Maniac Eyeball (20 page)
Little by little I had succeeded in establishing a crank’s inflexible code for a setting without which my sleep, if not impossible, was at best troubled and anxiety-ridden. Today I need only stroke my sacred wood to slip felicitously into a somnolent state.
I am a Catalan peasant in tune with the soul of my land. It has never happened that after a month’s living at Port Lligat I did not recover that earth-force which allows me to resist all storms, all temptations, like a rock. It was at Port Lligat that I learned to forge my ideas and my style as sharply honed as Tristan’s sword. In our solitude there we live according to the rhythms of cosmic pulsations. Fishing for sardines under a new moon and knowing that, at the same time, the salad greens are leafing out instead of bunching into heads. Preferring to ponder the intuitions of Paracelsus’ genius rather than listen to the radio, dream with eyes open on the world of the invisible rather than allow ourselves to be conditioned by TV, fly to the highest apexes of the absolute rather than become activists in the development of a Utopian socialism. I take care of my field, my boat, that is, the canvas I am finishing, like a good worker, ambitious only for simple things: to eat grilled sardines and walk with Gala along the beach at eventide, watching the Gothic rocks becoming transmogrified into nightmares of the dark.
I made myself on these shores, created my persona here, discovered my love, painted my oeuvre, built my house. I am inseparable from this sky, this sea, these rocks: linked forever with Port Lligat which indeed means “linked port” – where I defined all of my raw truths and my roots.
I am home only here; elsewhere, I am camping out. This is not just a matter of sentiment, but of psychic, biological-Surrealist reality. I feel linked by a veritable umbilical cord to the living totality of this earth. I am part of the rhythm of a cosmic pulsation. My mind is in osmosis with the sea, the trees, the insects, the plants, and I as sume a real stability that translates itself into my paintings. I am truly the center of a world that creates my strength and inspires me.
My genius is like a proton of absolute matter, the sun of a universe that legitimizes me. This privileged place is where there is the least space between the real and and the sublime.
My mystical paradise begins at the plains of the Ampurdan, is surrounded by the foothills of the Monts Albères, and comes to meaning in the Gulf of Cadaqués. This country is my permanent inspiration. The only place in the world where I feel loved. When I painted that rock that I dubbed
The Great
Masturbator,
I was merely marking out one of the landmarks of my kingdom and the picture was a tribute to one of the jewels of my crown. Yes, I am a Catalan peasant whose every cell branches on to a parcel of his earth, each spark of spirit to a period in the history of Catalonia, homeland of paranoia.
The Catalan family is paranoiac, that is to say, delirious and systematic, and the real finally ends up by conforming to the demanding will of this directed madness. Nothing stands in the way of our desires, and reality is there to fulfill them.
I ask Gala: “Heart, what do you want?”
She replies: “A ruby heart that beats,” and that wish turns into a jewel that enchants the world.[1]
Chance itself is on our side: my father tosses a match up in the air after having lighted his cigar. It lands vertically on a burning slate in the roof and catches fire. I in turn throw a carafe stopper toward the ceiling and it bounces off and lands poised on a curtain-rod, where we let it remain for several days so we can admire the play of forces in objective chance. For we know that anything can happen. Will and word are kings in Catalonia. Music is spontaneously born from our belief in it, our deep harmony between the forces of the spiritual unknown and those of nature.
My friends the Pichots went out as a family group to play classical music on the rocks at Cape Creus so as to establish a dialogue with the waves. Every Catalan is an orchestra conductor who can control and direct the forces of mystery. The most humble among us is sure of his paranoiac power. I knew a shoemaker in Ortis who spent his time beating out the measure of the most secret music. No wedding, funeral,
sardana
, or demonstration took place without his august presence, arm raised, setting out the cadence of a harmony he alone could hear. He was the clown of every gathering, and even when he was pitilessly chased away, he would continue conducting his orchestra – until sublime darkness in the middle of the village square, where he tried to conduct the rhythms of the storm that had broken. He struggled at this until morning, and died of a thunderbolt that burst his heart.
Small Catalan peasants in the evening catch glow-worms that they string into a necklace to give to the girl of their heart, who accepts it as if it were a rivière of diamonds.
And as long as darkness lasts, can there be more living, more sparkling, more poetic proof of love? I like the fact that this share of childhood remains in the adult and allows him to insert his dreams into reality. Nothing is greater than keeping intact one’s faith in the wondrous, in the metamorphoses of the real. One may prefer death to the renunciation of one’s deepest conviction or one’s absolute. An old man in Cadaqués, a sometime primitive painter, kept an odds-and-ends shop. He was in love with a young girl, but dared not confess his passion to her. His only pleasure was to watch her from behind his dirty shop windows. One day she went by on the arm of a young lad. It was Christmas Eve. He hanged himself from the balcony and the priest who discovered the body was hard put to cut the rope, for it had dug into the folds of the scarf he had put around his neck so as not to catch cold.
One may also prefer laziness to action. No to yes. Ramón de Hermosa, a local celebrity in Port Lligat, was the most compleat do-nothing one can imagine. The mayor allowed him to sleep among the homeless cats and the fleas in a broken-down house. He scrounged hand-me-down clothes and begged shamelessly. His victims – hard working fishermen – often later saw him sitting at a cafe terrace, before a steaming cup, smoking a cigar, and he answered their insults with an exquisite smile worthy of St. Francis of Assisi.
This parasite had gone beyond the stage at which human words could reach him. I understood this when, having paid him in advance for pumping water for me, I found him sitting in the shade and imitating the squeak of the pump by an effortless rubbing. Ramón had turned his worthlessness into a virtue and his attitude into an institution. The serenity of his soul was complete.
The Catalans’ paranoiac universe is amazing in its variety. To turn one’s weakness into strength, to transcend the absurd – for a Catalan there is no joy more noble. Each of them is a hero defending his honor of being allowed to dream with eyes wide open. In my childhood I knew a huge hulk of a man who suffered from a grandiose catarrh. Living in his company meant hearing a continual and fantastic throat-clearing, but he had conceived the unbelievable idea of saving up for one single expectoration all the secretions of each twenty-four hours. So each night at 8:30 sharp he gave his performance, and the whole neighborhood gathered before his door from eight o’clock on to see the happening.
He would finally come out, his face purple, apoplectic, his eyes set and popping, holding on to the door jamb, his chest congested, hiccuping, teetering, his esophagus swollen with thick viscous phlegm. And then suddenly, at the appointed time, he eructated a powerful, nauseating, huge spray, a greenish, shapeless, bloodied turd that bubbled on the ground to the great admiration of the initiates.
Every circumstance of life, every character trait, every anom aly thus turns into something exceptional, something mythic, and any exhibitionism can be a grandiose spectacle of humanity and truth. There is no chance, no coincidence. If I was born on Calle Monturiol, it was because Narcissus of that name invented a submarine so as to go down to the green depths of a sea that fascinated him in childhood, and it was only natural that Figueras’ most illustrious son be the one symbolically to welcome my genius. And from the balcony of my father’s house looking down on all Figueras, I could see the plain of the Ampurdan and the Gulf of Rosas, from which the calls to my vocation came to me and allowed me to escape from the bourgeois notarial universe.
To Dalí, Delirium And Dream Are Not Objectively Reality
I believe in universal analogy. There is a subtle link between the stars and the grains of sand on the beach. I believe that the delirium present in us Catalans is the blood of the spirit that develops reality as a photographic plate allows us to recognize it. Only that is true which we believe true and are strong enough to impose. Knowledge – science – is but a proposition: one of the possibles of the universe. Watching Lidia live, I often wondered whether poetic reality was not just as true as common objective truth. The widow of Nando the fisherman, madly in love with writer Eugenio d’Ors, whom she had met when he was twenty and going fishing with her husband, bound her whole life up in that passion. I can still see her sitting on the ground and reading me an Eugenio d’Ors article in which she in terpreted each sentence as a secret message intended for her alone. As her imaginary romance grew, and she commented upon it to me, she would then cut the neck of a chicken that she plucked and cleaned with admirable dexterity and precision, thus living on two separate levels as naturally as can be. Of course, she was crazy, and her two sons were even more so and had to be locked up to keep them from killing her in a violent fit. But no one more than she – except for me – knew so firmly how to maintain the systematization of delirious thought within the most remarkable coherence.
And had Eugenio d’Ors loved Lidia, what would have happened? What then would be madness? And what truth?
The secret lies in lucidly keeping a steady course between the waves of madness and the straight lines of logic. Genius consists of being able to live while going constantly from one frontier to the other, grasping handfuls of the treasures of mystery that one then, like an athlete, holds at arm’s end to make them shine before the eyes of contemporaries whose imaginations suddenly recall unknown beaches they had forsaken. I am that genius. Others have paid with their sanity for the fit of delirium. I saw Ramón de Hermosa, so deep in the idleness of his dreams that he was nothing more than a pile of crawling vermin one could not even touch. I remember Lidia, naked, well set on the roof of her house with a paper hat as sole adornment. She had to be locked up...
Such exploration is dangerous. It is the most terrible of navigations, with the death of the mind as the punishment for failure. I too have known those grave stormy hours of the greatest risk. Many is the time I experienced the anxiety of feeling I was slipping over to the side of the irrational. My laughing jags were atrocious times in my existence. And my murderous impulses... my obsessions: the time I could no longer eat or drink because I found out one of Lidia’s sons, whom I had tormented a bit, had starved himself to death; the time I thought I was losing my sight for having hit a blind man; the time I believed I was Dalí such as into himself eternity no longer would change him...
My strength lies in the fact that I am deliberately what I am. My intelligence and lucidity are present at every moment. The delirious heritage of all Catalonia lives in me, but dominated, fertilized, fermented by the greatest intuitive genius of lucid life ever brought to earth. I have lived and surmounted all the dramatic adventures of the mind errant in the world of madness and always found my way back. I am the perpetually reborn, each time stronger, more alive, upon return from each dive into the deepest of the abysses of the un conscious. Dalí is the most sublime personage there is and I am Dalí.
I know and make use of all methods further to increase my genius by ceaselessly sowing the fields of the earth with the diamond seed of madness. Since the time when, like all Catalan children, I played at being Father Patufet[2], and on all fours kept swinging my head like a metronome so as to try to create a black veil before my eyes on which were projected fantastic visions of eggs that brought the sensations of my intra-uterine existence back to me, I’ve perfected the system. I have become a magus of delirious exploration and a sage whose secrets are part of the treasures of humanity. And this confession, these confidences are a spiritual testament capable of setting future Nietzsches on the road to the great mutation.
But, to be Dalí, one must
first
be Catalan, that is, equipped for delirium, for paranoia, and living in it as naturally as the old fishermen of Cadaqués who hung live lobsters from the gleaming baroque cherubim of their church’s altar, so the death throes of the crustaceans might help them better to follow the passion of the Mass. But more than anything else one has to be
true.
Madness is an artificial, rootless delirium, delirium-as-snake-biting-its-own-tail. I start from reality and come back to reality, bringing a full sack back with me. In that way, one becomes a medium able to project his fantasies and a prodigious calculator of each of his gestures incessantly formed into equations facing consciousness. I exist in the totality of my being and each cell is on display, but this prodigious energy is perfectly orches trated, unified under the eyes of my lucidity. So I use each nugget to form an ingot through force of imagination just as Gaudí stopped passers-by on the street to make plaster casts of them and turn them into saints for the front of the Sagrada Familia. Space and time which appear only in the forms of the world ask to be immortalized by human genius.
I am human genius, the more universal for being Catalan. Transcendence, that is genius. The palm trees Gaudí looked at as a child with ecstatic eyes inspired him to raise the towers of his cathedral toward the heavens. The reproduction of Millet’s
Angelus
which as a child I saw in the Brothers’ school at Figueras brought forth a tragic interpretation that became the basis for my paranoiac-critical system. Cadaqués – and all of Catalonia – left indelible marks on me and I left the marks of my whole existence on the sands of its beaches. We are in existential osmosis. I espied my first pubic hairs and found expression for my narcissistic desires among the rocks at Cape Creus. I ecstatically sowed my seed as I masturbated along the coves, creating a sort of erotic Mass between that earth and my body. I worked for thousands of hours at my Port Lligat window engraving the beauties of a landscape designed by a Leonardo gifted with the hand of God. I myself am the hand, the blood, the eye, the sperm of this Catalan soil.
