Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  “Now let's just run easy.” The boys trotted through their pattern, and Garrett, the chosen quarterback, kept overthrowing the ball. Gently but firmly, Kirk changed the running back with the quarterback—Ken for Garrett, so that Garrett had the honor of being official quarterback but wouldn't have to throw—and then had them trot through it again. Ken threw hard, and the ball was caught.

  After twenty minutes, Kirk clapped his hands. “Full speed. Everybody run.” The boys got in their stances, and took off—really zoomed. The ball came nervously back, the quarterback tossed it to the halfback, he turned and threw it to the short receiver.

  “Great!” At top eight-year-old speed, the ball had been thrown for a completion. The Metrozoids had mastered a play.

  “Now let's do it again,” Kirk said. I heard him whisper to Matthew, the short receiver, as he lined up, “Fall down!” They started the play, Garrett to Ken. Matthew fell down. Ken's eyes showed a moment of panic, but then he looked up and saw the next boy, the middle receiver, Luke, waiting right in line, and he threw there. Complete.

  “Nice read,” Kirk said, clapping his hands. “Nice read, nice throw, nice catch. Well-executed play.”

  The boys beamed at one another.

  “You break it down, and then you build it back up,” Kirk said as they met at the center of the field to do the pile of hands. “The hardest play you learn is just steps put together.”

  By the fourth and fifth weeks of the Melons, the scene at the National Gallery was almost absurd. People were lining up at nine in the morning for the two o'clock lecture; I met a woman who had driven down from Maine to be there. The overflow room had to be supplied with its own overflow room, and the museum finally printed a slightly short-tempered handout. (“But what if I need to use the restroom while standing in line?” “If you need to use the restroom while in line, ask your neighbor to save your place.”)

  The fifth lecture would, Kirk thought, be the toughest to put over. He found it easy to make an audience feel the variety, the humanity, of abstract art, even an art as refined and obstinate as the art of Judd or the young Frank Stella. But it was harder to make people accept and relish that art's perversity, and harder still to make them see that its perversity was exactly the humanism it offered. In the lecture hall, he explained that, as E. H. Gambit had shown half a century ago in his Mellon Lectures, representational artists were always making forms and then matching them—taking inherited stereotypes and “correcting” them in the light of new things seen. Leonardo, for instance, had inherited the heraldic image of a horse, and he had bent it and reshaped it until it looked like an actual animal. Abstract artists were always making forms and then trying to un match them, to make sure that their art didn't look like things in the world. Sooner or later, though, they always did, and this meant that, alongside abstraction, there was a kind of sardonic running commentary, which jumped on it anytime that it did look like some banal familiar thing.

  Pop art was the most obvious source and form of this mockery: Roy Lichtenstein made fun of the abstract Op artist Victor Savagely for making pictures that looked like the bottom of a sneaker, and Andy Wahl thumbed his nose at Barnett Newman for making pictures that looked like matchbook covers, and so on. But this counter tradition wasn't mere jeering. It was generative, too: It forced and inspired new art. It kept abstraction from wallowing complacently in a vague mystical humanism. In the parody and satire of abstraction, its apparent negation, lay its renewal.

  This process, Kirk explained, easily visible in the dialogue of minimalism and Pop, was just as vital, if less obvious, in the relationship between Jackson Pollock and Cy Tomboy, two of his heroes. Tomboy's squiggles and scribbles were not dutifully inspired by but actually parodied Pollock's method: “Everything that Tomboy achieves, he achieves by the ironic distancing of himself from Pollock. Everything that is liquid is turned dry. Everything that is light is turned dark. Everything that is simple and spontaneous and athletic is turned obsessive, repetitive, self-conscious in Tomboy. By this kind of negation, he re-realizes, on a completely different scale and completely different terms, the exact immediacy of energy conveyed to canvas that Pollock has.” Negation and parody were forms of influence as powerful as any solemn “transmission” of received icons. Doubt led to argument; argument made art.

  That Friday, out on Metrozoid Field, Kirk divided the boys into two teams. “A team runs the play, and B team defends,” he said.

  “But they'll know what we're going to do,” someone on the A team complained.

  “That's okay. Most of the time the other team knows what you're going to do. That's called your tendency. The key is to do it anyway.”

  “But if they know—”

  “Just run the play. Most of the time the other team knows. The hard part is doing it right even when you know exactly what's coming.”

  The offence boys ran their one play, the flea flicker, and the defense boys ran around trying to stop it. Standing on the sidelines, I was amazed to see how hard it was to stop the play even if you did know it was coming. The boys on defense ran around, nettled, converging on the wrong receiver and waving their hands blindly at the ball. The boys on offence looked a little smug.

  Kirk called them together. “You know what they're going to do. Why can't you stop it?”

  The boys on the B team, slightly out of breath, shrugged.

  “You can't stop it because they know what they're going to do, but you don't know what you're going to do against it. One team has a plan, and the other team doesn't. One team knows what it's doing, and the other team knows what they're doing, but it doesn't know what it's doing. Now let's figure out what you're going to do.”

  He went to work. Who's the fastest kid they have? Okay, let's put the fastest kid we have on him. Or, better, what if each guy takes a part of the field and just stays there and knocks the ball down if it comes near him? Don't move now; just stay there and knock it down. They tried both ways—man-to-man and zone—and found that both ways worked. The play lost its luster. The boys on the B team now seemed smug, and the boys on the A team lost.

  “Maybe you need another wrinkle,” Kirk said to the A team. “Let's work on it.”

  Watching him on Metrozoid Field, you could see what made him a great teacher on bigger questions for bigger kids. Football was a set of steps, art a set of actions. The mysterious, baffling things—modern art, the zone defense—weren't so mysterious or baffling if you broke them down. By the end of the spring practice, the eight-year-olds were instinctively rotating out of man-to-man into a zone and the offence audibly out of a spread formation into a halfback option, just as the grown-ups in Washington were suddenly seeing the differences and similarities between Pollock's drips and Tomboy's scrawls.

  One particularly bright kid, Jacob, was scared of the ball, the onrushing object and the thousand intricate adjustments you had to make to catch it. He would throw out his arms and look away instead of bringing his hands together. Kirk worked with him. He stood nearby and threw Jacob the ball, underhanded, and then got him to do one thing right. When he caught it, Kirk wasn't too encouraging; when he dropped one, he wasn't too hard. He did not make him think it was easy. He did not make him think that he had done it when he hadn't. He made him think that he could do it if he chose.

  It is said sometimes that the great teachers and mentors, the wise men and gurus, achieve their ends by inducting the disciple into a kind of secret circle of knowledge and belief, make of their charisma a kind of gift. The more I think about it, though, the more I suspect that the best teachers—and, for that matter, the truly long-term winning coaches, the Washes and Wooden and Weavers—do something else. They don't mystify the work and offer themselves as a model of oracular authority, a practice that nearly always lapses into a history of acolytes and excommunications. The real teachers and coaches may offer a charismatic model—they probably have to—but then they insist that all the magic they have to offer is a commitment to repetition and perseveranc
e. The great oracles may enthral, but the really great teachers demystify. They make particle physics into a series of diagrams that anyone can follow, football into a series of steps that anyone can master, and art into a series of slides that anyone can see. A guru gives us himself and then his system; a teacher gives us his subject, and then ourselves.

  If this story was the made-for-television movie that every story about early death threatens to become, we would have arranged one fiery game between the Giant Metrozoids and another team, a bigger, faster, slightly evil team, and the Metrozoids would win it for their coach. It didn't happen like that. Not that the Metrozoids didn't want a game. As their self-confidence increased, they kept urging us to find some other team of eight-year-olds that they could test themselves against. I was all for it, but Kirk, I sensed, was not. Whenever the boys raised the possibility, he would say diffidently, “Let's wait till the fall,” knowing, of course, that the fall, his fall, would never come.

  I understood the hold he had on the Metrozoids. But when I thought about his hesitation, I started to understand the hold that the Metrozoids had on him. I had once said something fatuous to him about enjoying tonight's sunset, whatever tomorrow would bring, and he had replied that when you know you are dying, you cannot simply “live in the moment.” You loved a fine sunset because it slipped so easily into a history, yours and the world's; part of the pleasure lay in knowing that it was one in a stream of sunsets you had loved, each good, some better, one or two perfect, moving forward in an open series. Once you knew that this one could be the last, it filled you with a sense of dread; what was the point of collecting paintings in a museum you knew was doomed to burn down?

  But there were pleasures in life that were meaningful in themselves, that did not depend on their place in an ongoing story, now interrupted. These pleasures were not “aesthetic” thrills—not the hang gliding you had never done or the trip to Maui you had never taken—but things that existed outside the passage of time, things that were beyond comparison or, rather, beside comparison, off to one side of it. He loved the Metrozoid practices, I came to see, because for him they weren't really practicing. The game would never come, and the game didn't matter. What mattered was doing it.

  At the last practice of the school year, the boys ran their plays and scrimmaged, and the familiar forms of football, of protection and pass routes and coverage's, were all there, almost magically emerging from the chaos of eight-year-olds in motion. At the end, the boys came running up to him, and he stood in place and low-fived each one of them. “See you in September,” the kids cried, and Kirk let the small hands slap his broad one and smiled. “We'll work again in the fall,” he said, and I knew he meant that someone would.

  That Sunday he did something that surprised me. It was the last lecture of the Mellons, and he talked about death. Until then I had never heard him mention it in public. He had dealt with it by refusing to describe it—from Kirk, the ultimate insult. Now, in this last lecture, he turned on the audience and quoted a line from a favorite movie, Blade Runner, in which the android leader says, “Time to die,” and at the very end Kirk showed them one of his favorite works, a Richard Serra Torqued Ellipse, and he showed them how the work itself, in the physical experiences it offered—inside and outside, safe and precarious, cold and warm—made all the case that needed to be made for the complexity, the emotional urgency, of abstract art. Then he began to talk about his faith. “But what kind of faith?” he asked. “Not a faith in absolutes. Not a religious kind of faith. A faith only in possibility, a faith not that we will know something, finally, but a faith in not knowing, a faith in our ignorance, a faith in our being confounded and dumbfounded, as something fertile with possible meaning and growth…. Because it can be done, it will be done. And now I am done.” The applause, when it came, was stadium applause, and it went on a long time.

  By July, the doctors had passed him right out of even the compassionate trials and were into the world of guesses and radiation. “It's a Hail Mary,” he said of a new radiation therapy that they were proposing. “But, who knows, maybe I'll get the Doug Flutie of radiologists.” Then a slight ache in his back that he thought was a disk he'd hurt water-skiing turned out to be a large tumor in his spine, and the end came quickly.

  His wife, Elyn, had to be out of the city, and I spent the last Saturday afternoon of his life with him. In the old way, I went into his office to work on something I was writing. Kirk went to see what was on television. He had, I noticed, a team photograph of the Metrozoids at their last practice propped up on the coffee table. By then he could hardly walk, and his breath came hard.

  But he called out, “Yo. You got to come here.”

  “What?”

  “You won't believe this. Boston College–Miami.”

  Damned if it wasn't. ESPN Classics had a “Hail Mary” Saturday, all the great games decided on the last play, and now, twenty years late, they were showing the game from beginning to end: the whole game, with the old graphics and the announcer's promos, exactly as it had first been shown.

  So we finally got to watch the game. And it was 1984 again, and the game was still thrilling, even though you knew what the outcome would be and how it would happen. Kirk's brother, Sam, came around, and he watched, too, the three of us just enjoying a good game, until at last here we were at that famous, miraculous, final Hail Mary, Doug Flutie dropping back and rolling out to heave the ball desperately downfield.

  “Look at that!” Kirk cried, and the ball was still in midair out of view, up above the television screen.

  “What?” I asked, as the ball made its arc and fell into the hands of Gerard Phelan and the announcers went wild.

  “That's no Hail Mary. Watch it again and you'll see. That's a coverage breakdown.” The old defensive-backfield coach spoke evenly, as, twenty years before, the crowd jumped and screamed. “Safety steps up too soon because he doesn't think Flutie can make that throw on the run. What he doesn't see is that Flutie has time to square around and get his feet set on the rollout, which adds fifteen yards to his range. Safety steps up too soon, Phelan runs a standard post route, and that's it. That safety sees Flutie get his feet set, makes the right read, and there's no completion.” Turning to us, he said, “That is no Hail Mary, friends. That's no miracle. That is just the play you make. That is one gentleman making the right read and running the right pattern and the other gentleman making the wrong read.” And for one moment he looked as happy as I had ever known him: one more piece of the world's mysteries demystified without being debunked, a thing legendary and hallowed broken down into the real pattern of human initiative and human weakness and human action that had made it happen. We had been waiting twenty years to see a miracle, and what we saw—what he saw, once again, and showed us—was one more work of art, a pattern made by people out of the possibilities the moment offered to a ready mind. It was no Hail Mary, friends; it was a play you made.

  He turned to me and Sam, and, still elated by the revelation of what had really happened all those years ago, we began to talk about Ralph Emerson and Richard Serra. And then Kirk said heavily, “There is nothing in the world I would rather be doing than taking part in this conversation. But I have to lie down.” He died four days afterward, late at night, having spent the day talking about Hitchcock films and eighteenth-century hospital architecture.

  Luke and Elyn and I went up to the football field at Williams last fall and, with some other friends, spread his ashes in the end zone, under the goalposts. At his memorial, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Renée Fleming sang and the violinist Arnold Steinhardt played and the art world of New York turned out and listened and recalled him. I think a lot of them must have been puzzled, in the slide show that Elyn had prepared to begin the evening, and which recapitulated his career, from Savannah to Princeton, to see toward the end a separate section gravely entitled “The Giant Metrozoids,” with the big figure surrounded by small boys. But I'm sure he would have been glad to see them there. T
he Metrozoids are getting back in business again, with an inadequate coach. I've thought about finally making the motivational speech, but I don't think I need to. The Metrozoids don't need to learn how to separate the men from the heroes. They know.

  Last Thanksgiving: Immensities

  The Gates went up in Central Park, and we took the children through them. We entered the park at the Children's Gate, Seventy-sixth and Fifth, but now the pathways and walks, usually so open and Narnian, their old-fashioned streetlamps glowing at twilight, have been hung with countless orange shower curtains, more of them than you had thought possible.

  And yet it works; the effect makes its effect. I had been, for what little it's worth, opposed to the idea, on the grounds that Central Park, a perfect and miraculous work of art, hardly needed to be italicized or commented on by an inferior work of art. I opposed it on the grounds of the park not being mere grounds. And yet the scale of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's invention, the expanse, the perspective—orange veils not here and there but everywhere, a vast infestation, yet orderly, obviously human-tailored, premeditated—all of it was, if not artful, then at least impressive, a form of the organized sublime.

  They revealed and emphasized the park's expanse. I watched a small boy enter the park at the south end, where the pond and skating rink are, and saw him muttering. Drawing closer, I could hear him: “Sixty-four, sixty-five, sixty-six …” he counted. He intended to check the reported number for himself. (Actually, there were around 7,500.) They showed, also, how small the park is, how man-made: 7,500 is, after all, a number far from nature's millions, an amount a boy can hope to count. Density was transformed into immensity; the close-packed park, usually limited by what is going on right in front of you, by the local proscenium of incident, is transformed by the tick-tock metronomic regularity of the curtains, marching away in every direction, into something ordered, regimented, overwhelming, and vast. The park, experientially quite segmented, becomes by the repetition of a single measuring unit perceptually quite large. We can no longer see the park in separate chunks. Someone has taken an orange ruler to it: My, how big you've grown!