How to Tie More than Sixty Ingenious, Useful, Beautiful, Lifesaving and Secure Knots.
The punning title of Philippe Petit's latest book could just as easily be the maxim by which he has lived his life. Why Knot? is the name of the elegant and quirky volume.
Petit is, of course, the Man on Wire, who has constantly asked "Why not?" when facing the most monstrous challenges. He is the daredevil high-wire artist who, in 1974, stepped into the abyss between the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Centre and for 45 minutes held the city transfixed as he promenaded effortlessly and improbably along a steel cable 400 metres above the street.
In contrast to the insouciance of the main title, the book's subtitle is How to Tie More than Sixty Ingenious, Useful, Beautiful, Lifesaving and Secure Knots.
And in a further hint that while this is a book about art it is also deeply practical, coiled neatly in a window in the book's hardback cover is a one-metre length of six-millimetre, red, nylon rope.
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Tying knots, it transpires, is one of Petit's many passions,
which is unsurprising given his very life has so often depended on the
integrity of, say, a locked clove hitch. Knots, he says, are his
"guardian angels protecting my life in the sky".To this day, he personally inspects each knot in his rig, before ascending the high-wire for a performance. "It makes sense because before I get on the wire I have to completely erase any question mark about a possible incident or accident so my mind can be completely dedicated to the walk," he says.
"I do work with assistants and I hire rigging people for big walks, so I ask them to do knots for me, but it is the truth that before the walk I go and check them in the way I check my own knots."
By his own admission, Petit has a "deep and unusual relationship" with knots and rope, to the point where he feels that they are, literally, alive.
"When I walk on a wire, I feel that the cable has its own life and vibration," he says. "If I am not able to marry my own vibrations to that of the cable, I won't be able to walk much on it. When I work with ropes and make knots, you have to respect them for their own life - for example, if you force a rope to go against its lay and you have it twisted a certain way, you won't be able to use that rope, you are going to create kinks and elbows."
Born in 1949 in central France, Petit began wire-walking at the age of 16. "I had to know how to tie ropes and fasten cable and attach all the components of an installation before being able to venture on a piece of rope or cable," he says. "So, from 16 years I started learning more knots and collecting books about knots and becoming an expert rigger and engineer."
His mission with this book is to reignite interest in the somewhat neglected art of tying. At the heart of the knotty problem is the proliferation in the modern world of gadgets and devices that remove the need to tie. And while inventions such as cable ties and Velcro have their place, Petit believes we should keep things much simpler, relying instead on the tried-and-tested methods of our forebears.
"I think going back to having a piece of string in your pocket and going back to this very ancient art is a revival that is much-needed because in our modern world of communication I think we forget nature and things that have been around helping us for thousands of years."
Petit has 200 or so knots in his personal repertoire, but says for most of us a knowledge of five or six should suffice.
The book is peppered with anecdotes, reminiscence, quirky observations and puns (he is a polyglot, speaking six languages, and his fascination with words rivals his passion for knots). He owns more than 200 knot books (one of his pastimes is to correct the many, egregious errors he finds), but he had no desire to produce a definitive work on the subject.
"Definitive works are quite boring sometimes," he says. "One part of me - the archivist and historian - might one day write the 4000-year history of wire walking, but here I wanted to do the opposite and do an opinionated choice of knots. I wanted a book that is original in the sense that the author is infusing it with his personality and his life."
At 63, he shows no signs of hanging up the balancing pole and continues to practise his juggling and wire walking three hours each day at his retreat in the Catskills in New York State.
"To me, it is my life," he says. ''I will never stop living my life until my body refuses to move. But walking on the wire is actually a very simple art.
''It is something you can do as long as you can walk and I am not about to stop walking."
Why Knot? by Philippe Petit is published by Abrams, $24.95
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