man on wire

there is something strange about dreams. they can be huge and outlandish and impossible, and then, somehow those same dreams can be attained, and if you’re a certain type of person, you find yourself dancing across a wire strung between the twin towers. these utterly impossible dreams are so important. because nothing is really so unattainable, not if you desire it like you would a lover.

this film teaches that. if desire is there, then the magical will happen.

i was weeping like a little girl when they showed the photo of him, halfway between the two towers. everything between. completely liminal space, between living and dying, between a tiny rope of wire and the swirling air all around, between heaven and earth and somehow at home in that liminal space, not possible because that’s a borderline, a no man’s land, but he is at home there, in love with that place, not afraid. ecstatic. joyous.

love, desire, and longing—are there any things more important in this life?

they bring you to a place where the achievement of your dream gives you an almost ecstatic seeming bliss in the unlikeliest of places. the photos—of him lying on the wire, seagulls above him, kneeling, saluting, walking towards the camera with a look of pure pleasure, the face of a man who has at last gotten what he always wanted, proof that the world can be kind at times, proof that the human spirit can literally ascend, and that something as terrifying and insane as walking on a wire between the twin towers can suddenly make the most beautiful, lovely sense.

one suspects that even the police were moved to tears, at least some of them.

“I observed the tightrope ‘dancer’—because you couldn’t call him a ‘walker’—approximately halfway between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire….And when he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle….He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again….Unbelievable really….Everybody was spellbound in the watching of it.”

eight crossings, forty-five minutes in another world. how could you ever want to come home?

these things, so important.