It has been an exciting month as the long worked on elements of my structure have come together.  Last week I finished painting the steel trusses columns and their bases, and was able to erect the two main trusses along with the four columns for the net.  Yesterday I lifted the net into the air and at the end of the day jumped from the wire and was caught by my net.

I have chosen to erect the structure in a meadow about a quarter mile from my house.  It is located among a number of small and thirsty trees.  The ground is so dry this year that the clay and sand have become powdery fine, permeating into all of my tools.  Nylon ropes are especially prone to picking up the dirt, so the ropes with which I am working immediately changed color.  This fine dirt enters into the structure of the rope and acts like an abrasive working down the fibers from the inside every time the rope is bent or comes under load.  Yet all my endeavors, all of my labors of welding and weaving, and training and balancing seem insignificant when I look at the forest around me.  I feel like I am living in a natural tinderbox.  The land and trees are so dry that if a fire were to start it would consume everything.  This is the worst drought in recorded history!  This winter there was barely any snow and the lack of moisture is apparent in trees’ condition and lack of spring flowers.  I have found only one spring flower, a lonely specimen.  It was tiny, barely reaching off the ground, its growth stunted by thirst.  Yet it was beautiful, a pure white with a bright yellow center.

Now I wonder if any bees will find pollen.  I have also seen only a single bee this spring.  It was a small salt bee interested in a yellow shirt I was wearing.  At least this week we got a couple of inches of snow although such a small amount just wets the surface and is quickly evaporated as soon as the sun burns through the clouds.  I have over the last months noticed  great changes in the health of many of the larger ponderosa pines and pinons.  They are loosing a lot of needles and the ones that looked unhealthy last year are clearly dying.  I feel deeply saddened by this.  I am frightened by this drought as I have no control over the situation.  The beautiful forest in which I came into the world and has been my home for two thirds of my live is most likely dying.  Its color has changed, its smell has lost the pungent aroma of a high desert forest.  In my imagination I see it burning, the fire’s heat devouring the trees, animals, my house, my tools, and my work.

The events current and future which terrify and sadden me are part of a dance of flux, the rotation of a great mandala, the mandala of creation and destruction.   The rotation of this wheel is eternal and has little care for its passengers.  Its spokes are forged by cosmic energies which could in the sliver of a moment sterilize the earth.  Its great fires of death are of profound importance.  It takes fire to renew life which springs vibrantly from the ashes.  Everything fire consumes is something that is alive or once was alive.  The only exception is the fusing and splitting of atoms which yield tremendous fires which at unimaginable distances create the light of day and the thousands of points of light at night.  Even the minerals and chemicals which we burn are derivatives of ancient life, long ago deceased and entombed in the body of the earth.  Without fire and death there could be no creation.  Without loss there can only be delusion.

Immersed in the immediate situation of my life, I tend to think of my own concerns and feelings as being of the greatest significance, yet I know my existence is but a drop in an ocean of conscious experience and that ocean is again but a drop in a larger ocean.  And even this ocean, the sum total of all human endeavor over the ages, if viewed through a cosmic lens, would scarcely occupy the tip of the sharpest point.   The seduction of such a perspective is to free one of responsibility, which in turn can nurture nihilism and negligence.  Yamamoto Tsunetomo says in Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai,  “Negligence is an extreme thing.”  Yet the opposite extreme, that of putting total importance in one’s situation and personal beliefs causes narcissism and often myopic and nasty righteousness.  I find both these approaches towards dealing with existence and action dissatisfying and limiting.  In the first the macroscopic is enthroned and the microscopic is suppressed leading to false feelings of freedom which lead to inevitable delusion contradiction and pain.  In the second, the macroscopic is ignored and false beliefs are allowed to breed which also leads to confusion and suffering.  Often I find myself trying to find a balance between these two states, realizing that I am falling to one side.  A problem arises in the microscopic and I try to explain and escape its pain by musing on thoughts of cosmic abstraction.  Modern physicists experience a similar problem when trying to explain physical phenomenon.  Quantum physics works only up to a certain scale, then falls apart when dealing with masses and energies of a large scale.  The explanations Einstein provided us by his theory of General Relativity does an excellent job of explaining the cosmos, but falls apart when we look to the actions in the subatomic universe.

I sometimes feel my work suffering from a similar split.  I can relate a personal narrative of the labor, hours welding cutting grinding and drilling steel.  I can tell of the nasty fumes of oil burning from steel as the heat of welding vaporizes any impurities, of the iron and oil entering my hands staining them black.  I have a great passion towards the simple act of doing.  I can talk about the feelings of exhaustion and sickness caused by the long days of training in the cold.  I relish the splendid feeling of effortless balance and perfect movements briefly executed on a thread of ground.  I can talk about the frustration of continually battling my own mediocrity as a funambulist, thrashing from one uncertain balancing to another, barely controlling my vertigo.  I am faced each day by the grounding of a dream, what I could be and could build becoming what I am able to do with my hands and mind.  I think of once running along the wire timing my stride with the bounce of the wire, but missing and falling in a flash onto the hard steel, the coarse lay of wound metal cutting open my shin, watching the blood run down my leg, flowing horizontally along the cuff of my shoe.  I wonder about the source of such actions whose results are at times self defacing.  I think, is this anything artistic; is this self expression?  Running a finger down my shin I feel dents, are those the contours of my bone?  To me all these memories of work, struggle pain and joy are now embodied in my installation of rope and steel.  The labor of creation is recorded in the form of the work.  The object and its final form is inseparable in my mind and body from the experience of its creation.  I question if what I have made is art or of artistic interest.  I think that what I have created may have value in the fact that it displays the focusing of creative energies to create a large and ambitious project.  It shows that with passion and determination one can make a dangerous and exciting vision come to fruition.   But in doing this, does this vision serve others as much as it does me?  Does the fact that I am inspired and excited by what I have created and future possibilities help inspire another.   Can that which inspires be a thing of utility rather than a creation of aesthetic meditation.  My net is useful as it saves me from injury or death, but is also beautiful.  I made it for a purpose, one which it serves.  Yet beyond this purpose it does have an intrigue and interest to it.  It is large and hand made.  It took much time to create.  When I look at it I see things beyond labor and utility.  I am reminded of graphic models of space time.  As the forces pull and stretch the mesh you can see and feel the invisible force upon the ropes.  The cells of the net under greater stress have been stretched to a larger dimension than those under less strain.  This is not only a beautiful phenomenon for the organic geometries it depicts but it tells of more than only stress and strain.  It is the surface of a fractal, the skin of a snake,  the neurons of a brain. The surface of the net with its small imperfections feels alive.

One thing has become more clear in my mind, the making of this installation is a result of a desire to perform explore and create.  I am looking to build a place to dance in the sky where I am untethered, but free to fall.  Its creation is to serve a love of space, gravity and the feelings of fear and honesty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Building, training and weaving, these have been full days. The 6000 feet of rope is becoming a net. Connecting each strand to the two adjacent, the splices weave together the linear material to form a fabric, a planar material. The pile of net on the floor is impressive and becoming quite heavy. It now has become larger than the floor of the room. I realized this as I spread it out this morning to take a couple of pictures for the blog. I have been weaving in the evening for a couple of hours almost everyday. I have been listening to This American Life, and thinking that what I am doing is no less crazy than the stories I hear on the show. Man people are so nuts! I have also been listening to On Being, which has got me thinking about Bardos, more on that in a moment.

I am making two truss towers which will support a wire 10 meters in the air. They break down into 11 foot lengths and I am almost done welding the truss sections themselves. Now I must make the connections between them, the top anchorages for the wire and guys, and a robust tabernacle to transfer the loads down to the ground. After they are painted it will be time to erect them in a meadow near my house. The net will be suspended about 18’ feet below the wire and will protect me if I fall, at least that’s the theory. During a lesson today with my yoga teacher I explained what I was doing. He spoke to me solemnly that it is now time to start training seriously. He said, “you need to be really strong and limber for what you planning to do, I mean you are going to be on a wire 30 feet in the air! It is time to start spending long period standing on your head doing variations to make your central column strong and nimble. You are now ready for this work and are going to need this power and muscle control to protect you from serious injury.” He has given me rigorous neck strengthening exercises and difficult shoulder and core work. These new exercises add to my training regime. I have been spending several hours on the wire almost everyday which I feel is really important to unlock my potential as a funambulist. Sometimes the weather is pretty shitty, gusts of blowing snow knock me about as I fight to balance on the wire bundled in a down jacket, thinking how ridiculous this must look. But ridiculous or not my practice rewards me with the distillation of my movements. Thus I am introducing more difficult movements into my repertoire. On a low wire I have been practicing leaping and running, although a full 360 spin in the air still evades me most of the time. Although on a rare and amazing occasion I jump from plié, spin like a dancer and land on the wire. More often my attempt is rewarded by being flung violently off to one side or missing the wire with one or both feet. A couple of these falls have been scary. These acrobatics are leaving the realm of static control. I stand on the wire waiting for my body to become totally erect in a moment of stillness. Then I push down on the wire and as it rebounds I jump hard stealing the energy from the wire to gain more upward momentum. At the same time I spin fast in the belief that if I have timed everything right and jumped exactly straight up I will turn around to face the same direction in which I started and land in balance. This is a difficult trick, you rarely see it performed by wire dancers. Perhaps the next progression after mastering this would be a backwards somersault, and then the pinnacle of technical achievement for the wire acrobat a forward somersault, which seems infinitely far away for me. Some of the basic poses I am close to mastering. Lying down I no longer fall and I am confident doing lunges and knee balances. It is fascinating to remember what some of these poses felt like a year ago when just to achieve them on occasion was a reward. Now to fall doing one of these poses has me thinking poorly. It is success which can become a tyranny when you judge the present moment by times of past success.

The thought hanging in my mind is that I am going to do a public performance sometime this spring on this apparatus, either rigged in a public park in Santa Fe, on BLM land, or in the meadow near my home. The wire is uncertain and with the pressure of an audience I hope I am able to perform and give a beautiful show rather than becoming a thrutching mess. I suppose it is this thought that has me working hard and to get the net and the trusses done soon so I have time to acclimate working on such a high rig, and potentially falling into the net.

I am also thinking about the whole rig as a sculpture. Transforming it into an installation which allows it to travel beyond apparatus to become something mysterious, something in-between functions and poetics. Which brings me back to the fore-mentioned idea of Bardo. Bardo is a Buddhist term for the existence between. This is essentially every lived moment, but can also include times between physical embodiment. These times challenge our mental constructs asking us to become more expansive in our vision or causing us to recoil into our shells and weather the psychic storm by clinging to the familiar. Being on the wire has many metaphor and parallels to Bardo. In my upcoming research I want to look at Bardos and allegories of nets and ropes seeing if I can “weave” a connection between the two and the work I am doing in my funambulism and building. It is still vague, but I think it is a rich area of study which relates directly to the material and physical acts which I work with. Thats the news with my work. I hope everyone’s projects are going well and the beginning of 2013 is being enjoyed.

 

I have begun weaving the net which I plan to use to use in aerial work to guard in case of a fall.  Its finished size is going to be 18’ x 50’ and will contain about 9,000 splices with 500 edge knots.  I started with the arrival of 6600 feet of rope.   Eleven spools, ten of 5/16” rope and one spool of 5/8”, were shrink wrapped on a palate weighing 250 lbs.  I cut the 5/16” rope into 40 foot lengths and then marked it every 4”.  This marks allow me to locate the splice, the intersection of the two ropes.  I have approximately 9000 splices to make which when weaved together will form the surface of the net.  I have to be quite aware as to not make any error.  If I do make an error, it only can be undone be excavating it by undoing a wedge of splice from the nearest edge.  So far I have made one mistake, splicing a rope off center by 4 inches. I noticed the  mistake after doing about 30 splices which I then had to undo to fix the error.  I hope this to be my last.  It is simple to weave the net, but also easy to make a simple mistake.  It is a good exercise in attention in the most basic definition of the word.  Sometimes when it is a simple and repetitive task, it is the hardest to stay present.

 

Sitting cross legged on the floor is proving to be a challenge as well.  Last week before coming to NYC for the winter residency I spent many hours sitting cross legged weaving the ropes and I felt some pain in my knees and back.  It may turn out that I have to work standing by constructing some sort of table which allows me to do the work erect.  I figure with so many hours ahead I must employ a system to ease the task.  I am finding the technique which is most vital to speed the weaving is keeping track of the ends of the rope.  To form the splice one rope must travel through the other and then the second back through the first.  This means that every time I make a splice I have to find the end of the ropes I am splicing together.  This sounds simple and it is, but over several hours it means handling thousands of feet of rope hand over hand in search of ends which are concealed in a sea of lines covering the floor.  If I can work out a system where the ends are keep organized, I will not have to go looking for them and this will cut in half the labor of handling line.

I have never done anything on this scale which is so singular in its labor.  In choosing to do this work I feel a paradox of desire.  Is it an attempt to solve a problem of desire. In setting the hands to a task, the mind fixed on a simple undertaking, perhaps a sense of purpose and peace can be achieved?  As Louis Khan says “It is the human desire to do.”  The desire is to create something through touch, something which becomes a vehicle for our human desire.  The Tantric philosophers tell us that human sexual desire is merely a manifestation of the universal cosmic desire to create, which in their minds manifests itself in all matter of the universe.  In one conception my net can be understood as a metaphor for my own sexual desire to create.  But the most basic explanation of its existence is that I want freedom from a safety tether.  I want to be “naked” on the line without a cord swinging and knocking against me.   I don’t want to think of negotiating around it and avoiding becoming tangled dangerously in it if I fall and fail to catch the wire.  The net will allow me to work safely on a high wire without needing the tether.  I also think that the net in itself will be a beautiful object and a great challenge to rig.

 

 

 

I wanted to write a brief response to the critique of my work which I presented during the winter residency.  It seemed from the response to the work that many wanted to be taken out onto the wire.  They wanted to hear my thoughts and my breath as I struggle with the challenge of the void, to be brought closer to the physicality of the endeavor.  They wanted me to transcend admiration and virtuosity by providing a more transporting experience of human endeavor.  This is certainly the challenge in presenting this work.  I, however, am not at all certain that the solution to this problem is found in portraying more details from the experience throught documentary forms.

 

I cannot take anyone onto the wire, they most go there themselves.  Only they can step out over a great void supported by the insubstantial “ground” of the wire. They can never truly know this experience through images of my body, writings of words, or recordings of sounds.  The dream in this project is not to be a simulation of working upon a high wire, an attempt to translate the untranslatable.  Instead it is a focusing of my own human desire directed through discipline and love at a difficult and rewarding physical practices.  At this point it is not for a gallery, nor is it for leisure, but it is in search of mental clarity and acceptance that I work tirelessly upon the wire, trapeze, and yoga mat.  It is in this process, in the development of a trust of self and the trust of friends, which I believe will emerge a beauty not approached directly, but tangentially as a byproduct of the desire to find mental and physical courage.  John B. said that he felt gravity was the medium which I am working in and this is an interesting perception.  To me time is also an important medium in which the work will be developed.  More than attempts to create “art” I want to develop self and my relationship to others— not in a narcissistic sense but in a simple sense, by making myself honest, vulnerable and sincere.  I do not know where this work leads me or how it might come to manifest, but I trust that through devotion and passion the path will unfold.  I feel more and more that I find satisfaction in growth, not growth in the sense of attaining an external resource such as money, property, or acclaim, but in the development of compassion, capacity and wisdom. If one can find a practice which releases a progression in the self of ideas and capability, rather than looking to fill a lack, a freedom is exposed.  As Plato says, life is a meditation and preparation on and for death.  No amount of material wealth or the admiration of others changes the fact that we are born through love and come to death along a path shaped in part by the channeling of our desires.  The true wealth lies not in the results, but in the struggle itself.

In Mircea Eliade’s, The Two and The One, there is a section called Ropes and Puppets.  In this section of the book Eliade examines stories and myths where ropes are links to the heavens and the realms of spirit.  First he starts with describing a rope trick.  It is a startling performance, a traditional Fakir trick, but this trick also exists in variations around the globe.  In one variation, the performance consists of the guru taking a magic rope and tossing it into the air so that it climbs so high that it disappears from view.  The rope is mysteriously anchored to the heavens and his disciple then climbs the rope until he disappears as well.  The master then follows his disciple up the rope with a sword.  A little while later the dismembered parts of the disciple fall to the ground.  The master then returns down the rope to the ground and proceeds to puts the fallen and cut apart man back together, which to the astonishment and amazement of all causes the disciple lives again completely unharmed.

There has been some effort to explain the rope trick yet nothing is entirely satisfactory in explaining the experience.  Some scholars have argued that it works on collective suggestion, others have said that it relies on an extraordinary slight of hand.  What a slight of hand that must be to witness!  Whatever the cause, or how it operates, it has an interesting theme which is common in many shamanic and spiritual traditions.  In spirituality, evolution is often likened to a sort of death.  In some shamanic traditions initiatory dreams often consist of being devoured by demons, bones picked clean.  Then the demons or spirits put the bones back together and re-flesh and organ the skeleton and by breathing life back into the initiate, the individual lives again.   This is considered a spiritual rebirth.

In a breath meditations (part of the Viraja Homa) which I  regularly practice, one begins by cultivating a fire which then consumes the inner body, burning it to ash.  From this ash a wind is born which blows a nectar back into the shell of the body giving it life again.  These experiences and stories/practices all reflect a process of self destruction and creation of a new self.

In The Two and The One, there are other myths dealing with the significance of ropes and chains linking man to heaven, spirit to body, and heaven to hell, which I will not elaborate on at this time.  But the point being that at this particular moment I spend much of my creative practice engaged with and on ropes and cables, connecting various pieces together to form a system/whole which carries me at times high above the ground.  My intuition tells me that my current endeavors share  fascinating connections to these myths and I would like to deepen my understanding of this connection.

I have begun to string lines high in the air linking hoist, slings, pitons, building anchors in rock, spanning the walls of a gorge.  For the first time I have enjoyed a simple pleasure in balancing high above the ground.  At last with much practice over the last year and carefully honing my rigging knowledge, I am able to enjoy the dance of the high rope without the paralyzing fear that something is perhaps about to go horribly wrong.  In addition to the wire, I have rigged other lines across the gorge.  On one traveled my safety tether, which I still opt to use at such height and with the strong thermals this gorge seems to create.  On the other rode a camera which was crudely rigged with a pulley system using fishing line to travel back and forth.  I walked and my friends Chuck and Darien traveled the camera back and forth following and passing me as I worked upon the wire.  This project has been really exciting to me, it feels like a whole new world of exploration has opened up.  I dream of great lines and nets strung between hills and cliffs which all but disappear at great height and tiny figures dance silhouetted against the brilliant sky.  Now I know that this is possible for me, not just a dream.  I now need to focus on finding and cultivating relationships with people who wish to help in the production of such ventures.   As the weather gets colder and snow covers the ground, I will have more time inside which I will use to create proposals to bring to others and solicit their help.  The other thing I want to look into is the building of nets.  These seems like the next step away from the tether, but with still protecting one in a fall if the wire is lost.  I want the freedom from the tether, but it would be foolish for a wire walker of my experience who uses no pole, working at great heights with unpredictable winds, to do away with a safety completely.   Also nets are such interesting structures, not just in form but in their histories, metaphor and myth.  I feel like soon I will learn to weave a strong net of nylon rope and use/rig it to protect an aerial fall.  In addition I am thinking next semester’s research also will delve into myths, histories and symbolisms of ropes and webs.

 

 

 

But anyways, back to the current work.  In this process I successfully rigged a wire across cliffs for the first time, something I have dreamed of doing for the last year since first setting my feet on a wire.  Chuck, Darien, and I built two anchors which were both elegant and very strong.  One consisted of a nest of 10 pitons woven together in a web which would lengthen and release stress if any one piece were to fail.  It is based on a design commonly used in rock climbing and rescue anchors, but substantially stronger and therefore more intricate.

The other was created by hitching two massive basalt columns with thick nylon slings.  Disturbingly, both columns initially moved as we brought the wire up to tension.  They however soon settled into what thankfully was a static state.

 

In the process of tensioning the wire, you soon realize that you are dealing with huge forces, capable of causing great change, no longer operating in the familiar scale of the human body, but more in the realm of the elements.  You try your best to be aware of your body’s placement in space and in relation to the rigging as it is tensioned.  Your ears and hands are your best senses to observe as you heave on the Tirfor’s long handle bringing the wire to over three tons tight.  If the air is calm you will hear and feel the pulses and beats of shifting rigging which your eyes may miss. Choose your position wisely so that you are least likely to become maimed if something fails under stress.  The art of rigging lies in the absolute avoidance of any sudden or unexpected releases of energy.  Yet rock is to a degree unpredictable.  In rock climbing sometimes a foothold which supports one’s weight shears of the wall unexpectedly causing a sudden and startling shift in one’s balance which can cause a fall.  Thousands of tons of rock fell off of Glacier Apron in Yosemite in the mid nineties.  What happens in the event of a rigging failure is one discovery in all of this I hope to never make.  It sounds simple enough to avoid, but many a wire walkers has been harmed or died at the hands of a failed rig.  It is frightening enough when a rope which you are suspended from shifts a couple of inches, it scraps against the rock and your heart races.  I can’t imagine a failed tight wire, whipping through the air with ample speed to cleve in half a man, although I have read of this happening.

In the last week I put together a short video from the footage that I gathered and some of the sounds I recorded.

Looking at it I wish I had more footage of the other participants, Chuck and Darien, helping and watching the walking and setting up the rigging, for the participation of others is so much a part of what makes this process amazing and exciting to me.  But in the midst of such a complicated endeavor I decline to split my focus between rigging and filming.  At this point the documentation of the process invites collaboration as well.  Perhaps I can find a film student at one of the schools in Santa Fe who might be interested in creating a piece with me, but honestly where I want to carry the work forward is bringing people to witness the actual installation and act.  In person you feel the wind, can walk to the gorge’s edge, and can touch the taught lines sensing their stored energy.  You feel the vastness of the exposure barely tamed by the slender and elegant arcs of wire and ropes crossing from one side to the other.  You sense the beauty of it all in an awesome landscape.  The couple of friends who made the journey to witness my activities said they were inspired by the intensity and skill of the endeavor and encouraged me to continue my practice while seeking more public exposure.  Maybe with this work a new type of interaction with the viewer has yet to be discovered, who knows, it all feels so new.  For the first time in this project I have the feeling the direction I am traveling in is yielding something exciting and tangible.

Walking on a wire high above the ground is incredible.  One feels as though he is a hole in the sky.

Balance comes not so much from looking but from inside, from the spine, the soles of the feet and the fingers painting the air like strokes of a brush.  The cable seats deeply between the ball mounds of the big and second toe.  Gripping like a bird clings to a wire, gives the feet confidence, stilling the twists and shakes.

The walk is lead by the toes which first find the wire and guide the foot forward as it glides to a rest on the cable.  Shifting the weight straight forward places the center directly over this foot.  The next step comes not as an order but as an offering, it cannot be rushed.  It will occur in its own rhythm.  Bending the legs deeply and lowering down to the wire, the sit bone latches to the wire like a hook.

The spine straightens and the trembles of the wire ebb. One leg hangs like a keel, the other extends out forward until the length of it rest on the wire.  In a careful arc it moves under the wire so the toes hook the wire and the back begins to un-role onto the wire.  The arms spread and drape, then finally the head comes to rest on the wire as if it were a pillow.  The body lays as if it were a skeleton balanced upon a line.  The sun blinds the eyes causing them to shut.   Now without sight, the wire finds a seat along the spine, and the other leg can rise to stack upon the first so now both legs rest upon the wire the body in Shavasana.  Now the boat has raised her keel and the muscles of the arms and torso become active steadying the body from rolling on its narrow perch. Without a pole, the hands can grasp the wire and lower the body to hang from one arm, pinned to the wire like a piece of laundry.  The eyes wander, no longer occupied with balance or hiding from the suns rays.

They look to the ground, to the feet, allowing the first understanding of the true environment.  It is huge, the ground is farther away than the walls of the gorge which farther down stream joins the Rio Grande.  The river looks so small, how does it quench the thirst of some many?  Does it even survive to join the sea during the spring snow melts? No, I think it dies somewhere in Texas, drunk to the point it becomes cracked earth.  Both hands latch onto the wire and the body curls up over the wire to become seated again.  Now to press up to standing in a moment of faith.  Now the dance of balance begins again.  The end of the wire is approaching, now it is time to turn.  The balls of the feet lift and the body spins 180 degrees.  The eyes reach out hard to grasp the cable, but the body is no longer over the wire.  A legs swings up to catch the balance, but it is not right either, and faster than the mind can command, the body draws itself toward the wire to embrace it.  The hands have reached out and grabbed the wire tightly.  A leg hooks and curls around the hard steel rope.  The fall creates a momentum which will be used in the next instant to regain the perch atop the wire.  Back above the wire it is best to be not haunted by the fall.  Its only use now is a release, a shedding of tension towards creating a more fluid dance of uncertainty.  The fall waits, to deny it is impossible. It is this uncertainty that makes the dance of the rope extraordinary.  If the fall absolutely could be avoided, the beauty of the act would be diminished.  But to miss the wire in a fall, to not embrace it with intense power, but to let it slip from the grasp is terrifying.  It should never happen.

On to net making, I am starting by trying to find information on how it is done.  Ironically my research project deals a great deal with tensile structures, which of course nets are.  However most of the research of have done deals with steel cable nets and not rope nets.  I have to perhaps consult fishing references?  Here is my beginning exploration into the net, working from a splice I noticed in one of Frei Otto’s book on nets.  I have order some nylon rope and must wait for its arrival to begin the weaving.

 

I really look forward to seeing everyone in NYC in a couple of weeks and seeing what you have been up to.

best jamie

All of the great performers in history have spent countless hours consumed in rehearsal.  The moments that we see them in marvelous performances are on the very tip of an enormous blade of practice.  I was watching a Francis Brunn video of him juggling.

Francis Brunn is considered by many to be the greatest juggler who has ever lived and, interestingly enough, a patron to Philippe Petit. He funded Petit’s clandestine walk between the towers of the World Trade Center.  I watched in a trance as Brunn moved elegantly and acrobatically through space.  His movements were so quick and yet so precise as to perfectly balance, bounce, throw, and catch balls in a myriad of combinations, some seeming impossible.  This led me to research his life and practice  as I was very inspired by his performance.  It seems he was mostly self taught as a juggler. Other than having a formal training in acrobatics, he taught and invented most of his art.  His sister Lottie, also an ace juggler, said that as a child Francis and she would spend 12 hours a day practicing.  His passion for his art was truly tremendous.  He speaks of juggling as being primarily creative and exploratory, but also in essence performative.

He once said, “Today when I am rehearsing it is still the same. I still feel limitless – that there is no end to it. There are so many ways of doing things, doing them in a certain rhythm and changing the rhythm – different moments to wait and different moments to push. You cannot learn this by just going into a hole – you must gain experience in front of audiences.”

I have come to a point in my rehearsal upon the wire and the structures I have built/rigged that I am able to go forward and start performing.  The essential outcome of my studio project was to perform upon structures which I build.

I have built a simple low wire rig.  It consists of two A-frames made of steel tube with small plexiglass platforms on top which I can stand and rest on.

I engineered the A-frames to be as light as possible, pushing the 1 1/2” tube to its compressive limit. Any taller and I would have had to make the frames from larger tubes.

The wire is about 7’ feet above the ground which gives me the opportunity to explore not just walking on the wire, but hanging from it and spinning around it like an acrobat.  Its height lends to the  performative nature of the apparatus as the wire is over head, like an elevated stage.

So far I have taken it to several parks and worked on it for some time.  People stop and watch. I imagine a wire walker on an over head wire is an alien sight in a public park in Santa Fe.  Many people stop their cars and watch for several minutes.  I have to be focused to not watch being watched because when I do, I easily lose balance.  But since I am used to walking on the wire in total solitude this is a new challenge for me.  Also dogs seem to be interested.  Some bark and whine to the dismay and apology of their masters, others sit very still and just watch, some for a long time.  This has brought up some conversations with their masters and we wonder what they must see or think?

Today I used a GoPro camera and walked on the low wire at a beautiful park in downtown Santa Fe.  I put together a short video so that you can have a sense of what it is like to play on the wire.  I especial like the moments when I spin around the wire and am playing under it.  I am really excited about playing more with the little GoPro and of course learning more about video editing.

I also have returned  to working on my high wire after 5 weeks.  My first steps were uncertain.  Why am I doing this? This is not fun, I want a net.  Why, why do this when I could die for a silly reason?  I come to a partial answers.  To offer oneself totally is beautiful.  To realize that our life energy is not ours to own only to borrow and for an unknown duration.  For me nothing has become as stirring as walking on a thin weave of metal fibers stretched to the point of singing, over a void of nothingness in a fierce conquest of the useless.  The dance of imbalance, graceful and calm, hypnotizes a storm of evolutionary terror.

The high wire is difficult to explain, its danger often seen as the realm of a dare devil or adrenaline junky, a nut with part of his mind dis-functioning, but I don’t find truth in these conceptions.  I see it as a simultaneity of action and surrender.  Not a controlled preconceived action but a spontaneous action born from a body’s understanding of balance on wire.  If I silence my mind enough the body will carry itself as it needs.   If you begin to think that you are out of balance (which in fact you always are to some degree or another) and try to conceptualize your way through balancing, soon you flail about from one side of the wire to the other, arms moving in great arcs and you torso bending and twisting wildly to keep from being through from the wire’s steel back as it trembles, undulates and invisibly and most dangerously rotates underfoot. Everything tenses, your vision becomes blurred and fragmented, fear takes hold and you fight to keep from falling.  You wish to be somewhere else, to be held by a lover or friend.  Alone you struggle with this pursuance for balance.

“A void like this is terrifying.  Prisoner of a morsel of space, you will struggle desperately against occult elements: the absence of matter, the smell of balance, vertigo from all sides, and the dark desire to return to the ground even to fall.  This dizziness is the drama of the rope dance.” Philippe Petit, On the High Wire

But then some part of you lets go.  You feel tiny in a universe of wind and space, a speck of life on a strand searching for some love, some light. The lungs fill with air and as they empty you trace the breath’s movement to the very edge of you flesh.  Time takes a couple counts longer.  In the midst of the tempest, the mind clears and lightness enters.  It come from the wire itself into the feet, up the legs, spreading upwards and outwards to the tips of the fingers.  The consciousness we feel centrally in our skull spreads uniformly through the body onto the wire and outward to the needles of the pine trees swaying.  A seed drifts by the front of your face as light as the air itself.  You smile knowing that one day this seed might become a tree so connected to the earth as to never travel again, but for now it wonders the currents of the breeze.  Immersed in beauty, light, and air, you forget your fright.  Should I be frightened of not being afraid?  Is this the moment when I slip too intoxicated with joy to intervene?  Yes I am in danger, but perhaps it is safer to forget?  To be cautious, but not in fear, I think this is best.

“Leave nothing to chance.  Chance is a thief who never gets caught” Philippe Petit, On the High Wire

Also here is a time lapse of me slicing a section of wire rope to be used in the low wire rig.