"Why did you do it?" - several reporters to Philippe Petit after he tight-roped the Twin Towers in 1974.
This year's Oscar winner for best foreign documentary is a stunning film called Man on Wire. On the surface, the story traces the staggering performance of Phillipe Petit starting with his beginnings as a little boy who liked to climb trees and continuing through his astounding series of high wire acts from Paris to Sydney, Australia to New York City.
Man on Wire takes its title from an entry on the police report covering Petit's action. The arresting officer, somehow grasping the transcendental nature of the man he was handcuffing wrote the phrase in the box on police forms called something like: "Incident Under Investigation."
"I had the feeling I was watching something I had never seen before and would never see again," the awestruck officer said. Police work, like nursing, social work and so many other jobs, has its routines, its forms. For the policeman, entries like: "public drunkenness," "break-in" and "petty theft" are common place. "Man on Wire?" What is that about?
That is the fascination in Petit's graceful and artistic waltz on air. What is the point? In practical terms, a trapeze act has no point. Neither does any other kind of art. Art is not supposed to have "a point."
Artists don't cook food for eating, they don't build houses for us to live in, they don't make boats for traversing oceans, cars for driving, planes for flying. Artists don't arrest other artists for breaking the law. They don't fight fires or mop floors. Of course, all of these things, like nursing and social work, can be performed in an artistic way. This is the art that lifts life from mundane to transcendence.
What artists, whether painters or great caregivers, "do" is enrich the quality of our lives. If we only ask "why" they do it, we will never understand why their art exists.
Personality profile results suggest that about two-thirds of the population has no idea what I'm talking about. In general, concrete thinkers (most of the world) think about life in functional and practical terms. For this giant segment of the population, art probably seems superfluous. Why hang paintings on walls? What do they "do" just hanging there?
I can't answer the practical questions of art for the concrete thinkers of the world. Nor do I mean to sound judgmental. But if you are a caregiver who appreciates art, finds solace and stimulation there, and perhaps creates some of your own, you will know and love the enormous gift of a small Frenchman who, for a period of 45 minutes in 1974, transcended the earth and walked on clouds.
What do you think as you walk your own high wire each day and night?
-Erie Chapman
p.s. the answer to yesterday's quiz, for those who missed it, is Kate Hepburn in Philadephia Story. Congratulations to Diana Gallaher (and her brother) for ringing the bell!!
