It is time for us, in the history of thought, to see that the real as given to us by rational science is not all of the real. The world of logical and allegedly experimental reason, as nineteenth-century science bequeathed it to us, is in immense disrepute. The very method of knowledge is suspect. The equation has been formulated by skip ping over the unknowns and assuming a part of the problem to have been solved. In the end, it will finally be officially recognized that reality as we have baptized it is a greater illusion than the dream world.
Following through on my thought, I would say that the dream we speak of exists as such only because our minds are in suspended animation; the real is an epiphenomenon of thought, a result of non-thought, a phenomenon of amnesia. The true real is within us and we project it when we systematically exploit our paranoia, which is a response and action due to the pressure – or depression – of cosmic void.
I believe my paranoia is an expression of the absolute structure, the proof of its immanence. My genius consists of being in direct contact with the cosmic soul.
Dalí’s Reflection On The World: A True Cosmogony
I am essentially a visionary, a sort of sounding board for total truth. My intuitions are fundamental. Likewise, I believe that the universe around us is but a projection of our paranoia, an enlarged image of the world we carry within us, I think that the object our eyes isolate from the real or that we invent is a pure expression of our delirium crystallized. A simple secretion. Objectivity is but a snare and a delusion: in truth, merely a relationship of forces in temporary suspension. Caldéron speaks of the “traitorous world”. What an admirable expression!
I am thinking of my eye, the only proof I can give of the brilliance of my soul, the expression of my feelings, which projects my paranoiac force and re-creates and transmits the message of the real... What is this eye? A glob of humors, a knot of muscles, a film of flesh and nerves irrigated by a flow of acid? Beneath that appearance lurk galaxies of microscopic electrons, agitated by an impalpable wave, itself the fluid of a quasi-immaterial energy. At what level, then, the real? The truth, to me, to Dalí, is in the magnifying-glass I aim at the world, called my eye, through which there takes place an exchange that for that moment is known as real. As for me, what I project is truer than true and it is all that is true. Real is there fore equal to unreal. An implacable syllogism.
Paranoia, moreover, does not express itself solely in a system atized projection, it is also the formidable breath of life. And this mad exaltation that drives me to exist has as much consistency as the images it animates. I know that the world is not a dream because my life is evident to me as it is to the world and my dreams arise from it. And the sole evidence of reality resides in that breath of live forces that agitate me and color all things. But what void! What disparate ness! What strangeness all about us! How can we believe in substance in itself? What is substance? God? It sometimes seems to me that at the tip of my paintbrush or of my cock in orgasm – at the second when Gala’s coming goes through me like a wave bounding back – I have a deep sense of infinite reality, a micron of absolute structure, the élan vital of becoming. And in all finality I believe that the real is but eternal becoming. Sometimes in the thrill of beauty I seem to experience that wave that comes to me in ecstasy. In an archangelical beauty, without gender, without principle, which is like a certainty of God.
When Dalí Experiences The Certainty Of God
I bend over Gala, her body a galaxy, traversed by lightning waves, swept by eruptions of desire, convulsed by tensions, erections, shiverings. I am transported to the stars of a universe in state of be coming. But this face is something quite more than just a material trace, just a tissue of life. The lines, shapes, éclat, smile, are a presence of a being in its power, its uniqueness, its unity, its radiance. Here before me. It tells me it is. It awaits me, wants me. Calls to me. Receives me. This is not merely an interchange of energies, erections, sensations, a rubbing of epiderms to bring about electrical and biological discharge; not just two intelligences trying to understand each other, but a ball of fire bursting out of an unknown sky. Two forces uniting to create a bit of the infinite. A spark that spreads through the universe in all its dimensions. A unique something that tran scends our lives, and justifies, Everything – Her, Me, the Totality of the World – Gala is herself, and all women; and also the cosmos. And the desire biting at my skin, inhaling me, grabbing me, exalting me, suddenly feeds on my most intimate substance, the densest of my deepest realities. We are welded; time and space become a single reality, a fusion-point of the absolute structure. Beyond life, we project a bridge, a rocket, toward unknown wonders. We are the greatest hope of the world. All men live in me; all women under me – in Gala! The world is full, new, absolute.
I slowly withdraw my cock and look at that weeping root. My hand slowly strokes her breast. Our eyes open as the words The End fade in on the screen of the real while the picture, the chair, the bed, the curtain, the window come clear. We come back down to an indifferent earth knowing that real life is somewhere in an unknown dimension to which desire and paranoia alone can lead us. Dalí means Desire, and I am the symbol of all the desires in the world. The desire to possess life in its totality, to go beyond it, reinvent it – without death. In the space of dream.
Is Science, To Dalí, But An Approach To Dream?
Science – which appears to give us the key to power over the world – in fact carries us away from the power which can be born only of total intuition, flashing between mind and reality. Rationalism, experiment are merely control elements.
The irrational faculties alone open the doors of the universe to us. Art is a school of depth, knowledge and initiation. I say art and do not say aestheticism or plasticism, the model that illustrates my thought being art nouveau as the expression of the delirious. Art nouveau is an expression of which with The Visible Woman as early as 1929 – I helped to have the characters of profound originality recognized. And it was not just for its reaction value against the right angle and golden number that until then had ruled the plastic arts, but for the profound revolution it implies in its anti-functionalism and its extolling of the exaltation of desires. A compendium of art nouveau figures brings out soft abdomens, women’s hair, aquatic plants, and limp, hydrocephalous col umns. An art of metamorphosis, a materialization of smoke, wave, and the immaterial, art nouveau is both sculptured water and the most edible of cakes. It brings together the two poles of existence and its erotic expression is properly cannibalistic. Art nouveau brings out our unconscious mechanisms, our megalomania, our exhibitionistic capri cious feeling. It smashes all creations of measure, order, balance, good taste, to exalt dream and fantasy and suggest that we devour our own desires. It lays before our eyes images of a beauty fed on Eros, fear, anal sadism, onanism, in other words glorifying the truths of Self. Back to one’s sources so as to dip once more into the deeper truths of the Being and the All and that élan vital from which de cadent Greco-Roman art has estranged us (when I say élan vital, I am not referring to the silliness of Bergsonism nor the primitive aesthetics of the lovers of African art). I say that mystery, pathos, eroticism, madness are no more found in barbaric fetishes than in the columns of the Parthenon. A race must find force of expression in its biological and psychological depths and art nouveau is the mark of that explosive reaction against all aesthetic taboos. It is time for a new cultural revolution that might bring forth a new style and reverse the degrading powers of the bourgeois who eliminated nudity, dreaminess, and lyricism from existence. Gaudí and Ledoux, I proclaim, are the great wizards of the future, and paranoia the force of exploitation of the world.
What, To Dalí, Is The Greatness of Gaudí?
What I love in Gaudí is his vitality. His brain is at the tips of his fingers and tongue. He’s gustative. His architecture aims to embody the sum of all gluttonous sensations. It strikes me as the idea of man’s desire incarnate. The Sagrada Familia is a gigantic erogenous zone prickly with goosefle
sh aching to be stroked by hand and by tongue.
I remember Lorca in front of the admirable facade of the Sagrada Familia claiming to hear a griterio – a cacophony of shouts – that rose stridently to the top of the cathedral, creating such tension in him that it became unbearable. There is the proof of Gaudí’s genius. He appeals to all of our senses and creates the imagination of the senses. Gaudí researched this deeply by studying the applications of acoustics. He turned his bells into organ pipes. He applied the same attention to the color scheme for a polychrome mise-en-scène of his constructions. Like Catalan folk Christmas mangers, in which the characters are modeled after actual persons, each subject had its original coloring and even the roosters had red cocks combs. Gaudí had composed a chromatic palette to correspond to his polyphonic scale. Everything in his work, light as well as silence, “transports us elsewhere”, and none was more adept than he at using bad taste to throw us, decondition us, tear us away from the sterility of good taste.
He provokes us down to our innermost depths. Through him, everything is metamorphosis, nothing is taboo nor set any longer, the Gothic rejoins the Hellenic, which in turn merges into Far Eastern forms. He calls forth paranoiac vision and multiplies all interpretations. In Catalan, to come is written gaudí. The Sagrada Familia is the cathedral of the paranoiac-critical method, thus, of the pure science of systematically creative and fatal delirium. The fact that today the Sagrada Familia remains only a “gigantic rotten tooth” should not turn attention away from its true meaning. It is a magnetic tuning-fork whose waves spread ceaselessly and penetrate all minds receptive to the irrational that often practice and live art nouveau unwittingly.
When we automatically roll a bus transfer between our fingers, making it into a tube, cutting it up, we are creating art nouveau forms! The butcher slicing calf’s liver is doing art nouveau!
What The Catalan Future Is To Dalí
To be a Catalan today is to have the greatest opportunity for the future. Like being a Jew in the time of Nero! One of those persecutees from Judea who in two thousand years conquered the world. A Catalan donkey in its chromosomes has the genius of paranoiac conquering power. The Catalan philosopher Raymond Lully, an alchemist and metaphysician who wrote The Twelve Principles Of Philosophy, mystic and martyr – he was stoned to death at eighty at Bougie (Algeria) by Arabs – inspires me. Like him, I believe in the transmutation of bodies. I am sure that our capacity for delirium will one day lead the Catalan people to the highest glories through the powers of paranoiac imagination.
According to another Catalan, Francisco Pujols, there is an angel in us who sees the light of day only after a long series of mutations – begun at the start of the mineral kingdom to reach man after going through the vegetable and animal. I am in the angelic phase of my existence. I am approaching the absolute and I have perfected a whole series of methods for completing myself, from delayed orgasm to ejaculation over the idea of my death. The world will soon see Dalí turned angel! Having renounced all that he might take, burning desire refusing to satisfy or even express itself, extolling anticipation so as no longer to be anything but a blazing hearth of unfulfilled pleasures. Catalan thought will dazzle the world. It reaches the sources of the depths. And I give it the power of coming to awareness. In becoming exorcised, through the strength of Gala and her love, I found the pathways to the method of truth. Paradoxically, I channeled my delirium through reason, as in art I found my expression through classicism. I turn my contradictions into a veritable coherence. I can truly say I do not know when I begin simulating or when I tell the truth, but I do know when and where delirium ends. Through the pitiless demand of cold intelligence, I transformed part of my personality into an analytical faculty and won back from madness a domain that I turned into power and creation. The only difference – need I repeat? – between a madman and me is that I am not one.
When I heard of the death of Lidia’s son whom I had tor mented a bit and who starved himself to death in the grip of his psy chosis, I was seized with the horrors and found myself unable to eat in my turn. A terrible self-punishment drove me. That was a time when I lost confidence in my painting, feeling that Velázquez had already given all the answers. Gala, who was first to employ my method by explaining to me that my artistic death had just crystallized over the death of Lidia’s son, showed that if I were to set about drawing by obeying only my talent, which was immense, I would be able to start eating again. There was some bread and anchovies on the table. While listening to Gala, whose gifts of persuasion were getting into me wave after wave, I mechanically picked up the food and started to chew. An hour later I was drawing. Introducing a ferment of consciousness into a flow of desires creates eroticism; in a paranoiac élan it provokes genius; in a psychosis it effects a cure by transmuting the light into a laser.
Paranoia, thanks to my critical method, develops like a cellular blossoming. It proliferates as soon as it can feed on what is called the real. I conquered my delirium. But it is necessary to know what taunted lucidity this perpetual victory requires. I am Dürer’s Knight facing death, ceaselessly walking between the human and the non-human above the abysses. My whole being is a field of work that I unify through my will. If for one second this wave of force stops, Dalí no longer exists. I am the triumph of conscious life. I exist totally every thousandth of a second. I cannot be sidetracked from this existential battle under pain of death.
Sitting on the pot, yawning, farting, shaving, combing my hair, bathing, I am constantly present and the slightest rumble in my viscera is as essential as the movement of the stars. First of all, because I believe that each stage of our lives, each movement of our beings, each thought partakes of the totality of the universe and its correspondence. Each wave has a corresponding star, blade of grass, breath of wind. Our freedom is a bubble inserted into the great All. A toothache is a tempest somewhere else. Moreover, nothing is more important to Me than Me, otherwise I cease to be and it is by listening to my life that I best serve and nurture my genius.
Finally, body and awareness of being are the best radars of reality – the only ones we know of to tell us that a world exists outside ourselves. It is necessary to make the effort to emerge from the sleep that forces us to exist within the limits of our physical prisons. Our energy must spread its rays as does a sun. We must understand the analogical forms that shape on our inward screen like phosphenes and interpret them so as to decode the secrets of the universe. There is no such thing as chance. Everything corresponds to everything. Intelligence and imagination invent nothing. They remember and decode. Their role is not to reinvent the real but to lessen the distances between things. Genius consists first of all in putting one’s finger or tongue or penis on the truth of forms.
Dalí’s genius lies in having eliminated the appearances of the right angle, the logic, the aestheticism that lock reality into cages and returning to it the organic, malleable, limp forms on which a true network of correspondences can be established. My limp watches, for example, are the symbol of this illustration. I call for all things to be challenged by starting from sensual, carnal, erotic, existential evidence. Let us walk through the world in the image of Dalí! We are at the heart of a labyrinth and can find our way while becoming labyrinths ourselves. By mimesis, my paranoia took on the analytic hardness of Cape Creus granite, my imagination acquired the power of the metamorphoses by wandering along these perpetually changing shores. My delirium battened on the dream-like anguishes and mysteries created by the interplay of winds, rocks, and sea. I chose this place as the privileged center of my world, where the most intimate contact arises between the earth that bore me and the being that I am. Yes, I am Cape Creus and each of my rocks is a lighthouse forming the constellation of my internal navigation. In the center there is the “Great Masturbator”, with his huge nose, immense eye lids, a rock of strangeness the fascination of which still has the power of the Sphinx over me. In painting it, I attempted to tame it; I merely extolled its image and made it m
ythical, and its personage must now be wandering somewhere deep in dream memories since I set it afloat. For the Great Masturbator belongs to me and I alone know how to celebrate the Mass of his paranoiac passion.
One has to have heard the north wind come over the mountains to play the organ in his granite portals, caressed his craters, bloodied the tips of his needles with one’s feet in order to be able to speak to him and be heard. I alone can raise his closed eyelids so as to understand his gaze into eternity. He is my awareness of being, the radar echo of my self. My whole life is an alchemy that transmutes everything into gold. And as long as I remain anchored to these rocks in the heart of my Catalonia, the source of my delirium of living, inspired by my Catalan genes, I shall never cease transcending all fatalities.
Dalí Must Constantly Be Dalí
There is no urgency for me greater than to become Dalí, that is, the center of the greatest tension of intelligence, sensuality, and power that there is. My lucidity constantly reveals to me the secrets of the world and first of all of myself, from whom all begins. I leave nothing in the shadow of the phantasms that arise, for light alone can provide my delirium with its true strength. Were I to drop vigilance for one second I might be taken unaware by a nightmare monster. I one day discovered I was attracted to Stalin because of the sphinx who was my father, the greatest of my bosom enemies, most magnificent of the tyrants of my unconscious. By a sort of projection I had recomposed the impulses of my unconscious around the image of the Little Father of the Peoples.
From this experience I understood the hold that the “Man of Steel” had over his contemporaries through the Oedipus complex. He appeared as the fatal father whose power one must endure in order to grow in one’s own eyes and whom one venerated in his worst excesses because he embodied fatality. After his death, when his memory was being vomited upon and his statues were being unscrewed while street signs with his name were wrenched off, his carcass wasn’t worth much. I should have bought his mummy. I would have made a Dalínian sarcophagus for it in my garden at Cadaqués. It would have become the center of a phallic, Oedipal, perhaps orgiastic cult, a big game of the kind I like.
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