including 1981's Vincent and Star Trek IV and Trek VI.

And for the artistry, poems, recitations, my personal feeling is we never truly got the intellect behind Spock.  I've always felt that Nimoy perhaps felt that he couldn't live up to the gravitas of the character and only passively skirted at the fringes of intellect, never delving in and coming back from that journey.