Girl on Wire: Thoughts on Tightrope Walking

I first taught myself to tightrope walk in high heels because I once saw a woman do it in a circus tent with silver curtains. She wore a black cocktail dress, tattoo sleeves and stiletto boots. She had the kind of confidence you expect in army generals and minor prophets. She carried no pole. It wasn’t in her interest to make it look easy, and she made it look the best and most tempting level of difficult; somewhere below war, marriage and religion but above everything else. To provide razzle-dazzle and manufacture tension two circus hands had scattered broken glass on the ground underneath the wire, but it wasn’t necessary; we hadn’t come for the danger, but to see something vertiginous and counter-intuitive performed with insouciance by a beautiful woman. The circus tent was dark. It was, for me, the epitome of glamour. It was magic carpet stuff.

It took me a long time to learn, and a certain amount of blood. Noel Streatfeild gave me unreasonable expectations about what sort of effort would be involved in the acquisition of a foot-skill. I still fall off, especially when I try to walk en pointe, and falling off still hurts more than I’d really like it to. I live in a set in an Oxford college and have a low tightrope strung across my study. I practise every day, because it simultaneously empties and works the head, and also because wire-walking, unlike riding a bicycle, is something you can lose the knack for. The professor on the floor below me has been immensely generous about the thumping.

Tightrope walking is such a giddying thing, so malleable a metaphor and so beautiful that it is no surprise that it has for thousands of years appeared in art: frescoes, books, films, dancefloors. From the beginning, wire-walkers were different from other acrobats: the word ‘funambulist’ comes from the Latin – funis, a rope, and ambulare, to walk – and ancient wire-walkers dressed in the same white as members of the Senate; to mark out that they, too, required the special protection of the gods. There is a graffito scratched onto the floor of the stage of the theatre at Aphrodisias in Turkey, which is Roman or late Roman. (There are two X-shaped supports of the tightrope, and the tightrope walker is halfway between them, facing left; his lower half is clearer than his upper.)  It’s hard to see, but his feet look impressively steady, for one who has been standing for so long a time.

If you haven’t seen James Marsh’s Man on Wire, you must (you really must – Ed.) It is the film that best explains why wire-walking can feel so much like saluting the world with your feet. When Philippe Petit walked the wire between the Twin Towers in 1974, he stopped halfway. With 500 metres of nothing between his shoes and the ground, he knelt, balanced his pole on the wire, and dangled one leg down above New York. With his free hand, he saluted the birds. The thought of it still makes me shake. In his book, To Reach the Clouds, he makes vertigo sound exactly what it is: alive. ‘It cannot be done all at once. To overpower vertigo–the keeper of the abyss–one must tame it, cautiously.”

Guillaume Apolinaire, author of the brilliant and mad Beasts of Tiresius and the man credited with coining the term ‘surrealist’, did not believe in caution. He wrote a pornographic story in which two gypsy-acrobats walk a tightrope mid-coitus. It’s pretty fantastic and also pretty filthy, and has a winning description of cellulite, from the days before cellulite was a bad thing.

“The stage hands having stretched a tightrope three metres high across the stage, he climbed onto it, and, most obscene funambulist, walked his mistress over the heads of the flushed spectators. The audience was entranced. Her buttocks seemed to smile, so dotted were they with dimples.”

I do not know if this is actually possible. I would say not – largely because you need your mind clear to wire-walk but also because, surely he would need his arms free to balance? I cannot walk a wire with my hands by my sides, let along around some else’s bottom – but, Blondin carried his manager on his back on a wire strung across Niagara Falls, and, I have met a man who can play the violin on a slack line, so, perhaps. Still: three metres! When people say they want to die having sex, this is not what they are thinking of.

Blondin (born Jean François Gravelet in 1824) had the kind of crazed courage that I have never met in real life, but which I imagine might exist in stunt men, free-climbers and people who argue with my grandmother. He crossed the gorge below Niagara Falls for the first time when he was 35, on a rope was nearly half a kilometre long. He had flair, and a valour so large and extravagant as to be almost pantomimic: he crossed the gorge blindfolded, and on stilts. Once he carried a stove, stopped at the mid-point and cooked himself an omelette. (An omelette! I think this is my favourite part. It would have been so much simpler just to have fried an egg.) In 1860 he offered to take the Prince of Wales across the gorge on his back: the Prince refused. This cowardice is a blot on Britain’s history that I do not believe we will live down. When he came to perform in England Charles Dickens was there and wrote: ‘Half of London is here, eager for some dreadful accident.’ But Blondin surpassed anything in Dickens’ fiction: once he strapped a lion into a wheelbarrow and pushed it across the tightrope. Near the end of his life he was, briefly, an actor in pantomime, which, if a literal come-down, seems fitting to his kind of brightly-imagined, spit-and-sawdust life.

The only woman to have crossed the gorge was Maria Spelterini. She was only 23 when she first crossed in 1876; I am 26 and still find cycling across roundabouts a feat. She had, it was said, the grace of a dancer, and was famous for her theatrical costumes – big tutu-like skirts, big hair, sea-green bodice and scarlet tunic – and (journalistic priorities are forever) her bosom. Most of all, she had enough courage to burn a hole in the world: she crossed blindfolded without a harness, and then with her ankles and wrists manacled, and, once, shuffled across with her feet strapped into peach baskets. (This made no more sense then than it does now.) She made the rest of the world look stay-at-home and ungainly. These recklessly, riotously brave people, I think, do us a service: they show us humans have something vertiginous and tenacious in our blood. There is such optimism and hope in their daring. I don’t have the guts nor the flair to stake so much on my ability to hold steady under pressure, but I love and am grateful to those everywhere who do.

And wire-walking is everywhere. My favourite is Vogue’s account of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball: they reported that editor Clifton Daniel “jitterbugged with an expertise that increased one’s respect for The New York Times,” and that Norman Mailer and his fourth wife, Beverly, took control of the whole floor with a dance that mimicked walking on a tightrope.

I’ve found that people make interesting faces when they walk the wire. As Philippe Halsman discovered in his jumpology photography, people look different when asked to temporarily alter their relationship to gravity. I am collecting photographs of peoples’ first attempts: many wear expressions that suggest they are listening to music. Several look as if they are about to sneeze. I look like an anxious horse trying to climb a tree.

People often ask, is it useful for anything? It’s not, of course: it’s not even particularly good exercise. But tightroping is proof, incontrovertible, that if you practise even the most improbable things, they become possible. It is tangible evidence, in a world that so frequently reneges on its promises, that there are endeavours in which effort will surely be repaid.  And wire-walking shifts, for the moment, your relationship to the world. There is a beautiful line in Rushdie: “Don’t think of it as a safety line through space.” his father had said. “Think of the rope as a line of gathered air. Or think of the air as something preparing to become rope.” I love that.

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Graffito picture courtesy of Andrew Wilson.

Tags: feminism, history, katherine rundell, sports