This essay describes the celebrated funambulist Philippe Petit’s “punishment” for his clandestine walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. The essay was first published by Dance magazine in November, 1974. It is reprinted here as a complement to my latest article for Voice of Dance, Sky High, which discusses James Marsh’s recently released film chronicling the original event, Man on Wire. To read Sky High, click here.
We’re walking to the park in the dead heat of the August night. In front of the path to the Delacorte Theater, public buses lurch to a halt, belching out gulps of carbon monoxide, flap open their doors to disgorge hordes of watchers, sightseers, neck-craners, a sweating sample of New York’s multiglot millions. Bicycle riders, hunched over like racers, converge on the open entrance, zoom in slowly, persistently, buck the pedestrian mob by using their wheels as soft weapons. The children who have nagged me into bringing them fastwalk me down the path towards the lake. With every step there seem to be more of us.
We’re here to witness a cruel and unusual punishment. Or is it entertainment? (I think of Nureyev saying, “We are paid for our fear.”) Or is it art? The opening of the Delacorte Dance Festival, my assigned beat, has been postponed for an hour while Philippe Petit shows us how imaginatively justice can be served. Earlier this week, the French aerialist (from S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk: “One day there came to Meshibach a troupe of German acrobats…”) had the unlicensed temerity to string his tightrope between the 1800-foot twin towers of the World Trade Center (“…who gave their performance in the streets of town . . .”) and walk gracefully through space. An absurd offense (a high crime? a misdemeanor?), of such daring and frivolity, you wouldn’t think it punishable by a jail term, but apparently it is. Now District Attorney Kuh, in a politic ploy, is allowing Petit to pay for his infringement of the law’s concept of order and safety by giving the people of New York–the mass non-élite–a command performance. By democratic decree, Petit will walk across Belvedere Lake, on a high wire, up across the dirty, shining water (“They stretched a rope across the river…”), up to the castle (“…and one of them walked along the rope to the opposite bank…”).
“Here, here, here,” the children cry, arriving at the edge of the dense, moving crowd that surrounds the edge of the silent, glittering lake. Beyond the water, a dark circle of trees in full leaf, their green turning black in the summer night, and beyond that a fringe of concrete points, the tips of New York’s tallrise skyline. A white rope stretches wide in the air.
To our left, where the rope is anchored, a long, fragile ladder leans for the ascent; to our right, deep in the trees, is the castle, a turreted, mock-medieval tower, made fairy-tale true by dusk. The twelve-year old boy claims knowledge: “See those antennae at the top? They use it as a weather station.” “Don’t tell the girls that,” I say, “you’ll spoil it.”
“We can’t see, we can’t see,” the little girls wail, along with every underling in New York. They’re wearing long dresses, elegant for dancing, and their long, waving hair hangs loose down their backs, to their waists–one blond Mélisande in sandals; one smaller, dark one. Their faces shine with eagerness and sweat; their dresses are sprigged with flowers. “Here, here,” the boy yells, having found a vantage point. The girls hoist their skirts and scramble after him on to the back of an open, parked, pick-up truck. “¡ Mira, mira! Aquí!”–and they’re surrounded. (“From all sides the people came running to behold this ungodly marvel…”) From the center of that sudden mass of packed flesh, I hear one of the girls calling, in a small, frantic voice, “I still can’t see,” and the human mountain opens a chink for her, one of its voices chiding, “Y’all hush now, sweetheart. They ain’t nothin’ to see yet.” Below, the more sedentary, middle-class crowd stakes out its grounded turf. Toddlers with ice cream-smeared faces sleep beside them, exhausted, in their flimsy strollers. Blacks hoist their babies onto their shoulders. The youngsters perch in the halo of afros, serene.
We look up.
The sky is brown with pollution. It looks soft. Not a star in sight. The moon is three-quarters full, pale orange. Clouds drift across it, like cigarette smoke, blotting it out from time to time. Are the clouds moving or is the moon? The crowd sighs with impatience.
A huge TV camera–the all-seeing eye–is mounted over the heads of the people; it partially obscures our view. Higher, on slim poles, the arc lights illuminate the waiting circle. Moths, gnats, mosquitoes–all of New York’s insect life on wings–swarm in the glare of the lights, in dizzy, blind spirals.
A crackle of static. Kuh speaks, loud-miked. The crowd is just tolerant. It’s after the hour. He postpones the event–is he a showman after all, building anticipation, or has something gone wrong?–with credits (five hundred dollars from some-lady’s-name; so-and-so who donated the cable and speaker system, plus a brazen-voiced band). Pairs of policemen thread their way through the crowd, watching everyone’s hands. The cops nearest me seem benevolent enough, faces tolerant, muscles relaxed, with soft, beer-drinking paunches. Their weapons hang idle from their belts–a club, a gun, temporarily non-lethal. Can they assume we’re a safe crowd? Between the band’s brassy onslaughts, I call to the kids. They roll-call back, exasperated. What harm could come to them in this place?
And–suddenly–it’s happening. Petit emerges out of the heads of the crowd, halfway up the ladder, a lithe, faraway man in white, flared trousers, silhouetted against the trees.
Reaching the rope horizon, he hesitates, waits several long moments, seems to go backward. Is it fear or a tease? And then slowly, cautiously advances out into nowhere, into sky, into lake-bottomed limbo. Then picks up a little speed, confidence seeming to come with it, finds a gait, a stride. To our astonishment, he walks like Marceau (only Marceau, I kid the children later, is a real artist, because he can do it on the ground), foot first, leading, almost exaggeratedly articulate, then the whole leg and the pelvis loping through; chest, shoulders, head slanted back, then flipping loosely in sequence after, in moving S-curves. Imagine a vertical worm.
He moves through the dark space. The crowd aahs and claps. Like a tiny, bright cut-out figure, against scenery by God and the New York Planning Commission; the little man in white is walking through the trees.
“This city is outrageous,” the man in front of me says, shaking his head with perverse pride and pleasure. Petit progresses forward, carrying a long, willowy pole, holding it horizontally before him, balancing. It wavers and quivers. “Mommy, watch,” my daughter’s voice pierces out. I hear her, can’t see her. “I’m watching,” I assure the darkness. Petit nonchalantly slings the pole over his shoulder, and walks down the slim-line road like he’s going fishing. (“…and in the midst of the crowd of onlookers stood the holy Balshem himself.”) A happy drunk next to me blows his whiskey breath in my face, chanting a supportive litany. “He looks like he’s not going to do it, but he’s doing it. He’s not falling. He’s doing it.”
Now for tricks. Reaching the end of the line, Petit turns–a flick-flip in the air. The rope reverberates with his weight and movement. It holds him up. His body, his life are hanging on that one thin line. Now he lies down on it, crosses his legs casually, so sleepy-easy it looks like his hammock, his bed. He tenses for a split instant, then, splaying the rope along his spine, he does a backwards somersault. Then another. And another. “Did you see that?” the boy calls out to me, excitedly. “No,” I answer softly to myself. “I don’t think so. I couldn’t have seen that.” Because where was he when he was off the rope? And how did he get back? (“His disciples were greatly astonished, and asked him the meaning of his presence there.”)
Petit gathers his aplomb and strolls back slowly, still carefully, towards the welcoming ladder until he’s within a few yards of it, then runs for home.
On his second journey out, he performs his adagio: boneless, spineless, pretzel convolutions over and under and around the rope in maneuverings undecipherable in terms of human limbs and locomotion, disregarding the givens of ordinary center and balance. He seems to have turned himself into an octopus, wrapping himself around the rope without touching it. The sequence of intertwinings is so concentrated and complicated, he almost loses the audience’s attention. He stands and pretends he’s falling. Half the audience gasps; half laughs. Now he’s got them.
Will he try a third trip? (“And the holy Balshem answered them thus…”)
Home to the ladder and rests for a while. The near-satiated crowd is cautioned back from the ground wires, to remind them of the danger, the risk. Then, calmly, he sets out on his third and last journey. (“I went to see how a man might cross a chasm between two heights as this man did, and as I watched him I reflected that if mankind would submit their souls to such discipline as that to which he submitted his body, what deep abysses might they not cross upon the tenuous cord of life!”)
They tell me Petit says in interviews, “When I see three oranges, I have to juggle them, and when I see two towers, I have to walk between them.” Thicker and thicker the crowd swarms around him as he climbs, as the moth flies to the flame. Across the rope, out over the lake, and up and up, against the trees and sky, and now, now, now, he captures the castle.
He has bought his freedom back.
© 2008 Tobi Tobias