11
Actors say they "go up" when they forget their lines during a performance. "He is going up." I suppose it derives from the unconscious gesture of rolling one's eyes heavenward looking for the lost words or cue. My first memory is of being on my father's shoulders. We are looking up at a tall building. In a window near the top, I see my mother. She is waving. My brother has just been born, and my mother is in the hospital. I am three. To write this essay, to write anything, I search through my memories. I like to think of them, my memories, arranged in library fashion on ascending stacks of stacks. In my imagination, there is one of those open ladders, rollers at its top running in channels and wheels wearing grooves on the floor. The ladder glides along the shelving. What I need to remember has always been kept on the upmost spot, the hardest part to reach. A place has these hidden coordinates: time and memory. We travel there. Through time and within memory. We return to the time when… When we tour, we want our destinations to remain timeless or, at least, to remain stuck in the time we first experienced them. In Athens, at the Acropolis, literarily the Summit City, they are restoring the ruins of the Parthenon, deteriorating from the city's pollution, to a state of pristine ruin: the moment the temple was blown up in the nineteenth century. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, called the Summit City for its location along a long-gone canal system. When I go back, I experience that distortion of scale that comes with travel through time, with the animation of memory. Things grow smaller as you go up. Things grow smaller as you go back in time.
12
I walked up the Washington Monument, the stairs winding around the one central elevator shaft fenced off by a wire screen. The occasional stone on the inside wall was inscribed by the donating charity, municipality, regiment. Here and there were scrubbed graffiti of the countless class trips. The windows on the cramped observation deck were miniscule, hard to get to as the current schoolchildren pressed in for a look. What I did see was the strange skyline of Washington, whose buildings are legislated to rise only so high as not to obscure the dome. It looked like about thirteen stories to me. An unlucky city, I thought. Off in the distance, I could glimpse the highrises of Virginia's Crystal City and the other taller obelisk dedicated to Washington by the Masons in Alexandria. The elevator delivered load after load of schoolchildren who rushed ten deep to the tiny windows. What had they come to see? What could they see? They were in a kind of space capsule not unlike the Apollo module that they had just seen at the Smithsonian. But now they were at the top of the rocket. A quick check out all the windows assured them of that. "Look!" they shouted. "Look how high up we are." And then it was time to go.
14
In the literature of elevators (Coover, Dahl, Whitehead), there is the moment when the car keeps going up. It is an extension of the initial wonder. Gravity has been resisted. The sky can now be scraped. The apparatus is so simple, so transparent, a parlor suspended by a thread. It is a daydream of elevator travel. The dream has you traveling in an elevator, pushing the button for the top floor, but as the vehicle arrives it rises above that, breaks through the ceiling, the roof, and keeps going on, up and up. As with all travel, it is the journey and not the destination. The protocol of elevator travel demands a silence among its occupants. No time here in the flight between floors for the dissertations of train travel, the memoirs of an ocean voyage, or even the interviews of the air. We become the center of gravity. We talk to ourselves. We dream our dreams. We contemplate claustrophobia, acceleration, even death. You have your excuse, this booth. For many it is a routine routine, a daily affirmation. This is a mechanized meditation. This is a special species of stillness at the heart of our teaming urban hives. We enter. We arrange ourselves. We face the closing doors. We suspend our animation. We go up.
Still Life of Sidelines with Bob
The Game Away from the Ball
Basketball coach Bob Knight of the Texas Tech University Red Raiders is riding the referee. It is the opening seconds of the home game with Oklahoma University, and the ref lucky enough to pull the assignment to patrol the bench-side corridor from Texas Tech's back court to Oklahoma's base line is weathering the sniping coming from Knight, pacing parallel. After a few minutes of this criticism, the ref has developed a twitch. He is flinching, his head turning toward the coach then shying away. Every call, no matter who is calling it, is being questioned, commented on, underscored. The ref's attention is being divided. His reaction time dulled. Running up the court, he stalls sooner after crossing the timeline, adding a bit more distance from the glowering coach. He is being conditioned. He can't take his eyes off his own periphery now. And then, like that, Coach Knight lays off, slumps into his chair and assumes the position, his arms wrapped around his broad chest, his head down, brooding, Olympian, his dark eyes looking out from beneath his dark and darkening brows, intent on the game before him.
I have no idea what is going on in the game. I have been forcing myself to watch this drama on the sidelines, one of Coach Knight's calculated contributions to the flow and tenor of the remaining minutes of play. Roger Angell has pointed out that in baseball, the only game where the ball doesn't do the scoring, the spectator must widen the field of vision to the whole playing field. Basketball fans certainly know of the game away from the ball-the screens and constant cuts, the choreography of checks and switches, pickups and block-outs performed covertly while the player in possession dribbles into position or coils in anticipation of the perfect bounce pass to the now-open man. In spite of sensing the complete action of the court, that bouncing ball more than likely rivets the fan's attention, its trajectory through the air mesmerizes. That is why I have had to expend so much energy to ignore the attractive nuisance of that ball in its flight and the furious action swirling around it to focus on the nowstill center that is Coach Bob Knight.
In his thirty-five years of coaching college basketball, he has constantly shifted our attention to the game away from the ball. By that I don't mean simply the machinations of his players on the floor or even his psychological gamesmanship on the sidelines. It still matters that teams he coaches win, that the ball goes through his team's hoop more than the other team's. After thirty-five years in the presence of Bob Knight, however, the game away from the ball has expanded way beyond the game on the floor, in the arena, in the league, in the season. The game away from the ball has expanded to include institutions, state governments, whole peoples even. Our vision has shifted. We no longer keep our eye on the ball. Our eye is drawn to Knight.