Rivenrock Gardens Blog

   I spent the late morning watching Star Trek ‘The Next Generation’. It was a most unique episode wherein Captain Picard is transported into the mind and body of a citizen of a dying culture that wishes to pass on it’s existence to other cultures with whom it does not yet have a means of communication. So they launch a probe that one thousand years later finds a ship (the Enterprise) in the vastness of space and locates the captain, knocking him unconscious and influencing his unaware brain to dream the existence of a life in the community of ‘Kitahn’ (we used to have a cat by that name) before their sun goes supernova and destroys the entire planet. This was their way of passing on their life and love to others. This episode seems to me to be emblematic of the lives of most peoples through the years; loves, community, friendship and family were all highlighted as he lived a full forty years in the dream of this place. The visuals of the architecture were astounding, a mix of Greco-Roman-Aztec, with some space-type geometrical patterns thrown in. Even though television is often called ‘the great wasteland’, this episode seemed to pull together all the best elements of classical

   The Mayan codexes, the Library of Alexandria, all of the lost or destroyed writings of the ancients, these are what this episode showed these doomed people trying to protect. There is such a wealth of information that is lost each generation, especially during those sad times that mankind falls into every thousand years or so. The depths of depravity and barbarism that seems to be so enticing to so many on occasion tend to come and go as the millennia pass.