Sunday, August 31, 2008

Man on Wire: A Disneyesque Tour de Force


When Phillippe Petit indignantly answered the police: "there is no why I did this, that is the beauty of it, there is no why!" He was, more than right, an inspiration. What he did had no reason and no function, it was JUST beautiful!
Functionality is generally profane to the poetic eye. It concerns finitude’s compromising of integrity: something is functional because it is pledged to perform a task in a moment ahead of itself: because of its enslavement.
What Phillippe Petit did was pure freedom: he transgressed the law, he even transgressed the security of the Twin Towers to make them magic, giving people a leap of sheer, non utilitarian, beauty.Transgressing the law for pure beauty is the turning of reality into magic. The spirit of it is expressed by Walt Disney's saying:
"It is kind of fun to do the impossible".

Petit, going against all circumstances, security and law, rendered the towers immortal, not in sorrow, like the lowest of blows did, but in beauty. In lightness and joy. Watching him makes one think there is hope, good is yet to prevail, as it already prevailed in heaven, for those who were murdered in the towers. Watching Petit makes one reminisce of a justice that, winged and miraculous, does exist, and will take place.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

A Dreamer, a Doer, a Chosen one



Walt Disney asserted he was not a mystic: he did not believe in a lucky star. The mystical dimension I am attributing to him, however, does not relate to mere superstition or belief in luck, but to an individualism of such profundity to discover mission fulfillment in one’s personal life, that is, to discover, in one’s action, the response to meaning, to something that transcends:
“If you live right, things happen right”.
(From the book "From Mars to Marceline"