A loftier view of the world

It was called the artistic crime of the 20th century. It started even before he had seen the towers. He was sitting in a dentist's waiting room in Paris when he flicked open a newspaper and saw a drawing of the projected buildings. At the time, Philippe Petit was a vagabond street artist with a toothache. Six years later, he was walking the air between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

For a man to walk a one-inch thick wire is an extraordinary thing, no matter where it happens to be. The fact that this wire was 1,350 feet above the canyonlands of Manhattan makes it all the more extraordinary. It was the early morning of 7 August 1974 when Petit stepped out above nothingness.

The core reason for the walk was beauty. Petit saw the expanse as a chance for artistic expression. It was a place no other human form could bridge. "If I see three oranges, I have to juggle," he has said. "If I see two towers, I have to walk."

For months beforehand, he had checked out the buildings, the delivery patterns, the security detail, the weather, the intricacies of the roof space. He adopted disguises and mapped out the rooftop. Cajoled an international crew of volunteers into helping him out. Brought together a whole landscape of desire and ambition. Waited for the right weather.

Petit and his crew were able to smuggle a half-ton of cable to the roof.

Using bows and arrows, daring, cunning, ingenuity, they strung the cable from one side to the other. And then – as the early morning subways began to disgorge commuters, and the ferries ploughed the East and Hudson rivers, and the yellow taxis began to blare 110 stories below, out he walked, stepping onto the cable and into an image that is all the more indelible for what happened later to the towers. Earlier this month, the New Yorker magazine drew a double picture of Petit, first walking in white space and then walking in history – as if to say that the past always shifts with the terror of the future.

Petit's vaunt from tower to tower – at one stage he ran, another moment he danced, and another he actually lay down on the wire – was not the only walk he has ever done, but it is one that history will have him doing forever. In photographs, it looks as if he is stepping both inside and outside his body at the same time. It is an iconic moment linked, in our imaginations, with the images of the falling man 30 years later on 11 September, that body that continues to tumble in our memories, the shirt jacket up over the head, the man upsidedown, arms out, flailing. Both images live on, as fully-opposed testiments to the ability of beauty and then, on the other hand, the presence of evil. Nothing lives without contradiction.

So much good art is life written in advance. In 1986 Petit did another walk, this one for peace. He strung a wire from a church in west Jerusalem across a valley all the way between the Jewish and Arab sectors, to the wall of Jerusalem's Old City. This, too, he triumphed with. He also strung a wire between the steeples at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, as if to say that we must learn to go from east to west, to bring together our various gods.

At a time when religious tolerance, or intolerance, seems to be a walk across a vast expanse, it would be a fine thing to find the balance in between, the sort of statement that a tightrope walker could make. The pope's recent misguided words about Islamic culture – though referring to the past and not technically his own words – have had many of us on a tightrope these past few weeks. It would seem a better act to string a wire between the churches than to have us become the falling man. After all, when you drop you can't drop halfway. And when you're on a one-inch wire, failure just doesn't come in very handy.