Maniac Eyeball (44 page)

Authors: Salvador Dali

Tags: #Art/Surrealism/Autobiography

BOOK: Maniac Eyeball

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In this domain, no need for miracles but just precise discoveries that are the simply logical development of known operative techniques and processes. The data are simple: it is known that hibernating animals naturally go into a deep sleep and bring their internal temperature down to 10 degrees Centigrade (or 50 degrees Fahrenheit). After the heart stops, the human brain can survive for two minutes. When the body temperature is brought down 7° C (12.6° F) , a person will survive fifteen minutes; below 10° C (50° F), survival continues normally. The problem then is to interrupt the vital processes – living micro-organisms have been found in samples of rocksalt crystals up to six million years old, so this can be done. At a temperature of –270° C (–436° F), energy stops dissipating. But, while possible for animals, for the sperm of a bull, a rooster, or even a man, such “chemical silence” – dehydration, desiccation as absolute zero temperature is approached, then unfreezing and rehydration – cannot be carried out with living human beings because of the brain. Ice crystals would burst the cells, or the mineral salts remaining after dehydration might reach a dangerous point of concentration.

The question then would be one of gradualness of refrigeration with concurrent injections of glycerine or glycerol to limit the osmotic shock. But this is getting down to detail – which in itself is reassuring because of its practicality.

How Dalí Sees The End Of The World

I decided to have myself preserved immediately after my demise so as to await the discovery that one day will allow mankind to bring Dalí the genius back to life. I am sure that a cure will be found for cancer, that amazing grafts will be perfected, and rejuvenation of the cells is just over the horizon. To restore life will be an ordinary operation. I will wait in my liquid helium without impatience.

There are however three things to be feared – apart from cell deterioration in my wonderful brain. They are that mankind, possessed of a kind of murderous madness due to the bad effects of overpopulation – like some species of Nordic rats that commit collective suicide – may start murdering the corpses. That the new life I some day wake up to may not be exactly mine, i.e., the divine Dalí body as it went to sleep: Would my unfreezing be a reanimation or rather the flower ing of someone new, the birth of a Dalí I would not recognize? And that humanity by that time may have forgotten me, a risk which in fact seems rather slight, for my immortal oeuvre will only continue to become more meaningful, and my legend will add even more to the prestige of my genius. I am just about guaranteed that in the centuries to come men of all eras will want to see, hear, and know of the new creations of the divine Dalí, and what a sublime adventure that will be for me!

I should not be unhappy if some day humanity declared my person to be sacred and that from generation to generation the torch of my body were transmitted as the eternal witness to evolution. Dalí wandering through time till the extinction of all suns – what superb delirium that!

That way, I should have cuckolded the whole world of all times and all climes!

“I SAY THAT THE MAIN AREA OF HIBERNATION OR DEEP-FREEZE OF OUR BODIES IS THE ARSEHOLE,
SINCE IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT THE FIRST THING ANIMALS BEGINNING HIBERNATION DO IS TO STOPPER THEIR ARSES WITH A PASTE MADE OF MUD AND SHIT SO AS TO KEEP THEIR METABOLISM INTACT,
AND AT THE SAME TIME GUARANTEEING THEIR INTIMACY WITH THEMSELVES!”

[1]
Caga i menga
: In his remarkable object-book,
Dix
Recettes d’Immortalité
(“Ten Recipes For Immortality”; Paris: Editions Audouin Descharnes, 1973), Dalí presented his ideas about the “
caga i menga
” system, as follows:

“In my very earliest childhood, probably around the age of six, well before the onset of masturbation, I was very much interested in the welfare of mankind and had sociological dreams about every one on earth being happy. I always saw myself as being hailed from the tops of public monuments by grateful crowds and tears came to my eyes at the scope of the benefits I was getting for them. Then, later, I jerked off – for the first time – and said aloud, ‘Fuck man kind.’ I began to be interested in my own prick and my own sexual problems; mankind went from a state of high esteem to one of almost total contempt. But then, in the period when I loved mankind, I had invented what I called
el sistema caga i
menga
, or ‘the shit-and-eat system’. Here, then, as Stendhal would have had it, are the specific de tails: the Towers of Immortality – each city was to have one – were fashioned after Brueghel’s Tower of Babel. Each inhabitant needing to defecate did it directly and in pecking order down on the in habitant of the next lower floor who needed to eat. Human beings, through methods of spiritual and alimentary perfecting, produced a semi-liquid defecation in all respects comparable to bees’ honey. Those below got the defecation from above in their mouths, and they in turn shit on those below them – which from a social view point guaranteed perfect stability; besides, everyone had enough to eat without even having to work. I saw nothing comical in this theory and believed in it firmly. But when I mentioned it to a medical stu dent, he told me that human excrement was utterly devoid of any vitamins, proteins, and so on, thus having no nutritive value whatso ever. So, I gave up my dreams of the Tower of Babel of Immortality, which, unlike the Biblical one that tried to reach to heaven, was to provide Immortality here on Earth.”

In the same book, he also contemplated the prospect of immortality through holography: “When I found out that one atom of holographic emulsion contained the entire image in the third dimension, I shouted without restraint: Let me eat it! That surprised everybody even more than usual, especially my friend Professor Dennis Gabor, Nobel Prize for Physics 1971. In so doing, I would have been able to accomplish, at least in effigy, one of my heart’s dearest desires: to eat the adored being Gala, to ingest into me, into my organism, atoms containing smiling holographic Galas, swimming at Cape Creus. Gala, Belka (Belka is Russian for squirrel), the super-sparkling squirrel, the hibernation specialist. So, here is the recipe for holographic Immortality: ‘With a glass of Solares water, swallow holographic information capable of bringing out images with a maximum of happy in stantaneousness of resurrection. After the
Persistance de la Mémoire
(“Persistence Of Memory” – the title that in 1930 already I had given to my famous limp watches), there will be the voluntary programming of desire: the image of a sybaritic squirrel coming back to life, to make man immortal.’ It was in 1948 that the English physicist Dennis Gabor, of the Imperial College of Science and Technology of London, described the principle of holography (from the Greek: “to inscribe all”), based on the properties of light interference and lasers. Holography allows for photography without a lens and restitution of the image in all of its three dimensions! In conformity with Leibnitz’ monadology, the eye needs only one fragment of a hologram in order to reconstruct the image con tained in the hologram as a whole! For every point in the hologram gathers the data come by diffraction from all points of the object. Apart from its applications in interferometry, spectroscopy, microscopy, acoustics, holography as already used by Dalí in painting is the key to the persistence of memory and its immortality, since 1.2 centimeters of emulsion can as of now store a hundred million elementary facts or bits of information!”

List Of Illustrations

Chapter 4:
The Girl Of Ampurdan
(1926)

Chapter 6:
The Lugubrious Game
(1929)

Chapter 7:
The Great Masturbator
(1929)

Chapter 8:
The Enigma Of Hitler
(1937)

Chapter 9:
Autumn Cannibalism
(1936)

Chapter 10:
The Atavism Of Twilight
(1934)

Chapter 12: Preparing
The Dream Of Venus
(1939)

Chapter 13:
Resurrection Of The Flesh
(1945)

Chapter 15:
Leda Atomica
(1949)

Chapter 16:
Sistine Madonna
(1958)

Chapter 17: S
lave Market With Invisible Bust Of Voltaire
(1940)