But I regret nothing, for as long as I can move I will be able to touch the beautymark that Gala has behind her ear, and I will have my talisman, my strength, my cathedral, my greatest attention.
I have said that Picasso had the same beautymark and my greatest pleasure one day had been to touch both ears at once so as to feel the absolute beautymarks of genius and love, reflections of the internal sums of beings. In my paranoiac-critical cosmogony, the beautymark has un usual importance. I have naturally assimilated all so-called scientific knowledge about it: the fact is, there is none!
I therefore imagine that it is an external sign – as folkways contend – of the internal existence of an unusual structure. A drop of absolute structure set in this body as a diamond is set in its case. Proof that a bit of the al chemist’s elixir is there, that the golden number is present somewhere in the architecture of that head, an angelic spark somewhere in that soul! I find it normal that Gala like Picasso – exceptional beings – should bear the same divine seal in the same place.
My passion for Gala is enhanced by the value of the sacred. This double discovery belongs integrally to the structure of ourselves; it adds the final touch to my internal geometry. Every time I touch Gala’s ear, I am caressing my dead brother (my double), Picasso (who was a kind of Oedipal father) – therefore, my father, and beauty; but Gala is also my mother, since she symbolizes Leda and her divine twins. My index finger against Gala’s beautymark makes me feel I am possessing my whole physical, legal, legitimate, holy, and mythical family. A sort of prodigious, paranoiac-critical mammoth orgasm.
Dalí Wins Out Over Death
My delight in existence is on this level: to shower death with a fireworks of life. I follow death, but it fascinates me by its eternity as does the “Great Masturbator” motionless before the waves. I believe that I love it despite my fear, but I cannot picture myself dying. If something were one day to finish, it could only be in one giant orgasm. A cosmic coming. That thought excites me as it used to transform Lorca who hid his anxiety by mimicking his death and then got up laughing and transfigured. I have only to think back on the picture of my dead brother placed alongside the reproduction of the Velázquez Christ in my parents’ bedroom, and I get the shivers.
I feel surrounded by all the departed I have accumulated during my lifetime. I expect the obsession to make me dizzy. Then I tell myself that each of them is at work for me, forming the humus of my own spirituality, nourishing my genius, and I suddenly become a superb cannibal battening on the angelic corpses of all his dead friends. They all contribute to my glory. My true glory: the one that warrants lasting – not only in memories but as an eternal Dalí.
I believe that all these departed solidify my life like so many buttresses. I take unheard-of strength from them. I have an answer to all challenges, and my ability to overcome all obstacles is prodigious. I am like that phyllomorpha laciniata of my childhood discovered when I was nine on the paranychia of the hills of Cadaqués. A mimetic magician, it disappeared beneath the leaves of the shrubs and made one think they had come alive. And when, to the amazement of the fishermen, I amused myself by setting them down on a table and ordering them to move, and they soon started moving, I was taken for a wizard. No one else had noticed this phenomenon. I gave my pal the phyllomorph the name of the Catalan expression for deception, morros de cony (cunt-lips). I admired its prodigious capacity for hiding to the point of invisibility, the better to exist. Then I discovered that the morros de cony had on its back a parasite which in turn was covered by a pyramid of eggs chiseled like golden diamonds – themselves probably endowed with even more amazing virtues. I asked a biologist to study whether these polyhedrons were not the expression of the germ of pure life that might, say, be the cure for cancer. This intuition deserves to be checked out.
Paranoiac-critical logic leads me to divine and find the road that, from Cadaqués, an exceptional place, by way of the morros de cony and its parasite, revealed to me the golden eggs and the absolute structure in which my genius can see itself reflected in the mirror of the unity of the world. My oeuvre since then merely translates the transcendent mimesis of the morros de cony as crystallized and sublimated, as illustration of the paranoiac-critical adventure.
The basic knowledge about the truths of life comes to us by the paths of reason, but what comes by intuitive flashes requires our being available before the world. The state of half-sleep is one of the privileged moments with a value similar to that of the openness of the soul in childhood, in which deep communication can take place. If I were able to remember or photograph the hypnagogic images that run across the screen of my eyelids before I doze off, I am sure I would discover the greatest secret of the universe. A machine ought to be invented which, like contact lenses, would record the input of dreams and allow their retrieval. A successful painting is nothing but a recollection of one of those prodigious mo ments. It includes all the bits most essential to the human being. To look at a painting is to receive messages from the absolute. Fifteen years before Crick and Watson I drew the spiral of the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid, the basis of all life), at the urging of a psychoanalyst, because I had always known what it was, deep in my dreams.
In 1931, I painted The Persistence Of Memory, containing all biological knowledge in its intuitive truth. Someone someday will have to wind up my limp watches so they can tell the time of absolute memory, the only true and prophetic time.
A Few Examples Of The Paranoiac-Critical Method
The genius of paranoiac-critical activity is to associate limp paranoia with tough criticism; the gooey with the sharp; force of life par excellence with mind; to reach the deepest intuition. Two fundamental examples: the tragic myth of Millet’s Angelus and the railway station at Perpignan.
I have always been obsessed by the image of Millet’s Angelus, which I discovered in early childhood, and I felt an inexplicable malaise at seeing the peasant man and woman facing each other motionlessly. I looked at the solitary figures, wondering what bound them together. The Angelus through the years gradually became the most internally puzzling, the densest work of painting I know.
In June 1932, the image of the picture suddenly appeared in my mind with phenomenal power. I could not stop talking about The Angelus with unbelievable constancy and admiration. The picture appeared with urgent insistence not only in what I said but in what I dreamt – although I did not dream the picture itself – but to me it was somehow different from everything else I had ever seen, somehow exclusive, and it moved me to excessive emotion, quite without logical explanation. It became the source of delirious images not through its intellectual or artistic value but by its psychic significance which had a whole world of associations that sprang up in stantly and took on their own life, revealing the existence of a drama far from the official version of calm and rest that the subject is supposed to mean.
My attitude at this time is induced by that paranoiac power of interpretation, and objective chances increase: I play with some pebbles I picked up on the beach to make objects out of them, attracted by their unusual shapes. I mechanically put two of the stones facing each other, and suddenly their position brings the Angelus couple involuntarily back to my mind, to the point that they become unbelievably precisely transformed into each of the characters. The man’s figure seems deformed to me, eroded by the mechanical action of time and tide, and becomes an anxiety-ridden silhouette. I under stand the association to be clearly delirious.
Returning from bathing, I go through a field, trying to avoid the grasshoppers that I have feared since childhood. I can clearly see a fisherman coming in the other direction toward me. Just as we are about to pass each other, I jump to one side to avoid him, but by some sort of awkwardness I bump into him violently, and at that very moment the image of Millet’s Angelus flashes through my mind.
In one of my daydreams, going through the Madrid Natural History Museum with Gala at twilight, I see among the shadows thrown by the gigantic i
nsects the terrifying form of the Angelus couple. Leaving the museum, I feel an overwhelming urge to bugger Gala in the deserted entryway and do so with wild delight.
Some time later, motoring through a street in the little Port of La Selva, near Cadaqués, I see a window display of a full coffee service, each piece decorated with Millet’s Angelus. Enough to drive a person wild! Of course, statistics could show that there was a good chance I would come across such a set in a window, considering the frequency of reproduction of The Angelus, which has always exerted a fascination of virtually epidemic proportions. And one might ask how such a picture, which appears to be quiet, insipid, insignificant, and conventional, could so grip imaginations.
Just what does this picture try to say, that it should so be heard? What is there behind the appearances? What is the meaning of that man and woman, standing, motionless, facing each other, stuck there without a gesture, or a word, or even a movement indicated?
When I look at Millet’s Angelus, the first recollections to come out of my store of memory bring back the twilight and elegiac feel ing of childhood: the evensong of the locusts, the last daydreams at nightfall, the poetic declamations I recited at fourteen. What I might call the atavism of twilight, imbued with a feeling of the end of the world.
The woman with her hands together, in the same position as those on the postcards praying to St. Catherine to “send me a husband,” strikes me as symbolic of the exhibitionistic eroticism of a virgin in waiting – the position before the act of aggression, such as that of the praying mantis prior to her cruel coupling with the male that will end in his death.
As for the man, he is riveted to the spot, as if hypnotized by the mother – wiped out. To me, indeed, he stands in the position of a son rather than a father. It may be noted that in Freudian vocabulary his hat stands for the sexual arousal being hidden to show his attitude of shame over his virility.
The erotic significance of the wheelbarrow is as undeniable as that of the pitchfork driven into the plowed earth. The two sacks set in the barrow also have a meaning, as is evidenced by the general connotation given the popular postcard with the legend Baisers en Brouette (Kisses In Barrowfuls). Regarding the fetishistic aspect of the wheelbarrow, I noted the fixation of the illustrious Postman Cheval, who also accorded a choice place in his ideal, delirious, and poetical pantheon to the wheelbarrow, having it speak thus:
“Now his work is at an end,
He enjoys his rest with grace;
And I, his humble little friend,
Am given a most honored place.”[1]
I collected materials on peasant eroticism in view of a film to be entitled, La Brouette de Chair (The Flesh Wheelbarrow). My intention was to show that peasants worn down by overwork eroticize their work instruments, and that the wheelbarrow was the very type of symbolic instrument par excellence. In a nineteenth-century Amer ican folk picture there is a woman holding her husband’s feet in her hands and pushing him ahead like a wheelbarrow, he holding a wheel between his two hands, while his rigid sex organ becoming an actual tool plows the earth and his balls appear as two cacti. The interpretation is obvious: as the Egyptian phallic mother with her vulture’s head, the American mother – here also representing the life-giving earth – gets fertilized, at the same time castrating her husband whose virility is reduced to no more than a reproductive role. In that picture, a happy sun looks down on the scene – the sun of absolute matriarchy.
That same summer, 1932, a madman in a fit punched a hole in Millet’s Angelus at the Louvre, after having long hesitated, he later stated, between it and Watteau’s Embarkation For Cythera or the Mona Lisa. (Freud’s demonstration of the incestuous attraction of that Da Vinci work is well known.)
I expressed my ideas and gave a detailed analysis of the whole set of delirious phenomena evoked by the tragic myth of The Angelus, but mislaid the manuscript at the time the Germans over-ran France in 1940. Twenty-two years later, I came across it again. In the interim I had found out that Millet had originally painted between the characters of father and mother a coffin that held their son’s corpse, but had later altered the picture for fear it might appear overly morbid.
In 1963, I requested Mme. Hours, who runs the Louvre laboratory, to have the painting X-rayed. The radiograph did bring out a geometrical shape at the mother’s feet. All became clear. My paranoiac-critical genius had sensed the main point. No other interpretation could account with such truth for the spell cast by The Angelus, and even if my vision was but mental intuition, this inter pretation was all the more sublime – as Gala was to say!
That study is one of the fundamental documents of the Dalí cosmogony. It is as important as the Perpignan railway station. Every year, when we leave Cadaqués for Paris, our old Cadillac takes us to the station at Perpignan, where I wait in the waiting room while Gala checks the baggage. There are people all around me. I feel as if isolated and that is when I have an instant of absolute pleasure. I have just left my Cadaqués studio and its stimulating climate of creative work in which I live in a state of perpetual alert, and am on my way to Paris with its gastronomical feasts, its erotic celebrations. I sit on my bench as at a border crossing, I feel myself available, and intense jubilation invades me, a monumental joyfulness. At this precise moment I visualize the painting I ought to have painted during the summer. I buy a scientific journal at the news-stand and read that, in operating for glaucoma, the eye anesthetic used is a “diffusion factor” made from wasp venom. I immediately recall that one day a wasp fell into my paint-pan and the fusion of the color pigments took place with miraculous flexibility and ductility. I wonder whether wasp venom could not be used as a color solvent. Since then, based on my intuition, I have had such a medium made and it is one of the secrets of my art of painting.
So, for years, the station at Perpignan has been a source of enlightenment, a cathedral of intuition to me. I long thought it was because genius needed a trivial place in which to assert itself. The Parthenon and Niagara Falls are too overwhelming! The absurd and the anodyne are better handmaidens to enlightenment. The memories of the unconscious let their passages get through only when the mind is vacant, and toilet seats are a high place for the state of grace, quite as good as the Perpignan station.
Then, in 1966, I found out that it was at Perpignan that the measure of earth, the standard meter, had been established. On a straight line twelve kilometers long, from Vernet to the outskirts of Salses, north of Perpignan, Pierre Méchain, in 1796, set the bases for the triangulation that led to determining the standard meter. I understood the fundamental metaphysical significance of this re search. The standard meter is not only one ten-millionth of a quarter of the earth’s meridian, it is also the formula for the density of God, and this place appears to me privileged among all places. The Perpignan station becomes a truly high place.
I then took a taxi and went slowly around the station, inspecting it as if it were some esoteric monument of which I had to find the meanings. The setting sun was ablaze and the flood of its light created flames on the facades and especially the central skylight of the station that seemed to become the center of an atomic explosion. About the station I could see a radiating aura in a perfect circle: the metal trolley cables of the streetcars that ringed the edifice and gave it a crown of glinting light. My penis sprang to attention with joy and ecstasy: I had seized truth, I was living it. Everything became overpoweringly evident. The center of the universe was there before me.
Physical, mathematical, and astronomical sciences are split over whether the world is finite or infinite. No one has yet answered that key question. At that moment, I knew that the world is limited on only one side, which is its axis. I cannot put into words the vision and certainty I had, but from that moment on there was no longer any doubt in me: cosmic space began in front of the facade of the Perpignan station in the area marked off by the circle of cables, and the universe ended at the same point.
This very limit was the proof of the existen
ce of the universe; it showed that the hypothesis of permanent expansion was erroneous. Non-Euclidian space stopped at the point where it met the dimension of the mind. This limit could not be defined but could appear only as a vision, a snapshot of absolute time-space that illuminated me viscerally. I decided to have the Perpignan station cast in gold as a tran scendent image of truth. To me it is the laboratory in which the absolute values of the universe can be followed, and I inspect it with passion. Under the impulse of my paranoiac delirium, I have had attentive analyses of the monument made. All its measurements have been noted. Not only the general dimensions, but those of windows, doors, ticket windows, benches. I have had the posters photographed, and the timetables which in enlargement show me all the shapes of objective chance, and starting from my delirious impressions I will be able to set up a kind of seismographic system of the relationships of the universe with itself. The point is to bring total truth out of this microcosm of the universe. I am persuaded that the bible of the world is symbolically represented in the Perpignan station; I know this in my innermost self: all that is needed is to find the decoding key.
Each year supplies me with new proofs. Do you know that the only drawing Sigmund Freud ever made is a sketch of his student bedroom, which is exactly the same shape as the waiting room of the Perpignan station?
Maniac Eyeball Page 18