Writers and Tightrope Walkers
A few nights ago, I went to the movie, Man on Wire, a 2008 documentary film, directed by James Marsh. The film follows tightrope walker Phillipe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk across the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The movie left my head spinning with thoughts. Why did Petit spend most of his life walking on wire over crowded cities buzzing with traffic? I thought about it the whole subway ride home and came to the conclusion that Petit was using his body to narrate his stories, just like writers use words to tell their stories.
I spent the rest of the evening browsing the internet, looking up information regarding tightrope walkers. I stumbled upon a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The poem compares the writer to an acrobat and the lines move back and forth as if to mimic the motions of a tightrope walker.
As you read this poem, ask yourself these questions: As writers, what risks do we take? What wires do we walk across as we tell our stories?
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October 16, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Interesting comparison. As writers we risk everything-our risk is our willingness to put anything we create out “there”…our own kind of death defying leap. We are language acrobats. We need to know and understand how to bend and manipulate our words and emotions. We need to feel the discomfort of risk so that when we leap we can be ready to fall or fly. The falling feels frequent, the flying not so much–but oh when the flying happens!
October 17, 2008 at 2:10 am
I’m a little tired, but I was thinking about this metaphor—the artist on the tightrope—and was wondering how far the metaphor carries. At first I was thinking about it in the following way: if you stay on the rope you’re being successful, and if you fall off, you’ve failed.
But I don’t think it’s like that. For me this is a metaphor for the inside of the artist’s mind; there are many famous writers who, although they’ve been very successful, have become “unstable” nonetheless.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/373904/famous_writers_who_killed_themselves.html?cat=38
So falling off the rope, in this sense, is a metaphor for art-induced craziness, depression, and suicide. A pretty thought, no?
And if it is, what are the two ends to the rope? The tower on one side, perhaps, represents ignorance, and the other enlightenment. We stand in the middle, too far to go back to where we came from, and yet we still have so far to go. Also, from this distance, both towers look suspiciously the same! We’re malnourished and hungover enough to forget which end we’d started on. Wait, go back. No; it’s that way! Yes? Yes!
Perhaps we’ll be lucky and die standing. My personal dream is to gather a large crowd below me, and just as I’m beginning to weaken (at this point the crowd is ooing and aahing as I wobble from side to side) when suddenly a beautiful and mothering lady in a helicopter swings by and saves me, whisking me off to coconut mohitos on a South American Beach.
Like all writers, that’s my dream.
(Note: Crowd takes toilet break, only to return to look at next person on the rope. There is no sound of helicopter blades in the distance, and there’s some jostling to get as close as they can to the fall. Cameras begin flashing in mid-air. Without pause, the crowd is looking up again for the next one)
December 13, 2022 at 11:51 pm
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