Maniac Eyeball (2 page)
I got more revenge a few days later by pretending to choke on a fishbone, so that my father had to leave the table, because he could not stand my hysterical coughing, which probably re-awakened in him an echo of the painful death-throes of his first born. I kept repeating these terrifying choking mimodramas, in order to savor my parents’ horror. By taking revenge on my father, I prolonged the enjoyment of my own desire.
In those days, all I had to do was go through my parents’ bedroom, where there was a picture of Salvador, my forerunner, my double, to have my teeth start to chatter; I could not possibly have visited his grave in the cemetery. I later had to develop all the resources of my imagination to treat the theme of my mortuary putrefaction by projecting images of my flesh as a putrid worm and finally exorcising it so I could get to sleep.
How Dalí Defines The Paranoiac-Critical Method
I define the paranoiac-critical method as a great art of playing upon all one’s own inner contradictions with lucidity by causing others to experience the anxieties and ecstasies of one’s life in such a way that it becomes gradually as essential to them as their own. But I very early realized, instinctively, my life formula: to get others to accept as natural the excesses of one’s personality and thus to relieve oneself of his own anxieties by creating a sort of collective participation.
At the Marist Brothers’ school at Figueras, one afternoon, walking down the stone stairway toward the play area, I felt like jumping off into space. Cowardice forbade it. But the next day, I made the jump and landed lower on the stairs, all bruised and battered. Both pupils and teachers were surprised, and no little frightened by what I’d done. The amazement I caused made me almost insensitive to pain. I was cared for, surrounded with attention. A few days later, I repeated my act, this time yelling loudly enough to have all eyes turn toward me. I did it again several more times, my own fear having completely disappeared in the great anxiety I caused my schoolmates. Each time I came down the stairs, the attention of the whole class turned toward me, as if I were holding a service, and I walked in deep silence – deathly silence, as the saying goes – so as to rivet their fascination until the very last step. My persona was being born.
The reward I got from all this was much greater than the inconvenience. It has often happened to me to yield to a sudden impulse and jump into space from the top of a wall, as though to risk the greatest danger and soothe my heart’s anxiety. I even turned into a very skillful jumper. And I noted that each time these events brought me, after the fact, a deeper sense of the reality about me: greenery, trees, flowers, all seemed closer to me.
Afterward, I feel light; I can share normally in existence and “hear” my senses. By jumping before my associates, I create in them an angst equal to or even greater than my own, I take on a kind of dignity in their eyes, raising my act to the stature of a happening. Dalí becomes the bearer of everyone’s angst, and his weakness is transmuted into strength. I have gotten them all to recognize my delirium, to accept it, and forced them all to partake of the same emotion.
This is how the passion for death became a spiritual joy. Which is typically Spanish. Not for me to “keep reason,” as was said by Montaigne, whom I scorn for his petit bourgeois mind, his grotesque attempt to beautify death, deprive it of its sap, and over come its horror.. I would rather look death in the eye. I make my own the sublime outburst of St. John of the Cross: “Come, O Death, so well hidden that I feel you not, for the pleasure of dying might restore me to life.” In the face of such a stand, how skimpy indeed the advice for falsification given by Michel de Montaigne. I hope for my death to come into my life like a thunderbolt, to take me entire like a spasm of love and flood my body with the totality of my soul.
In advance I can savor my desperation. My powerlessness to know on the other hand elates me, and my fright imbues me with the audacity of defiance. The prick of death bestows a new quality on my life and my passions. When Gala, the miracle of my life, underwent a serious operation in 1936, we spent our time in a state of apparent unconcern still creating Surrealist objects the day before the surgery. She amused herself at bringing together amazing dis parate ingredients for the fabrication of what seemed to be a mechanico-biological apparatus. Breasts with a feather in the nipple and topped by metal antennas dipping into a bowl of flour (this assem blage being an allusive reference to her forthcoming operation). But it happened that, while in the taxi taking us to the hospital – we had planned to stop off at Andre Breton’s and show him Gala’s invention – an unfortunate bump knocked the contraption askew, dousing us with flour. You can imagine what we looked like when we arrived at the hospital.
What is to be underlined is that, later that evening, entirely engrossed in my own invention – a hypnagogical clock made up of a huge baguette of French bread into which twelve inkwells filled with ink had been implanted with a quill-pen of a different color stuck in each – I had eaten a hearty dinner, without for one second thinking of Gala’s operation.
Until two in the morning, I continue to perfect my clock by adding to it sixty inkwells painted in watercolors on cardboards that I hang from the bread. I fall asleep, but at five in the morning, my tensed-up nerves awaken me, I am in a sweat and break into sobs of remorse. I get up unsteadily, weeping, my mind exalted by the images of my adored Gala in the various phases of our life, and I dash over to the hospital to shout my anxiety. For a week, I am overcome with sobbing, with death grabbing at my throat. Finally, the ill is overcome. I go into Gala’s room, take her hand with all the tenderness in the world, and say to myself, “Now, Galushka, I can kill you.”
My soul battens on what crushes it and finds sublime orgasm in what denies it. Weakness itself becomes my strength, and I am enriched by my contradictions. I live with eyes lucid and wide open, unashamed, without remorse, and emerge as spectator of my own existence.
Is Scatology Noble To Dalí?
Do you think it is coincidence that the flights of the great mystics were so often associated with defecation and flatulence? The fact is that the anus, raised on high by Quevedo in his
In Praise Of The Arsehole,
is mainly a symbol for the purification of our acts of cannibalism. All that is human when transcended by the spirituality of death becomes mystical. After the birth of the Dauphin, heir to the throne of France, his excrements were collected at Court, in the presence of all the Nobles of the Realm, and the greatest of artists were called in, that their palettes might take inspiration from the royal shit. The entire Court was dressed in the color of
caca-dauphin.
That is noble. It is the acceptance of man in his entirety, his shit as well as his death. Moreover, the excrementitious palette enjoys infinite variety, from gray to green and from ochers to browns, as can be seen in Chardin.
And there is nothing gastronomically more eye-appealing than the shade of loose stools. The true scandal is that we no longer dare to say or think this. Long live Dauphin-shit!
Take Americans, who are unable to face death and have built up a whole industry on slogans like, “You do the dying – we handle all the rest!” so as to disguise the reality of the phenomenon, to minimize it, dress it up, pasteurize it, standardize it, and deprive it of its tragedy. But death conceived without grandeur can inspire nothing but a mean life with mediocre thoughts. There is no sub stance to the life of men if death is devoid of meaning. The U.S.A. would find Dauphin-shit unthinkable, so they replace it by sugar candy-pink, i.e., blandness and mediocrity.
I dream of restoring its solemnity and fascination to death. Perhaps it will be necessary, as in the great days of the Escorial, to go back to the muckheaps on which one could be present at the slow decomposition of bodies, with sight and smell bringing to minds and memories the fermented values of a true spirituality. The worm-ridden bodies accomplished their last noble function: the return to earth. In the acceptance of scatology, of defecation and death, there is a spiritual energy that I exploit with great consistency. I am con vinced that, unconsciously, the deep impulses that moved me to disembowel my little dead and decomposed porcupine also doubt less demanded that I eat it.
Dalí: Kill And Eat
I love to crack between my teeth the skulls of little birds, bones that I can suck the marrow out of, gamy woodcocks served in their own excrement, and I regret only that I never got to eat the famous turkey cooked live, which, it is said, is a magical dish. I know I am fiercely ravenous, and my conscience is delighted with my cannibalistic appetite, for what I thus consume is the constant proof of my living reality.
I salivate in a more lively way, knowing myself to be alive, when devouring something dead. The jaw, moreover, is a wonderful instrument for becoming aware of our own lust for life, and the quality of reality, which is in fact only a gigantic reservoir of rot, of which our dining-tables are the cemeteries.
The truth is between our teeth. All philosophy is proved out in the art of eating. A man reveals himself when he is fork in hand. The aristocracy of Grande Cuisine has always appealed to me. Like my father, I am wild about seafood, those crustaceans whose virgin flesh is protected by the bones they are shrewd enough to grow on the outside, but I detest oysters out of their shells and the mushiness of spinach.
Joseph de Maistre said it all on this subject when he commented that on a battlefield man never disobeys and the whole earth continuously soaked in blood is an immense altar on which every thing living is endlessly, measurelessly, relentlessly immolated, until the consuming of all things, the extinction of all evil, the very death of death.
Yes, obliteration is inevitable. We will all be digested by the earth. And I think of that all the time. Not one of my actions, one of my creations but is profiled against this background.
At no moment in my life am I unaware of the presence of death. It makes me happy, witty. First of all, because everything in its shadow becomes unique and inevitable, and then because I intend to cheat a little by having myself hibernated, i.e., by extending the comedy two or three more acts into the coming century. Finally, because I believe in the resurrection of bodies. It is too bad that I am not a believer. I have not lost hope. St. Augustine showed the way by praying to God to give him faith, but not without first giving him the time necessary to exhaust the pleasures available on earth. I desire eternal afterlife with the persistence of memory. I want to be able to remember every detail of my life. Beatitude means nothing to me without the certainty of remembering the whole of my life. I reject other forms of resurrection and in that case prefer not to die. At present there are at least ten methods for prolonging life virtually indefinitely, with periods of sleep that would add that much spice to the re-awakenings. I will choose with the greatest efficiency, when the time comes. This attitude is a part of the game I play with death. I have my genius as an alibi for attempting to prolong the days as long as the fulfillment of my oeuvre demands.
But in truth, all that I love deeply and viscerally is the inside of my body. My entire ethic consists of getting maximum pleasure through waiting, using resistance to extend desire by heightening it to the paroxysm, not only with all that might stand in its way, but especially by my own deter mination not to take what belongs to me, not to possess what is mine. And what is mine more than my death?
I confess, I believe myself invulnerable; I want to endure to the highest limit so as to provoke divine death in its very essence. By way of becoming as great as it is, of emulating it in dimension and quality. It is my glorious goddess, governing spirit of us all. It is sacred and absolute beauty. I know that this life is but the realm of the incomplete, but I shall make of the long and infinite succession of days that constitute my life a superb completion, carrying pride to the point of its fusion with God. I would like to write a poem to it, that would say: O Death, my beautiful divinity, Thou hast found Thy High Priest, Thy rival, and Thou servest me as I adore Thee. We work together to formulate an equation of the absolute such as has never had its equal. Each day I am increasingly the Great Archangel of the House of the Dead.
To get back to my intra-uterine life, it ended on the eleventh day of May in 1904, at forty-five minutes past the hour of eight, as I was born from the legitimate belly of Dona Felipa Dome Domenech. My mother was thirty. And the birth certificate that my father, Don Salvador Dalí i Cusí, made out two days later gives details of the genealogy of both my parents’ families. On father’s side, Don Galo Dalí Vinas, native of Cadaqués, deceased, and Dona Teresa Cusí Warcos, native of Rosas. On mother’s side, Don Ancelmo Domenech Serra and Dona Maria Ferres Sadurne, natives of Barcelona.
Witnesses: Don Jose Mercader, native of La Bisbal, province of Gerona, tanner by trade, residing in this city, and Don Emilio Baig, native of Figueras, musician by profession, residing in this city, both being of age. My father, who was born at Cadaqués, was then forty-one, and known as the “money doctor”, being the
notario
of Figueras, living at 20 Calle Monturiol.
I was given the Christian names of Salvador, Felipe, and Jacinto. And I am sure that all the glorious departed, all those whose souls enrich the mystical noösphere in which we swim, that cybernetic humus of spirituality, rejoiced on the occasion of my appearance on earth, since it constituted the greatest challenge the genius of man had ever issued to death.
In the long succession of centuries that saw so many illustrious men born, how many ever attained my quality of concerted cosmic delirium? What I can say is that I, Dalí, feed my desires with the
élan vital
of all dead geniuses. I carry them all forward. I am the sun that shines on all the planets lost in the night of ages.
