What Did Dalí’s Father Really Mean To Him?
We are on our way up to the chateau at Figueras. My father is holding my hand. Now it is becoming steep. At the top I see a red -and-yellow flag waving. I point to it and ask him to get it for me. Sly father reasons with me. Soon I am furiously demanding that I have it. My whim becomes a tantrum. I will not give in. My father loses patience. I scream and stomp my feet. My father is at a loss, but in order not to attract everyone’s attention, he decides to turn back and quickly drags me away. I have spoiled his day.
Every day, I find some new way to drive my father to distraction, to rage, fright, or humiliation, and make him think of me, his son. Salvador, as an object of shame and displeasure. I amaze him, throw him, provoke him, challenge him ever anew: from my coughing fits, in which I pretend to be choking and carry on hysterically until he trembles with fear and has to leave the table, his own throat all knotted up, to my misconduct in school. I can still see my father, at the dinner table, reading my report cards and my teachers’ comments about me, as his face grows more and more concerned. There was true delight for me in seeing his discomfiture swell up like a wave and engulf him. I also often pretended to be sick, just to worry my parents, and then peed in bed with pristine pleasure. My father bought me a fine red tricycle that was set up atop a wardrobe, to be given me the day I stopped wetting the bedsheets. I was eight years old, and each morning I would ask myself: “The tricycle, or would I rather piss in bed?” And, having thought it over, knowing how humiliated my father would be, I opted for pissabed.
My shitting habits, I must say, were not without charm, either. I always tried to think of some perfectly unexpected place: say, the living-room rug, a drawer, a shoe box, a step on the stairs, or a closet. Then I went about it discreetly. After that, I ran through the house proclaiming my exploit. Everybody immediately rushed to discover the object of my elation. I became the leading character in the family play. They grumbled, they yelled, they lost their tempers as time dragged on. I tried preferably to select a time when my father was around so he could see it happen, if not be involved himself.
One day, just to make things better, I dropped my doody in the toilet. They looked everywhere for the longest time, but no threat would get me to reveal the place I had chosen. So, for days on end, no one dared open a drawer or set foot on a step without worrying about what they might come upon.
For a long time I kept a king’s costume that my Barcelona uncles had given me as a gift, with an ermine-lined cape and a topaz-covered crown, which in my eyes represented the highest of authorities. With a scepter in one hand and a whip in the other, I haunted the hallways of our home, where I watched in the shadows for the servants who had made fun of me, and cursed them with the most awful anathemas. I would have liked to beat them, and the crown and scepter were warrant to me that sooner or later I would get to do it.
With age, my head got bigger, but I still kept that crown until I could no longer get it on without giving myself a headache, for in my eyes it represented everything I wanted to wrest from my father.
Since my father, on removing me from the tuition of Mr. Truiter, whose pedagogical inadequacy had finally gotten through to him, had enrolled me at the Brothers’ school in Figueras, I had developed a strange new power: I could see through walls and isolate myself completely, something that went well with my unbelievable gift for dissembling. I succeeded in being almost permanently mentally absent from class. I had a gift for dreaming with my eyes wide open that no other equaled. My imagination had taken as its most common inspirational theme what I dubbed “the five sentries”.
They were, on my left, two cypresses that I could see out of the classroom window, flanking it with their tips and marking the rhythm of our days with their shadows; on my right, the two silhouettes of Millet’s The Angelus, facing each other, that could be seen lighted in a copy on the wall of the corridor leading to the classroom; and, in front of me, a big yellow-enamel Christ nailed to a black cross. Every afternoon, as we left the classroom, having pressed our lips against the hairy hand of the Father Superior, we crossed ourselves as we touched the feet of the Crucified One. The dirty fingers of several generations of pupils had finally turned the Redeemer’s ivory color to a sallow gray.
My game consisted of imagining in minute detail the course of the sun and its subtle transformation through the branches, then associating that with the observations I had been able to make: the tone of the light in the Pyrenees, the glint of a windowpane reflecting a beam of light, the variations of colors in the plain of Ampurdan, in which my dream became wedded to geological formations. At the same time, there grew within me an unhealthy anxiety that arose from the two motionless characters of the Millet picture with that dead space between them. This distressing malaise was inexplicable, but I could feel it increase almost to the point of nausea. The dirty gray of Christ’s feet and the wounds in the knees, perfectly imitated, letting the bones show through, fascinated me. In my head, all of these elements composed an obsessive decor, against which I set a dream ballet that nothing could interfere with, not punishments, not interruptions, nor making me change my place. From then on, my wide-eyed dreams are all I need. I can now project my little inward cinema, animate every-dayness with the images of my own creation. Each day, I outdo myself in this, getting further and further from reality, finally to exit through a secret passageway from the circle in which the world is attempting to imprison my soul.
How Dalí Got Free Of An Obsession
I would soon put this power to work to free myself of my father. I could see his Jupiterian force diminish before my eyes as the repeated assaults of my caprices grew.
In the beginning, I brought him into my imaginings, gradually, transforming him, the Lord, the Strongman, the Invulnerable, into a subject dependent on my will, through fear, anger, shame, and disgust. I forced him to join in my games and break away from the rails of his rationalism, his calm, his authority. He became one of the objects in my private cinema, one of the slaves of my paranoia. I gradually stripped him of the attributes of his power, reducing him to a mere symbol. I admire the prodigious cleverness that I then displayed; instinct and intelligence worked hand in glove to bring off this genius of an operation. For, lest I run the gravest peril, as of seeing my personality dissolve into permanent delirium like sugar dissolving in a cup of coffee, I could not cease to admire him in spite of everything so that I might identify with him in order to maintain his structure and mold myself in the image of his strength.
Even today, his structural ideas stop me cold: my father was an atheist, and I cannot find faith. He was afraid of venereal diseases. “I want,” he would say, “to make a book with color illustrations that would make it impossible for men to go to bed with whores.” That fear still paralyzes me. I have seen my father, weeping bitter tears with an atrocious toothache, yet crying out, “I am ready to sign a contract to put up with this pain forever, if only I need not die.” Indeed I am his son.
But Moses little by little was losing the beard of authority and Jupiter his thunder. All that remained was William Tell: the man whose success depends on his son’s heroism and stoicism. I trained myself to put up with suffering; not only by keeping my stools within me until it became unbearable, but by forcing myself to wear that royal crown on my head when it had gotten so much too small. The pain soon became atrocious, but I remained unbending with myself to the point of exasperation. A strange enjoyment grew out of these acts of masochism transcended by the most lucid intelligence.
One anecdote shows the quality of this development. I was then a student in Madrid. My father, to show how much he respected my intelligence, had treated me to a subscription to the Gran Enciclopedia Espasa, and each month he sent me a volume, but I had guessed that in his mind this gift was also a good investment. Each volume that he sent gave him another chance to complain about not hearing from me. One day, I tore the cover off the last installment he sent and wrote on it, “Wishing you
a Happy Easter and a Merry Christmas,” for good measure. Then I sent it to him. For a long time, I could gloat over the circumstances of that package’s arrival.
Delighted with my mail, which he doubtless imagined to be overflowing with the results of my work, he would order broccoli, his favorite dish, and put my packet aside to open as dessert. His stupefaction at my insult was doubtless immense. He left the table and went up to bed without a word. I held the magic key to victory. Of course, he was to return me blow for blow, as when he tried, on the pretext of a future and my security, to turn me away from my vocation by wanting to force me to become an agriculturist. He did succeed in whetting my interest in the technology of the work, and the ways of peasant life, but he was unable to make me forget who I was. He also refused, when the time came, to allow Gala, my idol, my wife, to come and see him, and opposed my marriage on the phony pretext that Gala was a drug addict. But I got mine back later when, on returning from the U.S.A., I came to see him in a sumptuous Cadillac, the very evidence of my success and the uselessness of his revolt against my genius. I had succeeded in taking over and overtaking his own strength. What he did not know was that by digesting him I had also brought about his resurrection, and that he was living once again through me. Such ascesis in conquering and outdoing is the whole secret of my genius.
My father, the vanquished Jupiter, has never ceased being reborn in the mental projections I constantly make. He reappeared in the person of Picasso as well as in the lineaments of Stalin, admirable in strength and hardness, but devoid of terror or fear, without the shadow of any fascination to paralyze me. A Freudian hero par excellence, I freed myself of his guardianship, by battening on every cell of his self, and he became one of the motive forces of my genius.
What Does Dalí’s Mother Mean To Him?
My mother, in the Dalínian Olympus, is an angel. Her breast, after her blood, brought life to me. Her sweet voice rocked my dreams. She was the honey of the family. I would have liked to drink her the way our upstairs Argentine neighbors, the Matases, drank their afternoon maté, which they took about six each day from a sucking-cup that they passed around the large living room from mouth to mouth. I joined in partaking of this huge teapot, and felt the sweet warmth of the liquid flow into me, as I gazed at the little wooden keg of mate with the picture of Napoleon on it looking back at me.
The emperor had pink cheeks, a white stomach, and black boots and hat. For ten seconds, his strength flowed into me. I became Napoleon, master of the world. At that time, I was seven, and in love with beautiful Ursulita, one of the Matas daughters. A strange sensation filled me at the idea of putting my mouth where Ursulita and her mother had put theirs, yet at the same time a spark of jealousy stung my heart at the idea that they had drunk after someone else, not after me.
Thanks to that little keg, I long believed I was Bonaparte. At the time, if I were lagging as we came back from a long walk, all I needed was to be told, “Lead the way, Napoleon,” and immediately all my fatigue was forgotten as I hopped on to my trusty warhorse.
I can still hear the regular noise of the crank on the projector my mother turned by hand as she showed us little films. I remember a documentary, The Taking Of Port Arthur, reporting the Russo-Japanese War, in which generals saluted like automatons, and another picture, The Schoolboy In Love.
My mother is behind me, in the dark. My sister and my friends and I strain our eyes toward the moving screen. She is the picture angel. When I think of her, I also see the carnations she planted on the balcony, or the tiny little cactuses she used for the Christmas crêche.
From my mother comes the fact that I have only two little teeth of the kind known as incisors, instead of four, in my upper jaw; I also have two babyteeth left in my lower jaw. I broke one of those once when I punched myself in a fit of rage.
My mother’s death filled me with despair. For a long time, I would not believe she was gone. She alone could have changed my soul. I felt that her loss was a challenge, and resolved to get even with fate by becoming immortal.
“I HAD SEEN, ON A SORT OF LITTLE TIN BARREL FULL OF THE SWEET LUKEWARM DRINK CALLED MATÉ, AN IMAGE OF NAPOLEON THAT STRUCK ME AS BEING OF THE MOST SUPERHUMAN BEAUTY FACIALLY AND ESPECIALLY SEXUALLY BECAUSE THE TENDEREST PARTS OF NAPOLEON BECAME IDENTIFIED WITH THOSE OF MY MOTHER.”
Chapter Three: How To Raise Caprice To The Dimensions Of A System
The irrational spurts constantly from our minds and the shock of reality, but we do not perceive it, for we are so deeply conditioned to recognize only good sense, reason, and acquired experience. Yet, miracle is ever present, and we possess all the necessary keys to live within the secret of the soul of the world. But we have forgotten the ways of truth. We have eyes yet see not, ears yet hear not.
I, Dalí, have discovered the pathways of revelation and joy, the dazzle of happiness shown only to lucid eyes. My whole being participates in the great cosmic pulse. My reason becomes a mere instrument to decipher the nature of things and detect my delirium the better to appreciate it.
Only a long search led me, in spite of everything, to allow the true language of life to speak within me. I remember, in earliest childhood, playing at Little Father Patufet – the Tom-Thumblike Catalan hero who, to protect himself from the storm, let himself one day be swallowed by a bull because in his belly there would be neither snow nor rain. I used to get down on all fours and swing my head left and right until it was gorged with blood and I became dizzy.
With eyes wide open, I could see a world that was solid black, suddenly spotted by bright circles that gradually turned into eggs fried “sunnyside down”. I was able to see a pair of eggs in this condition, which my attention followed, as if in hallucination. Then the eggs became innumerable and turned into a kind of soft white easy-to-handle substance, that I shaped somewhat as a baker would knead his dough. I felt that I was at the source of power, in the cave of great secrets.
I was back in a kind of warm protective paradise, the essence of raw sensual enjoyment. The feeling I had merged with the dizzying memory I still retained of my mother’s womb, before I was born: two huge phosphorescent eggs like the cold expressionless eyes of a gigantic animal with a slightly bluish white of the eyeball. I long took pleasure in deliberately re-creating the apparition of these phosphenes, pressing against my closed eyelids to go back in this way to the precious images of my embryo, and even now I can, at will, though without the magic of the moment, propel myself back into that world of angels so similar to a divine aura.
With my sister and friends, we also played at grottoes: this meant squeezing as hard as we could into a closet or other opening so as to fit as many of us as possible into the least conceivable space. For instance, into the dining-room window alcove, deep as the thickness of the wall, between the outer and inner shutters, we might get half-a-dozen of us, crushed right into each other. I let myself be grasped by this feeling of crushing, pressure, constraint, that was almost exquisite, while my eyes kept following the paths of the sun’s rays through the slats of the shutters.
All I need do in sleep is to assume the fetal position, knees up under my chin, arms between my thighs, and hands on my face, fingers and thumb squeezed together and intertwined, the sheet enveloping me like a sac; then, if two added conditions are obtain ed – my upper lip sucking the pillow and my little toe being slightly out of line – I can let the divine weight of sleep invade my head, my body acting as nothing more than a crutch. I am back in my original shell, the paradise from which I was expelled.
Mr. Truiter’s optical lantern, with the dazzling suddenness of its images, had been an overwhelming magic to me, imparting al most human shapes to my hypnagogic feelings. It acted as developer to the photographic plate of my memory, and gave meaning to my quest. The appearance of the little girl became realer than she herself, and at the same time allowed me to eradicate, to erase the true life setting, giving absolute all-powerfulness to her image. I fell in love with a dream, but it seemed normal to me that h
er physical consistency, her incarnation should be as possible, as evident and probable in her flesh as were color and light, the presence of her image. Perhaps I needed only to look for her. I did not yet know that I had to think and believe for my hallucination to become reality.
Dalí Dreams While Awake
I am walking with my mother and sister in the snow, which I am experiencing for the first time. I float on a magic carpet that crackles lightly beneath my step, but at the same time ceases to be immaculate. Soon we are out of Figueras and going on into a forest; and suddenly I stop: in the middle of a clearing, a magic object is there on the snow, as if waiting for me. It is a plane-tree pod, slightly split so as to reveal the fuzz inside. A single ray of sun, sneaking through the clouds, hits the yellowish fuzz like a tiny projector and brings it to life. I rush up, kneel down and, with all the care one would take to pick up a wounded bird, cup my hands to cradle the little pod. I bring my lips near the fuzzy slit and kiss it. I take out my handkerchief and wrap it up completely. I tell my sister I have just found a dwarf monkey, which I refuse to show her. I can feel the monkey moving in my hand inside the kerchief. My only desire now is to show my find to the little girl in the optical theater. I know she is waiting for me at the fountain. I insist that my mother take us there immediately. She agrees. Soon, we bump into some friends, and she stops with them. I rush toward the fountain, and there – oh, ecstasy! – the little Russian girl with the troika is sitting on a bench waiting for me. She looks at me. My monkey is moving under my hand, in my pocket. It seems as though my heart is about to stop. I run off, back toward my mother. Then I start up again, but this time make a detour and watch the little girl from the rear. I kneel in the snow, motionless, my mind paralyzed. I can see and hear a man coming to the fountain to fill a jug, and the noise of the gurgling water awakens me from my dream. I take the pod out of my pocket and with my penknife begin to peel it: it will be a gift for my love whom I will kiss on the nape of the neck as I hand it to her. But she suddenly gets up and goes to fill a small jug herself. My knees blue with cold, I arise and go toward the bench to put the fuzzy ball down there. All my limbs are trembling. At that moment, my mother appears. Very concerned about my condition, she wraps me in her shawl and says we must go right home. My teeth are chattering; I can’t utter a word. I would like to stay there, forever, holding on to my vanishing dream.
Maniac Eyeball Page 3