User talk:Jack Baret

Comments on 'Man on a Wire' documentary by Jack.

After watching an amazing movie about the story of a French high wire artist (tightrope walker) Phillipe Petit; who walked illegally between the Twin Towers of New York in 1974, I felt myself immersed in the lives of truly courageous people. The towers are long gone after the tragedy of 9/11 but the tightrope act seems to live on in infamy beyond the physical aspect of the buildings and the vacuum left after their collapse.

Yet this crime has served as a beacon and siren call for generations to come. One must break the rules in order to liberate oneself from a self-defeatist attitude. To plot ahead when all odds are against you is our reason for being, says Phillipe, if the act justifies a good result in the end. The end, in this case was entertainment for the masses, but the means took a superhuman will and steely determination to transcend fate which is always the same; our death but not the death of humanity which lives and breathes in the defiant act. We are not made of stone and steel. We are made to fly between mountains of stone and steel if we risk losing everything to gain ascendancy into the realm of the gods.

What I felt and saw in this one defiant act, with Phillipe taunting and teasing the police as they tried to arrest him while just out of reach, struck my soul with the same spark of rebellion that Phillipe had felt that fateful day. I was overwhelmed with emotion as I broke down and cried, pitying my own attempts at liberation. I realize that he was defying death itself and all the antiquated rules that keep us from breathing and living and choking us to despair. I was next to him on that tightrope and my heart soared with him suspended between the two towers, two worlds; one of life and one of death.

In the documentary Phillipe stresses how our lives should be lived as if we are walking a tightrope challenged by a looming death that threatens to plummet us into the abyss. There above the world suspended on the high wire, we should act as if we are seconds away from death because we choose to live and live brazenly, forever rebelling against the rules, customs and habits that places our freedom in jeopardy. Only then can we truly liberate ourselves from the tyranny of choices that compromise our path to glory. Yet the price for this rugged form of individualism is alienation from those around us who may help us on this road to self-determination but can never really understand why we must do this alone and for our own reasons?