Through the Children's Gate (41 page)

“The less there is to look at,” he said, pacing, as he always did, “the more important it is that we look at it closely and carefully. Small differences make all the difference. So, for example, the next time somebody tries to sell you on the mechanical exactitude of Frank Stella's stripes, think again about the beautiful, delicate breathing space in these stripes, the incredible feathered edge of the touch of the picture, which has everything to do with its kind of espresso-grounds, Beat Generation blackness that gives the picture its particular relationship to its epoch and time.”

So he walked people through it. There were the bright Matissean stripes of Ellsworth Kelly, made from the traced shapes of Parisian shadows, and those dark espresso-bar simplicities of Stella. There was the tradition of the Bauhaus diaspora, all those German refugee artists who had been forced to go to South America and who had proselytized for a kind of utopian, geometric abstraction—which had then appeared in New York just as New York artists were using geometric forms to indicate a cool-guy stoical distaste for utopian aspirations,
creating a comedy of misunderstanding and crossbreeding. An art that had seemed like a group of quadratic equations set by a joyless teacher had been revealed as a sequence of inventions thought up by people. Where there seemed to be things, there were stories. The audience, at the end of the hour, was riveted. Someone was breaking it down and then was going to build it back up. You didn't want to miss it.

O
kay, we're going to learn a play,” he said the next Friday at Metrozoid practice. The boys were standing on Metrozoid Field in their Metrozoid shirts in a semicircle around him. He showed them the play he had in mind, tracing it in the dirt with a stick: The quarterback takes the ball from the center and laterals to the halfback, who looks for one of three downfield receivers, who go in overlapping paths down the right sideline—one long, one medium, one short. The boys clapped hands and ran to the center of the field, terrier-quick and terrier-eager.

“No, no. Don't run. Just walk through it the first few times.”

The boys then ostentatiously walked through the play, clowning around a bit, as though in slow motion. He laughed at that. But he had them do it anyway, five or six times, at a walk.

“Now let's just amble through it, same thing.” The play took on a courtly quality, like a seventeenth-century dance. The boys did it at that pace, again and again: Hike and pitch and look and throw.

“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.”

B
y 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.

T
hat 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 perseverance. 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.

I
f 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.