Do you ever have the feeling that persisting with certain writing projects is like walking on a high-wire?
Maybe you hear that old Leon Russell song in your head: “I’m up on the tight wire/ One side’s ice and one is fire.” (“Tight Rope,” 1972.)
The parallels between writing and wire-walking are what draw me to the wire-walker named Philippe Petit. He was the subject of the film Man on Wire (Magnolia Home Entertainment: 2008), which recounted Petit’s extraordinary feat of walking a high-wire that he had illegally stretched between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Petit wrote about the adventure in The Walk (Skyhorse: 2015).
What are the parallels between writing and wire-walking? Writing frequently requires deep and prolonged concentration under the pressure of a deadline. In Man on Wire you see numerous shots of Petit in complete absorption, his face an “ageless mask,” as someone in the film describes it. Break the concentration and disaster may follow. Logic broken. Deadline missed.
Writing is also a performance, and sometimes a feat of derring-do. Malcolm Gladwell, in David and Goliath (Little, Brown: 2013), described how two different parents responded to the murders of their children. In one case, a failed experiment in criminal justice reform was the result. In the other case, an experience of peace and sanity despite the long odds of healing. How do you take two people who have suffered one of the most profound kinds of human loss, and compare their journeys? For Gladwell, with a reputation for seriousness, he took a great risk of seeming crass and produced a worthy essay.
Philippe Petit was certainly daring and skilled. Before he wire-walked the World Trade Center, he wire-walked between two monumental pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Before that, he wire-walked the towers of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. He was a man of derring-do.
One thing lacking in those performances was the taking of a different type of risk: the risk of being ignored. Petit had failed to get hired by the circuses. He performed his very public feats with the lowest risk of being ignored, perhaps in part because he couldn’t stand that peculiar torment. And wasn’t it the fear of that torment that led him to conclude repeatedly that he must risk life and limb in his art? That working at “the edge” meant working in close proximity to his own death?
In my experience, the writer frequently risks being ignored. The writer builds a house of words, but no one really needs to live there. There are plenty of books already in the library. Plenty of magazines, and plenty of websites. Unread books, unexposed to a readership, do not have squatters. Perhaps lack of exposure is not deadly like falling from the high-wire can be. More like a chronic wasting.
Another fascination about Philippe Petit: He is also a writer. The Walk will have an audience for some time to come given the immensity of his World Trade Center feat and the subsequent history of the WTC. But is there an audience for Why Knot? (Harry N. Abrams: 2013). In the age of Velcro, zip-ties, and all sorts of other technologies for binding, Petit has written a book about tying knots in ropes. He has an understandable passion for knots, given that wire-walking depends on being able to tie knots that are so secure, you can turn over your life to them. Two knots and a notion are all that keep him from death.
Salutations to Petit for leaving the high-wire long enough to build a little house of words.
Bryan K. Alexander 