I finally found it! The Red Alert cue from
Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFTzZH3djwsI'd been looking for this for years. It's very rare music. And this cue includes my favorite moment in the film, the segment from 2'01" to 2'15", when the Enterprise approaches the cloud on full power. It's my personal symbol of the excellence of optimistic sentient power. Seriously, that image in seared into my consciousness as an intimate emblem of what human beings can really do.
I could try and explain what's so significant about it. Have you ever thought about where the electricity comes from on a boat, or car, or airplane? There's no proverbial wall outlet to plug into. All electrical power is internally generated. Where? In the engines! A vehicle, unless it is connected to an external power source like an electrified rail, is nothing without its engine.
So it is with a starship. A starship generates its power internally, in the warp core, where matter and antimatter collide in spectacular fashion. Under normal operation, the resulting power (called "main power" or "warp power") is applied to the ship's systems, including the warp engines--which are not true "engines" but more properly "motors" (with some allowance made for the fact that starships distribute power through "electro-plasma" rather than electricity). "Warp engine" is thus a misnomer; the real engine is the warp core.
But! It's
all a part of the so-called "warp drive." The reason a vehicle is nothing without its engine is that that engine will be used for propulsion: a vehicle is nothing without propulsion. Warp drive is the key mode of propulsion in the Star Trek universe. Whereas the other propulsion systems are more like "position changers," the warp drive is an honest-to-goodness "paradigm shifter," and is the central plot device of the Star Trek universe.
In the first six Star Trek movies, the ones featuring history's most beautiful Enterprise, the inside (but not the outside) of the Enterprise's warp nacelles light up in a brilliant blue when the warp drive is engaged. Subsequent Star Trek films forgot about this detail, and only showed the nacelles lighting up when the Enterprise was at warp, but
The Motion Picture tried to be technically accurate, correctly showing the nacelles lighting up whenever the warp drive was engaged, even if the ship wasn't actually traveling at warp speed at the time. The distinction to take to heart is given in the contrast of the phrases "on warp power" versus "at warp speed." The latter is something a starship does, but the former is something a starship
is. And, by the nature of starships, and vehicles generally, this isn't just a secondary trait. A starship on warp power is a starship fulfilling its destiny. In the scene when the Enterprise approaches the cloud, it does so with the warp nacelles fully lit up--and the music swelling to cosmic emotional height.
http://drexfiles.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/uss-enterprise-star-trek-the-motion-picture-directors-cut-4.jpgNotice that the impulse engines are dark in that picture: unneeded, as surely as a bird needs no feet in flight.
The cloud, meanwhile, is an enormous threat to the Federation and to humanity in particular. Wider in diameter than the Earth's own orbit around the sun, generating more power than the sun, and having utterly destroyed every ship and station that crossed its path--a path pointing straight for Earth--the Enterprise is sent against all odds to intercept and investigate the intruder. The entity at the heart of the cloud would later turn out to be humanity's own handiwork (thus the course for Earth), but at this point in the film it is all a total unknown. Nobody knows what lies inside the cloud. It isn't a villain. There does turn out to be a conscious entity inside, but it bears no enmity. Thus the cloud does not represent evil. It represents, instead, the very two things for which Starfleet exists, and to which humanity is inherently driven: adversity, and the unknown.
So perhaps you can imagine why it is so beautiful to me, that one moment in the film, a rare glimpse of the Enterprise glowing in the darkness of space by the brilliance of its own power, power set against the utter immensity of the vastly more powerful and perfectly ordered cloud, an enlightened ship of enlightened people moving forward toward the unknown, toward adversity, people who mean to explore and learn and thereby dominate their own destiny, shaping the future to their will on behalf of all humanity. To even be allowed to approach the cloud is an immense honor, the privilege of a cunning and creative people who time and again survived the threat of extinction by their own hands. That warp drive didn't invent itself; people made it. The warp drive is herein a metaphor for self-determination
and the civilization which makes self-determination truly possible. Of all the things we humans might spend our time doing, Star Trek says that we spend some of that time building the instruments of our lasting and fulfilling future.
The Enterprise spends much of the film with its warp drive disengaged, and subsequent films don't show the nacelles glowing when the ship isn't at warp, so the rarity of this moment, and its contrastiveness, intensifies its significance to me.
But if that was all a bit much for you to appreciate, here is the simple crux of it, removed from the Star Trek imagery: It is beautiful to have internal power, and to shine out from within amid an obscure and adversarial world. That's why this image is so significant to me, and the inspiration for my personal philosophical sigil, the
Inner Awe, a thought so lofty that even the Kingdom of Zeal would have had to look up to it.
