LONDON – Illusionist David Blaine embarked Friday on his most daring stunt — 44 days of starvation and solitary confinement in a glass box hung from a crane.
Suspended for more than six weeks in a Plexiglas prison beside London’s River Thames, the “modern-day Houdini” will eat no food and have just one tube for water and another for urinating.
The American escapologist, who has been buried alive in a glass coffin, encased in a giant block of ice and thrown off a 10-story pillar onto cardboard boxes, believes this is the most dangerous feat he has ever attempted.
Before stepping into his glass box in front of hundreds of rain-soaked fans, the 30-year-old New Yorker told Reuters Television, “The first three weeks of this I am pretty sure I can handle. It is the last three that are going to be insane.”
The magician, who plans to keep a journal during his isolation, is worried about how the self-imposed ordeal could harm his body.
“When your body really depletes everything, when you rip through all your fat stores and muscle tissue that you need, you begin to get hungry again,” he said at the site beside London’s historic Tower Bridge.
“The hunger comes back, and it’s your body’s way of warning you that you are in danger. That idea is a little bit scary to me,” he confessed before his first major stunt, the first to be performed outside the United States.
Bookmakers William Hill believe the illusionist is an odds-on hot favorite to complete his 44-day ordeal, but the Guinness Book of Records has rejected his stunt as it does not encourage starvation record attempts.
“We have records on our books which are both better and longer,” said a Guinness Book of Records spokeswoman.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone felt that Blaine’s stunt could prove offensive to the relatives of Irish Republican Army extremists who starved themselves to death in protest over British rule in Northern Ireland.
“Those people who remember the situation of the 10 hunger strikers who starved to death and have ever met their relatives who visited them in the final days will know it is an absolutely horrifying risk,” he said. “It has painful memories for a lot of people in society.”
