[Spock's POV of the Story told in The Tarbaby]
"You must pardon my tendency to speak of both the Vulcan and the human as if I am able to observe them each objectively. One can not truly be objective in the experience and expression of subjective impressions. Nevertheless, I am in the unique position of being both a member, and to a great extent, an outside observer, of both species. A member, because as has already been noted I am a product of the genetic combination of these two dissimilar species. An outside observer, because I am, in fact, unlike both of them, and I consequently enjoy a unique perspective.
"It is my sincere wish to tell the whole truth, but in fact, under these conditions that is impossible. The most profound truths can not be precisely expressed with words, which is why mathematics as a means of communicating with humans is generally preferable. Both mathematics and music are more effective means than the use of language. Unfortunately, the average human relies upon the use of language exclusively. When one is required to communicate, however imperfectly, with a broad spectrum of humanity, one is in effect forced to use either language or pictures, or a combination of the two, to accomplish this, and that is what you require of me now. So be it.
"Language is metaphorical, inexact, and relatively undemanding as a discipline and mode of expression. Minds which are incapable of exactitude, and unwilling to accept the rigors of the finer disciplines, are through the use of language, equipped to express themselves only with broad strokes, which of course is better than no strokes at all.
"I am required under these conditions to, in effect, attempt to paint the Mona Lisa with a paint roller. You will forgive my extensive use of metaphors and similes under these conditions. Language is metaphorical at best, and is most useful when one wields it to paint pictures in the human imagination. Those lacking the human's holistic imaginative capacity, such as my Vulcan relatives, will naturally miss much, but it is not I who have chosen this occasion and means to attempt to tell my truth.
"I should like to have my protest about being limited to the use of language, and only one language, and not the language of my choosing, to be registered as a formal complaint.
"The Vulcan are possessed of a natural ability to share mental impressions rather accurately through touch. This replaces the humans ability to "place one's self in the other guy's shoes" through the use of imagination. As a boy I learned that humans are capable of participating in this process passively. I also learned, through touch, that humans have imaginative capacities that far outstrip those of the normal Vulcan, and that this is for them a significant advantage. A necessary one, since without this capacity a human is virtually crippled. As crippled as if a Vulcan were forbidden to touch to know another's truth, as my Vulcan relatives are now being forbidden to touch me.
"Of course, even the melding of minds fails when one participant's mind fails to grasp the truths presented by the other, as has been shown. As some humans have better imaginations than others, some Vulcans are better able than others in that area. Degree of intelligence is a factor, but the most limiting thing is lack of equivalent experience. It has become apparent to me that even in the melding of minds much of the understanding that takes place is accomplished through the translation of metaphors. If one has no equivalent experience, then one's mind can not fully understand the nature of a wholly unfamiliar thing. I assert that this is true of both humans and Vulcans, and that I know it to be true from my own experience. Since there are no others of my kind who may assert the veracity of this claim, I'm afraid you all shall simply have to take my word for it.
"Therefore, although I may convince any Vulcan of my truthfulness, of my sincerity, that which I am being truthful about may escape their understanding and ability to express via verbal testimony. That is my explanation for the irregularities in the testimony of my Vulcan relatives, and it is as good as you will get. There is much about me they can not explain for you, because they lack the capacity to fully understand me, as, I believe, do you.
"Still, I shall attempt to 'soldier on'. Paradoxically, although I invest no belief in the supernatural, I oddly have learned to expect miracles. Perhaps I might make you understand that, at least.
"My life is paradoxical, by its very nature. That I exist as I am at all is statistically impossible, yet I exist. How can the impossible exist? It can not, and yet it does, as, with my palpable presence here, I now demonstrate.
"If I would be permitted the use of mathematics to answer these accusations, I could prove quite convincingly that I never existed, and that therefore none of what Captain Kirk is accused of could have happened, and we could all go home early. That would be desirable, as the weather is delightful, making it an ideal afternoon for a picnic in some pleasant place, but no. So be it.
"Amanda Grayson, known to you as the wife of Vulcan's ambassador, Sarek, has put forth the proposition that Captain James T. Kirk, known to one and all as one of the most effective and significant Starship commanders of all time, a man of impeccable credentials and stainless reputation, has abused his authority and disgraced the uniform by establishing a detrimental intimate relationship with a subordinate, namely myself. Furthermore she asserts that this was motivated, rather cold-bloodedly, by greed and ambition, and therefore must be regarded to be criminal in intent as well as in effect, and if not by intent then certainly simply by its very nature.
"That such a relationship must be regarded as the exploitation of a subordinate I dispute. That such a relationship is detrimental by its very nature I dispute. That a detrimental relationship between myself and Captain Kirk is established I must dispute, by virtue of a moral imperative, as well as by virtue of a desire to be of service to both truth, and the forces of justice.
"That we enjoy a deeply intimate relationship I do not dispute. Rather than attempt to disprove the very uncharitable claims of my jealous mother, a famously very emotional human woman, I shall attempt to express what exactly the nature of our relationship truly is, with the hope that I might replace these arrant falsehoods with something more nearly resembling the truth.
"It has been my desire to place no picture in your minds of my relationship with James Kirk. I have been deprived of that option through no action of my own. Due to the nature of the human imaginative faculties, I can not remove that picture without offering another to take its place, which I now shall attempt to do.
"Consider the following:
"Vulcans have a natural ability to govern their emotional responses, with reason. This is more than a philosophy, it's the application of, what is for them, a natural brain function. Just as humans quite naturally can imagine themselves to be something they are not, as the children easily do for mere amusement, Vulcans can naturally and easily choose to not experience their own emotions, and can function as if they have none and therefore that their emotions are not motivators. A Vulcan does not require training to be able to do this, but it does require training to live in that state of mind, as it would be rigorously difficult for mentally healthy human beings to live their whole lives as if that which was before their senses wasn't real.
"As one might train a dog to not void its bladder within one's home, I was trained, while very young, to pay no attention to my emotions, and to instead live my life as if all of my actions were motivated purely by logical conclusions. Among the Vulcan this is simple politeness.
"I was a particularly difficult and ungrateful student, because by the time I was subjected to this training I had already been spoilt rotten, so to speak, by my very indulgent human mother, Amanda Grayson. Interestingly, the very thing she accuses Captain Kirk of doing, is nearly the same thing she herself had been accused, by the Vulcan, of unwittingly doing to me.
"To the Vulcan, it appeared that my mother's influence had been selfishly exploitive, and ultimately harmful to me. When they laid hands upon me to begin my proper enculturation, they found me to be unusually resistant to the process, because I had already developed, under my mother's tutelage while yet an infant in her arms, a very humanlike imaginative method for filtering and managing my experience and emotions. I have, like humans, the imaginative faculty, and my mother had developed the faculty in me to a rather extreme degree. I was loath to give it up, since our shared adventures in imaginative realms had been the one pure pleasure we had shared.
"It was a unique relationship, one which had no equivalent among Vulcans nor humans, because I discovered quite independently, at an unusually young age, that I could meld minds with my mother. It was through touch that we communicated, but the touch was unlike any either Vulcans or Terrans had ever known.
"She hadn't intended to "spoil" me. Her intention was to cultivate a normal, humanlike relationship with me. She was a very lonely human surrounded by unemotional Vulcans, and it happens that she craved an emotional companion.
"As my mother, she asserted both her right to indulge herself in such a relationship with me, and my right, as a descendant of Terrans, to participate in such a relationship. For the first four years of my life, the most vulnerable, formative years, the Vulcans allowed it to pass. They had never dealt with a case such as ours before, and frankly no one knew what the hell they were doing.
"There was no intended malice in it, I believe.
"No one involved had any way to truly know what exactly to do. One of my kind had never existed before. There were no established guidelines or parameters. They were quite literally "making it up as they went along". Mistakes were made. How these mistakes might have been avoided must remain forever a mystery.
"Be that as it may, it happens that both my mother and I suffered terribly when my formal education began. Methods which were unusually strict were used to convince me to abandon all I had learned about how to think and live, in favor of the preferred, socially acceptable way. This was psychically very costly for all concerned, including my mother. Perhaps especially for my mother. I doubt that she ever fully recovered from the horror of that experience. In fact, in my view, she is mad as a hatter, and has been since my youth.
"It is possible, if she is so, that I am at fault. No one knows if she would have gone mad without my influence. Yet I was in that instance held blameless, since I was after all a mere child. A child whom, as my Vulcan relatives would no doubt agree, was a perfectly uncivilized, selfish brat.
"This can not be proven, but I put it before you that my mother's reason for throwing this unflattering spotlight upon Captain Kirk is that, since she was not allowed to be happy with me, that no one else should be allowed this, either. Understand her, sympathize with her, but do not feel obliged to agree with her about this.
"Former patterns of behavior and of thought, however valuable they must have once seemed, need not mold the shape of what is to come. I don't require that you agree with that statement, but know that I do.
"I chose to leave my homeworld and pursue a career with Starfleet. What has happened since then is largely a matter of record. What is not a matter of record, what particularly has been my private affair until now I shall add to the record under protest, toward one purpose, and that is to replace Amanda Grayson's unprovoked slanders against Captain James T. Kirk with the facts as I have experienced them.
"I lived as I had been trained to live, in the Vulcan manner, for most of my adult life. This was more habit than preference. Indeed I've had ample reason to prefer other means, since the Vulcan way is not in all cases and on all occasions the best way. No normal Vulcan will agree with that remark, but I am no normal Vulcan, as James Kirk and I both found out "the hard way".
"The Vulcan experience a periodic irresistible urge to mate which coincides with fertility, and this time is called Pon Farr - the time of mating. By the time I was serving under Captain Kirk as his first officer, I had as yet never experienced pon farr, and indeed I had arrived at the conclusion that I never would. I had never experienced sexual desire in any form. I was at that point in my life accustomed to living as a virtual eunuch. I couldn't honestly imagine being otherwise. I expected to live out my days knowing nothing of erotic desire, and was content with this. After all, I knew not what I was missing.
"None of the humans I served with were like me in this. They all were typically human in that the fulfillment of their erotic urges absorbed much of their attention. Not that they were are constantly copulating, but certainly they were always courting the possibility, and occasionally they fanned the possibility into a certainty, and "nature took its course". This mating dance of the humans was always going on all around me, but although I was on rare occasions invited to join the dance I always refused, for I was not moved by the music to join in. I could not hear the music. I was perfectly deaf to it, nor could I even feel the beat of the drums. I was as if a block of wood from the neck down.
"I emphasize *was*, since I am certainly not that way now.
"I experienced the change after I had been serving aboard the Enterprise under Captain Kirk for nearly a year. During that year, Kirk and I had found reason to consider ourselves to be more than comrades, but friends. In fact we were already more than friends. James Kirk was in love with me, but I could not return his love as he would have preferred. You must believe me when I tell you that we both found this regrettable. I was already very fond of him, against all expectations and despite my rigorous Vulcan upbringing.
"He may tell you that he was the one who initiated physical contact but this is not so. It was I who made first contact, in the manner I shall now describe.
"The occasion was a very painful episode, when my friend, my Captain, was nearly insane with grief over the death of his well-loved elder brother. I was moved to react emotionally, partially because of my unresolved issues about my mother.
"You see, I had felt at a distance that type of pain before. When my mother and I were separated, she grieved, as James Kirk was grieving. I had felt her pain then, as I was now feeling my friend's grief. In my mother's case I was forbidden to interfere. I was physically prevented from assuaging her grief. In Captain Kirk's case, I was not only not prevented from doing so, but I felt it to be my duty to intervene, for the good of the ship and crew. He was nearly suicidal, and I felt he was at that time a danger to himself. I also wished to know, for my own sake, if an intervention of the type I was planning might actually prove helpful. That is, I wished to satisfy my own curiosity about whether or not a deep mind meld might have had the power to heal my mother's anguish, as I hoped it would do for Jim.
"I reacted emotionally to something which was arguably none of my business. No Vulcan would have done what I did because no Vulcan would have reacted emotionally. No human would have done what I did because none of them could sense what I was sensing. In short, it was a selfish experiment and I didn't know what the hell I was doing. If any ill has come of it, that is my responsibility.
"My thinking at the time was only that Jim was my friend, and my duty as both his first officer and his friend seemed to dictate that I assuage his pain and help him to manage his wild grief for the good of all concerned. Those were my conscious intentions. I can't say for certain, but I suspect I may have been driven by unconscious needs as well.
"I approached my Captain without his explicit demand or permission to do so, and placed my hands upon him, and established a meld. I connected with him in a manner that, to outside observers, would have seemed to be a conventional mind meld, but in fact it was deeper than that, because of my emotional investment. Jim and I became more than one mind, we joined souls, and I did not have control over all that was altered in us both by this process. We were both very changed by the process, and the changes initially seemed simply positive. I was successful in mitigating the extreme emotional pain he was in, and, in retrospect, I understood that I had accomplished this partially by taking his brother's place in his heart. He, by the way, had assumed my mother's former place in mine.
"There is more, but to avoid taxing your patience I'll not enumerate all the effects I've subsequently cataloged. I have composed a heretofore unpublished treatise on the subject which I offer as supporting evidence and which I now ask be appended to the official record and inserted at this point.
"In short, that Captain Kirk saw my unexpected period of Pon Farr as an opportunity to deepen and solidify our already very solid relationship should not be interpreted as a willful act on his part. It may very well have been a reaction which I unwittingly set like a time bomb when I delved into his mind in that invasive manner at that very sensitive time in his life. That was not my conscious intention, I assure you.
"Nevertheless....
"Therefore, although it is true I wasn't entirely in my right mind and fully self-possessed when I agreed to embrace James Kirk sexually during Pon Farr, it is not true that he in any way took advantage of my unusually receptive state. He was drawn to me at that time, due, I don't doubt, to the strong bond which I myself had put into place. He therefore should be held to be blameless, even if this did in any way lead to undesired effects, which I feel constrained to emphasize, it did not.
"To the contrary: I assert that my partnership with Captain Kirk has been and is, obviously, hugely beneficial to us both, not to mention very pleasurable for us both. Indeed, to me it is the most wonderful thing in my life. I ask that you not destroy now, with a careless decision, what I now experience as my one most precious reason for living.
"That concludes my oral statement. I am now prepared to verbally answer your questions."
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