LOOK! No hands and no safety net either!
The world’s greatest high-wire artiste reveals the secret to walking a tightrope at insane height
ON THE HIGH WIRE by Philippe Petit (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £9.99, 115 pp)
WHEN my son ran away to join the circus, I more or less ran away with him. I couldn’t be kept away from the Academy of Circus Arts, the apprentice arm of Zippos.
Most weekends, I would cook a barbecue for the clowns. I would drink single malt in the firelight with Konny Konyot, whose Hungarian wife had an exploding saxophone.
It was an honour to get to know the legendary ringmaster Norman Barrett, whose comical budgie act creased me up every time. As regards the contortionists, I didn’t know which end to offer them my celebrated cheesy-dip party sausage.
The high-wire artistes, however, tended to keep to themselves. They were moody, solitary sorts. After reading this book with huge enjoyment, I rather began to appreciate why.
As Philippe Petit explains, a neverending, monkish devotion to the task in hand is required — rehearsing, practising, perfecting the technique. Relaxation is not permitted. There are no off-duty sessions for the tightrope-walker. Nothing can be left to chance, as ‘chance is a thief that never gets caught’.
PETIT, who began as a unicyclist and juggler of burning torches, enjoys dazzling the public with what he can accomplish — or, as he puts it in his Frenchman’s way: ‘Limits exist only in the souls of those who do not dream.’
To that end, he has strung his wires between the towers of Notre Dame, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre, the two north pylons of the sydney Harbour Bridge and the skyscrapers in the vicinity of the Cathedral of st John the Divine, in Manhattan.
It took Petit ten days to install the equipment to cross Niagara Falls — the trick was not to look down, ‘for the movement of the waves will make you lose your balance’.
If anyone fancies following in Petit’s footsteps, the first task is to get to know your wire. Will it be tight or slack? Will it bounce about or droop and sway?
Wires, in fact, are woven together to form a strand. The strands are twisted and sheathed together to create a steel cable, which ‘is lubricated when it is manufactured’. The tight-rope walker has to wash the coils with gasoline and rub it down with emery paper ‘until it is clean and grey’.
Even so, grease can ooze from the stretched cable when it is exposed to the hot sun. At the other climatic extreme, ‘I have kicked off snow with every step as I walked along a frozen cable,’ says Petit nonchalantly. It is also necessary to look out for kinks and broken strands ‘that even the greatest tension cannot eliminate’.
Petit suggests the tightrope walker wears slippers with thin, rubber soles, cotton socks or simply bare feet. ‘You must be able to use the big toe and the second toe to grip the wire and hang on to it.’ Just like, presumably, a gibbon. ‘Work without stopping,’ we are told. ‘Little by little, the wire must belong to you.’ A wire that at first is tethered near the ground, but which is rigged higher and higher as confidence is gained. What is being learned is that crossing a high-wire will involve a continuous, if hair-raising, sequence of balancing and adjusting, ‘on one foot, on the other foot, again, and again, and again . . . After a great number of crossings back and forth, you will know what it is to go and what it is to return.’ I can grasp that — honestly I can — and I am so uncoordinated I can scarcely stand up without having to sit down again. Petit, however, with his showman’s need to trigger ‘an almost palpable excitement’ in his audiences, loves overcoming impossibilities. In his circus acts and other stunts up on a wire, he has done the splits,
balanced on one knee, spun cartwheels, danced with ‘daggers attached to his ankles’, performed tricks with hoops and skipping-ropes, climbed a ladder, reclined in a chair (‘its struts and legs resting on the rope’), worn a blindfold and carried an accomplice piggyback.
He is disdainful of fellow artistes who wear safety harnesses, connected by an ‘almost invisible cable’ to a belt under the leotard. As for a safety net: ‘Anyone can use a net,’ sneers Petit.
Nevertheless, he might have been glad of one the day he came a cropper, ‘falling 40 ft and suffering broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a shattered hip and a smashed pancreas’.
That’s the only thing I have in common with Philippe Petit: pancreatic trouble.
Understandably, the tightropewalker has no truck with margins of error. Literally, there can’t be any. False steps occur only, we are told very firmly, because of a lack of concentration.
Petit, indeed, sees himself as the equivalent of a bullfighter, willingly and habitually confronting death in the afternoon — ‘the terrain of the high-wire walker is bounded by death,’ he says, grandly, if truthfully, and certainly Hemingway-esquely.
He even hopes to be killed doing what he is so passionate about: ‘I demand to be allowed to end my life on the wire.’
Well, not on the wire, surely. More like, ker-splat, on the ground after he has slipped abruptly from it — though Petit does mention someone who fell with such rapidity and force that the wire sliced their arm off.
It is a scandal, as Paul Auster rightly says in his brilliant introduction, that ‘circus skills are assigned marginal status’, as if they are at best ‘a minor form of athletics’, belonging with gypsy orchestras, Pierrot shows and endof-the-pier entertainments.
Acrobats and aerialists, with their juggling and dangerous stunts, regularly perform ‘complex combinations, intricate mathematical patterns and arabesques of nonsensical beauty’.
I have always maintained that the circus ought to be accorded equal status with the Royal Shakespeare Company or Covent Garden Opera — it should be Sir Norman Barrett, for example, or Lord Zippo.
And as for Philippe Petit, despite his fondness for transcendental uplift and his efforts to convince the reader of the inner ‘lightness that is so magnificent at great heights’, all that matters really is that he doesn’t actually fall for some time to come.