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 whos
e 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.
“DEATH IS THE THING THAT FRIGHTENS ME THE MOST, AND RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH, THAT GREAT SPANISH THEME, THE ONE MOST DIFFICULT FOR ME TO ACCEPT – FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF LIFE.”
[1] It is a well-known fact that Vincent Van Gogh’s birth was also preceded by the death of a brother named Vincent. As a schoolboy, the future artist each morning was obliged to go by a cemetery in which he saw his own name on a tombstone.
Chapter Two: How To Get Rid Of One's Father
To the manchild I was, my father was a giant of strength, violence, authority, and imperious loves love. Moses plus Jupiter.
The love he had felt for Salvador, his firstborn, given the strength of his character and the quality of newness, was never to abandon him. At any rate, I was to experience its waves, its radiations searingly through me. When he looked at me, he was seeing my double as much as myself. I was in his eyes but half of my person, one being too much. My soul twisted in pain and rage beneath the laser that ceaselessly scrutinized it and then, through it, tried to reach the other, who was no more. And for a long time I had in my side a bleeding wound that my impassive, insensitive father, unaware of my suffering, kept continually reopening with his impossible love for a dead boy. For a long time this love was delivered to me like a sledgehammer blow, when through a word as fine-honed as a dagger it did not slash at my heart.
In spite of him, in spite of this feeling of being superfluous, of being ill-loved for myself – choked within the corset of the image of the other that was being forced upon me – I tried to keep catching my breath, to fight back vigorously as one does when drowning, to conquer my own place in the sun of life. This despair drove me to delirium, but yet, fascinated by the purely Spanish hardness of my father who was in fact the natural, biological, and psychological axis of my future personality, I could never stop admiring him. So, while afraid of the shadow of the oak he was, and trying at the same time to free myself of the oppressive hold it had on me, with my mind inspired by his example and his strength I skinned myself against its rugged bark and scratched my soul on its trunk. In order for me to become Dalí, I had to immolate on the psychoanalytical altar my father Dalí i Cusí shrink him as do the Java head-hunters to the size of one of those celluloid toys that as a child I hammered to bits, and swallow him like the Eucharistic host so as to digest him and be nurtured by his substance and essence. For, I must, at the same time, never cease to keep his admirable presence before me, so that my wild rage of power and resentment might not get the better of me, but remain channelized and mold itself little by little into the monumental projection that would be he and I, me and him, my genius flowering with the secret of his strength.
He spent the night sitting up with me when I was sick. The next day, a Sunday, he instructed that he not be disturbed. A client, a Figueras peasant, came to the house asking to see him. Soon, he was demanding to see the notario, and his voice began to roar about those public servants who get paid for doing nothing and are never there when needed, spending their nights carousing and their days sleeping it off, while honest folk like him had to work even on Sundays. My father heard him, and suddenly was up. He was in undershirt and drawers. I heard the door violently flung open. He grabbed the man by the collar, with a yell, and they both lurched out on to the stairs; they went on fighting each other all the way down to the sidewalk, then in the public square, right under my windows. I ran to the balcony and watched through the bars as my father and that man rolled over and over on the ground, tearing at each other. My father’s sex organ, breaking out through the fly of his drawers, now as the two wrestlers tugged back and forth, dipped into the dust and beat against the ground, like a sausage. When my father got mad, the whole rambla of Figueras held its breath; his voice broke out of his office like a torrential stream carrying away everything before it in its path.
A client who had come to deposit some money with him once asked for a receipt, pending getting the official document the next day. “After all, you might die tonight,” he said. My father jumped at him: “Do I look like the kind of man who might die?” And the notario of Figueras threw the impertinent client out.
In the sober aspect of his character, he was no less impressive. I could tell his worries by a tic he had. Taking a lock of hair between his thumb and forefinger, he would twist it into a coil that stood out like a horn on one side of his head, and his wrinkled brow, his ma jestic scowl, turned him into a Moses inspired, charged with divine authority.
I can see him rocking in his chair, with his ear toward the huge horn of the phonograph scratching out Gounod’s “Ave Maria”. Standing in front of him, against the background of the music I can see his leonine jaw coming and going above my head, full of its terrifying energy.
He had locked himself in, but I had seen him carry a platter piled high with the sea urchins he adores. I imagine him cracking them open in one movement and swallowing them with a sensuous enjoyment the more voluptuous for being savored privately.
I am seven years old, and he holds me by the arm with his huge hand. We are going across town. He has to drag me. I scream and refuse to go to school. Shopkeepers on their doorsteps watch the notario exercising his authority. He is just as furious as I am. This will be a dramatic confrontation. But the imposition of force will only increase my megalomania.
My father, being a free thinker, felt I should go to the public school rather than the one run by the Brothers, even though the latter was more in keeping with our social station. My arrival at the school was looked upon as an intrusion. In my little sailor suit, with neatly combed and scented hair, polished shoes, I was like a fashion plate suddenly dropped among these ragged street urchins. Everything about me, from my lace kerchief to the initialed thermos bottle with my four-o’clock hot chocolate, set me aside more implacably than a social disease. They came smelling around me, mocking me, calling me names. I lived in a kind of silently prideful quarantine, while around me there was a whole bustle of unaffected life, made up of shouts, fights, noisy games, in which the barefoot boys of Figueras gave vent to the vitality of their ages. I remained turned in on myself. And within a year I forgot everything my mother had taught me at home, all the letters of the alphabet and how to sign my name. I was so intimidated I could hardly even undress alone any more. To take my sailor blouse off was an exploit that came near choking me to death. I was unable to lace my shoes, and might stand gaping before a doorknob, paralyzed at the idea of having to turn it. The world around me was loaded with deviltries, bristling with spikes, undermined by pitfalls. My nights were invaded by monsters and I would scream out in terror. My mother had to take me in her arms, and she would spend whole nights cradling me on her knees.
How Dalí Remembers His First Class
Mr. Truiter, our teacher, looked like Tolstoy, with his white beard yellowed by the snuff he took mechanically but in massive doses. He had a strong smell and was dressed outlandishly, but he wore one of the rare high hats ever seen in Figueras. When he sat down, the two points of his beard surrounded his face like the flaps of a frock coat, and ran down to his knees. He was supposed to be very intelligent, and his eccentricity was equaled only by his gift for wool-gathering. Truiter is a Catalan word meaning omelet. He must have eaten his runny and had trouble digesting them, for he spent the better part of his class time snoozing. Between dreams, he pinched snuff like a “fix”, and then, after a good sneeze that shook his whole carcass, went back to his old-man’s slumber. When one of the kids got too
noisy and brutally brought him out of his dreams, his heavy mass of flesh as if needled by a nightmare jumped up into the middle of the room and he grabbed some youthful ear between thumb and forefinger, muttered a curse at the offender, then returned to the sweet arms of Morpheus. His pedagogy, as can be seen, shone best in the art of the siesta.
As the only socially acceptable pupil, although as dull a student as the rest – for obvious reasons – I was enshrined by Mr. Truiter in a special niche in the midst of his vegetative life. He had one passion – one escape – one way to fend off the present: collecting works from the past, which he did to the point of vandalism. They used to tell how once he was almost stoned to death when, in trying to swipe a Roman capital from the column of a belltower, he made a corner of the building collapse, narrowly missing bringing down the bells that might have crushed him, but not escaping the violent reaction of the villagers. This incident had contributed much to the legend of his being a man of culture and lover of art. He had a whole houseful of treasures he had pillaged and invited me to come and see them.
After a schoolday made up of alternate sleeping and violent awakening, Mr. Truiter would often take me to his caravansary. I remember one flat dried frog that he called his dancing-girl: it hung from a thread in his bedroom. He said it acted as a barometer, but its grotesque movements horrified me. There was a statuette of Mephistopheles that he kept in a mahogany niche and he could make sparkling flares come out of its trident like a real display of pyrotechnics. He had also brought back from the Holy Land a giant rosary, cut from the olive trees of the Mount, which he dragged out on his shoulders for me and spread on the floor with a great noise of clanking of chains. But the real wonder was his optical theater: a kind of stereoscope that took on all the hues of the prism and ran moving pictures before your eyes. I can remember as clearly as if I were still looking at it the overwhelming (to me) appearance of a little girl in white furs, riding in a troika chased by wild wolves whose eyes shone in the darkness. She was looking out at me, calling to me for help, and my heart responded to her call and her presence. I was never to forget that face, that call, that image as magical as a first look of love. There were many other things in Mr. Truiter’s optical show; but of all the visions none reached the intensity of that fantastic exchange between my solitary, megalomaniacal, hysterical, and absolute mind, and the dream image that came from nowhere to teach me that on earth and in the skies there was an angel watching over me, who also needed my help.
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