Order of the Day: Dalí having been guilty on several occasions of counter-revolutionary actions involving the glorification of Hitlerian fascism, the undersigned propose – despite his statement of January 25, 1934 – that he be excluded from Surrealism as a fascist element and combated by all available means.
So Breton was ready to strike hard. To ready myself for it, I removed my sixth sweater. My thermometer firmly in my mouth, I now went over to the attack, determined to catch Breton in his own logic. I highmindedly stated that to me the dream remained the great vocabulary of Surrealism and delirium the most magnificent means of poetic expression. I had painted both Lenin and Hitler on the basis of dreams. Lenin’s anamorphic buttock was not insulting, but the very proof of my fidelity to Surrealism. I was a total Surrealist that no censorship or logic would ever stop. No morality, no fear, no cataclysm dictated their law to me. When you are a Surrealist, you have to be consistent about it. All taboos are forbidden, or else a list has to be made of those to be observed, and let Breton formally state that the kingdom of Surrealist poetry is nothing but a little domain used for the house arrest of those convicted felons placed under surveillance by the vice squad or the Communist Party.
“So, André Breton,” I concluded, “if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail.” Breton tensed, his pipe tightly held between his teeth, and grumbled furiously, “I would not advise you to, my friend.” He was check-mated.
As I was removing my seventh sweater, and now baring my naked breast, he called on me to foreswear my ideas about Hitler, on pain of expulsion. I had won. Kneeling on the thick carpet now formed by my sweaters on the floor, I solemnly swore I was no enemy of the proletariat – about which in fact I didn’t give a fig, for I knew no one of that name and merely granted my friendship to the most disinherited men on earth, namely the Port Lligat fishermen who were so contented with their lot that I sometimes wondered whether the Marxists knew what they were doing in pulling for the revolution.
I had transformed the grotesque occasion into a true Surrealist happening. Breton would never forgive me for it, but he learned from it that it would probably be better to avoid repeating such an experiment that could so easily turn against him and trap him in his intellectual braggadocio.
“BRETON WAS THE FIRST IMPORTANT PERSON WHO MADE ME THINK AND WHOSE CONTACT GREATLY INTERESTED ME. I WAS CONTRIBUTING ROTTING MULES AND TURDS BALANCED ON HEADS – IN A WORD, A DELIRIOUS, SUPER, FIRST-RATE INCREMENT THAT GREATLY ATTRACTED HIM. THEY HAD CLEARLY EXPLAINED TO ME THAT OUT OF PURE AUTOMATISM I WAS CALLED UPON TO TRANSCRIBE EVERYTHING THAT WENT THROUGH MY HEAD WITHOUT BENEFIT OF ANY CHECK IMPOSED BY REASON, AESTHETICS, OR MORALITY. I HAD IDEAL MEANS AND POSSIBILITIES OF COMMUNICATION. BUT BRETON WAS VERY QUICKLY SHOCKED BY THE PRESENCE OF SCATOLOGICAL ELEMENTS. HE WANTED NO TURDS AND NO MADONNA: BUT THERE IS A CONTRADICTION TO THE VERY FUNDAMENTAL OF PURE AUTOMATISM IN SETTING UP IMMEDIATE TABOOS, FOR THESE EXCREMENTS CAME TO ME DIRECTLY, BIOLOGICALLY. THERE WAS A CENSORSHIP DETERMINED BY REASON, AESTHETICS, MORALITY, TO BRETON’S TASTE, OR BY WHIM. THEY HAD CREATED IN FACT A SORT OF HIGHLY LITERARY NEO-ROMANTICISM... IN WHICH I WAS FOREVER OUT OF FAVOR, AND INDEED BEING JUDGED, INVESTIGATED, SUBJECTED IN A WORD TO INQUISITORIAL PROCEDURE.”
[1] André Breton, a few days before this Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture, met Ehrenburg, who had written in his Vu par un Ecrivain de I’U.R.S.S. (As Seen By A Soviet Writer): “The Surrealists are perfectly willing to accept Hegel and Marx as well as the revolution, but what they will not do is work. They have their own concerns. They study pederasty, for instance, and dreams. One of them does his best to eat up an inheritance, another a wife’s dowry...” Breton slapped him. Ehrenburg was a member of the Soviet delegation to the Congress. Breton was denied the floor as a result of this incident.
Chapter Nine: How Not To Be A Catalan
When we were very small, my father used to take us on outings to Cape Creus. I need only to close my eyes in order to recapture landscapes and scenes intact, but at the time I established the strangest kind of dialogue with myself. Every rock, every promontory of Cape Creus is in permanent metamorphosis. Each is a suggestion that prompts spontaneous visualization of an eagle, a camel, a rooster, a lion, a woman – but if you approach from the sea, the nearer you get, the more the symbolism develops and changes. It is a continual simulacrum. The bird becomes a wild animal and then a barnyard fowl. Like living in a constant mirage... and yet, when we land, the granite beneath our feet is hard, compact, clear, implacable after having double-dealt us so constantly.
Likewise my thought, my mind: so wildly concentrated upon itself, a block of diamond whose multiple facets are so brilliantly shimmering that the reality surrounding it is disconcerted, deceived, snared, decoyed. Thus my strength and my strategy, patterned on a single landscape from which my roots draw their sap.
The universe is a whole. How can that be denied? Just as man breathes eighteen times a minute, or 25,920 times a day, the equinoctial point of the sun runs through the zodiac once in every 25,920 years. Our hearts beat only one-fourth as fast as our lungs breathe, just as the speed of the propagation of air is four times greater than that of water. Our life is a mimesis of the world. Our minds are like a film that records the variety of the phenomena of the universe. I am convinced that I am Cape Creus itself, that I embody the living nucleus of that landscape. My existential obsession is constantly to mimetize myself into Cape Creus. Like it, I am a cathedral of strength with a nimbus of dream-like delirium. My granite structure is equipped with ductilities, haze, glint, quicksands, that hide its needles, its craters, its promontories, the better to let me keep my secrets.
The north wind coming over the mountains, on this cape that the ancients dedicated to Aphrodite, sculpted the dream figures just as I model my own characters on my stage of life. To hear my secret voice, one must first have listened long to the song of the wind at the point of these Pyrenean rocks exchanging their memories and intertwining their millennial legends. The cape is the utmost point of Catalonia and one of those high places in which there blows the sacred spirit, the tidal wave that comes from the depths of the sea to conjoin with the breath descending from the sky to fertilize our earth. This is where my paranoia was born, in this cell of mystery.
One day I found a piece of wood formed by the waves and the rocks, awaiting me like a talisman vouchsafed by the gods, on a beach at Cape Creus. It was during an outing with Gala. Love guided our steps and illumined our days. All of our actions had unusual style; miracles sprang up beneath our eyes. I knew, when I saw that wood with its magical cachet, that Aphrodite herself had sent it to me. I picked it up religiously, and have never been without it since. This message from the gods is a good-luck charm. I often feel an over powering need to touch it so as to undergo its magnetism and inhale its spiritual effluvia. The obsession is a sort of crankiness: Gala knows as well as I that our two lives are knotted through that magical wand. At times I have mislaid it; and we became desperate. I remember once in New York making the housekeeping staff at the Hotel St. Moritz go through all the day’s dirty bedclothes to find the fetish I had negligently left between the sheets. For before I go to sleep it acts on me like a tranquilizer. It assures me of a harmonious passage from reality to dream. Before I had it, I was obsessed with the disorder I was leaving behind. I had to make sure all the drawers in the bedroom were closed. I made Gala leave all the doors ajar. Within the bedroom, I laid out a whole series of objects arranged in a harmonious but esoteric order.
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 all
ows 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 – scien
ce – 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...
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