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Self Wiring

Among the numerous theories relating to how we come to be who we are is the deceptively simplistic idea that it “all comes down to wiring.” There’s something undeniably satisfying about this approach, as susceptible as it might be to picking apart. Advocates of genetic influence would likely weigh in with support, but it’s difficult to form a sound argument that excludes environment. The same event that causes our circuitry to go haywire becomes no big deal with repeated exposure. Sense of self isn’t an exclusively western concept, but it takes on a different connotation among cultures stressing the importance of the group over the individual. No matter how you look at it, individual wiring exerts irrefutable influence.

“Man On Wire”, a documentary film currently in theaters, details the story of frenchman Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The idea of this daredevil act consumed Petit from the time he was seventeen and saw a magazine image of the yet to be constructed towers while waiting in a dentist’s office in France. This singular, crystallized dream defined his focus in the coming years and seemed to define him still, more than thirty years after accomplishing the feat. The act itself could be argued selfish, and watching the guy ramble on in excited broken English with a heavy french accent doesn’t embody my idea of a good time. But there is something undeniably spectacular, beautiful even, in what he accomplished. And taken in a metaphorical sense, the act is particularly moving. There’s a moment in the film when one of his accomplices, another french guy who helped rig the wire, is reflecting stoically on the day it all went down. Then, seemingly out of the blue, he breaks down sobbing. Another nice moment comes when Petit speaks of the hesitation in his first step on to the wire, and how all those years of planning came down to this single initiating act. There’s a still shot of him a few steps later, suspended more than thirteen hundred feet above New York City with a look of absolute joy on his face. Here was a man who knew his own wiring so well that he literally needed only the first step in even the most precarious and terrifying of circumstances to feel on solid ground.

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