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2008 Who do you think you really are?
For WFCR and WNNC
By Francesca Rheannon
For his project "Who do you think you really are?" Leonard Nimoy invited
a hundred people to a Massachusetts basement to reveal their inner selves to him and his
camera. Northampton Mayor Clare Higgins showed up carrying a guitar.
The project was inspired
by a Greek legend mentioned in Plato's Symposium. 'Once upon a time', the story goes,
'humans were twice the people we are today with two heads and four arms and legs. But
we got too big to abridge us. So God sent Zeus to cut us in two with a sword. Ever
since then people have been looking for their other half so they can feel whole again.'
Nimoy says the other half is the secret self.
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"The lives that we live are the lives that we have to live which obey economic reasons, social reasons, cultural reasons and the other is the part of yourself that does not want to, does not need to do that, that wants to do that other thing, being a child, being a mountain climber, being a rock star, being in front of a whole audience, in front of a mirror. So, that's the secret self, it's the other you live with, you dream about and fantasize about. The 15 minutes photo-session has turned up all kinds of surprises for Nimoy like the woman who came to the shoot with a pile of books." "My sense of her was she was that books, she has absorbed them and internalized them all to such a degree that she identifies with the books. She staged them in a way that you saw a human figure in the books and she embraced the stag. It was terribly moving." Then there are those whose secret expresses are spiritual vocations.
Someone came with an extra-body experience which he would not have told others, but felt he could tell Nimoy. Does Leonard Nimoy have a secret self? Leonard Nimoy (laughing): "Of course, of course, I have many, and I have portrayed them in films and television, it's the story of my life."
