Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

by Marina Abramović

So the monks took their 10,000 gulden and went downtown with their translator, beautifully dressed in their red robes—they all looked like the Dalai Lama. And they were gone for hours: seven o’clock, eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten o’clock passed. We were saying, “Oh my God, the monastery money—it’s gone. They’ve spent it all.” Finally they returned at ten fifteen, after the shops had closed, and they were super-happy, extremely excited. I said, “What did you buy?” They grinned with delight and showed me: two umbrellas.

I had always believed performance was real and theater was fake. In performance art, the knife is real, the blood is real. In theater, the knife is fake and the blood is ketchup.

For thirty days, I barely spoke. I never opened a suitcase—each day I was given three freshly washed sets of pajamas. For thirty days I ate ghee and meditated. I underwent hours of intensive massage daily. I never looked at a computer or a smartphone. E-mail was a thing of the past. And after thirty days, I was healed.