Eroticism, like hallucinogenic drugs, like atomic sciences, like Gaudí’s Gothic architecture, like my love of gold, comes down to a common denominator: God is present in everything. There is the same magic at the heart of things and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God and the whole universe tends toward the perfection of the human being. For having understood this, divine justice helps me in the shape of objective bits of luck in my most everyday gestures
I discovered the laws of painting when I understood that the human mind evolved in function of its ideas about space. To Euclid, the plane, the point were idealized objects having roughly the same consistency as cold tapioca.
Descartes, on the other hand, manufactured a kind of bare cupboard with three theoretical dimensions in which Newton placed a dream apple. Einstein, with relativity, uncovering to us the fourth dimension of time, gave us the means to a delirium in which we could meet God. Rationalism went right back to its place.
All mystiques, whether religious, nuclear, hallucinogenic, or of gold, have the same divine heaven as my painting celebrates, which found its expression in the Sacrament Of The Last Supper that I did for the famous collector Chester Dale, who donated it to the National Gallery in Washington. In that picture can be read all of my cosmogony: the union of time and space which is the secret of God.
“TO A PAINTER, EVERY BRUSHSTROKE IS THE EQUIVALENT OF A TRAGEDY EXPERIENCED.”
[1] In Dalí’s sculpture, Dante’s laurels are made of small spoons.
Chapter Sixteen: How Dalí Invents A Paranoiac-Critical City
I am a pig. A divine pig brought up in society and “possessed by desire” – which is the Catalan translation of my name.
Human beings have little effect on me, but I need to make use of them, and, snout foremost, I charge, sneak, gluttonously swallow anything before me while perfectly knowing which cesspool to avoid. I have paranoiac-critical printed circuits that act as antennae and my delirium is one of pure lucidity.
The best of all worlds to me is the one in which I can wallow with the greatest delectation, the one that has the finest garbage heaps and the most perfected bowels of mental constipation – through press, TV, and radio. But my veneration goes to hereditary monarchic society in which the most rigorous moral order reigns, on condition of course that I be its great man. Spain, which awarded me its Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic, is entitled to all my gratitude – I know no gratitude, nor admiration nor feeling, other than for Gala, but Gala loves Spain which is where she has her castle and I love Gala, so the syllogism is implacable.
Monarchy is the father recognized and celebrated, the dome of God upheld by the pillars of wisdom, it is the order that covers all disorders, the individual in his spiritual family.
All regimes merely ape the monarchic order with more or less demagoguery and efficiency. They are all hierarchical monarchy in disguise. They are decoys used to introduce into people’s mental circuits the impulses orders, and norms that they would otherwise not accept. But, make no mistake about it, monarchic order runs the world. I would even say a gerontocratic monarchic order.
There was a time when Mao in China, Stalin in the USSR, Eisenhower in the U.S., Churchill in England, De Gaulle in France, De Gasperi in Italy were masters. They were all over seventy! The ages since then have changed, but not the methods. Political hypocrisy is on the wane. Peoples get used to realities. They end up by seeing that nothing except electricity, running water, and penicillin, has truly changed since the Bourbons. Not even in the various countries. That is why I expect to see Rumania with a king again, Russia with a czar, and China an emperor. America has no tradition, which is too bad. With all of its kinglets of oil, crime, and deep-frozen foods, the vassals are ready for a suzerain.
One or two revolutions will allow us to see the light of day some time soon. The monarchic order, like Eros, is established in deoxyribo nucleic acid. Our Brownian motion cannot change that. There is an immanence that brings us back to the truth. Who the king is hardly matters; what counts is the order.
Take Monsieur Le Corbusier’s abject architecture, the Swiss heaviness of which gave indigestion to thousands of young architects and artists. For a time, it was possible to believe that it would rule over the city of men. But how now? The weight of his cement dragged him down (Le Corbusier died of drowning), and his work, which had been intended as “functional”, turned out merely to be simple-minded. Now people just yawn at it. Even the big complexes that were the basis for his architectural vision have been abandoned in favor of “individual folly”. The world has had enough of logic and rationalism as conceived by Swiss schoolmasters. I have nothing against Swiss bankers or cuckoos, on the contrary, but the country ought to stop exporting architects!
Gaudí, the admirable, creates beauty which is the sum-total conscience of our perversions. Gaudí, Catholic, apostolic and Roman, knew how to translate into stone his religious vision which “jibes” with the people’s soul. Look at the expiatory temple of the Sagrada Familia, the most perfect iconography of folk Christianity and piety, not only because Gaudí immobilized in the mineral a blade of grass, a flock of fowls, and even the sheepherder on whom he modeled Judas – in other words, the world and the people – with naive truthfulness, but because he exactly translated and extolled the remorse of con science, that great Christian concern, on which the whole of civilized intelligence of the twentieth century is based, as is everything great that has been accomplished in the past two thousand years. Take away the remorse of conscience, society will crumble! It is the fuel and the motor. It explains our morality and our subconscious, our vocabulary and our silences, our vices and virtues, our ambitions, dreams, ideas, and faiths.
An architecture must make its time explicit and especially dress it up. Monsieur Le Corbusier’s geometry is a small bit of home work by a schoolboy trying to solve theoretical problems, not the ex pression of the vital needs of a period.
We have to return to sense. Gaudí’s fingers were at the tip of his brain. I believe in erogenous architecture, not ideological. I be lieve in polychromatic architecture that satisfies the eye as does a mosaic. I believe in an architecture that takes sound values into ac count, I mean the harmony of the spheres. Total visual decoration must indeed take into account harmonic resonances. I believe in an architecture of bad taste, to the extent that good taste is castrated!
In 1925, I met M. Le Corbusier, who told me that Gaudí was the shame of Barcelona and with Swiss oafishness (I have nothing against Swiss bankers) asked my ideas about the future of architecture. I told him I thought it would be “soft and hairy”. I have not changed my mind and am just waiting for technique to catch up with me, for I am still a little ahead of it. In the interim, M. Le Corbusier confessed his errors about Gaudí, but he betrayed his own soul!
The divine pig that I am – did I forget to mention it? – has a rhinoceros horn. Truth of the matter, I am a rhinoceros, with mustache. In 1954, in the midst of my mystical phase, I discovered that for half a century I had been painting rhinoceros horns without even knowing it. I attach great importance to such attributes as beard and hair, all hairiness in general which always carries essential social significance. Hirsuteness, even before Samson, was identified as a sign of virility and strength, and my mustaches are the fangs of my personality. In popular parlance, avoir un poil sur la langue (to have a hair on one’s tongue) means “somesing is in ze way”, whereas a hair on the soup designates unwelcome out-of-placeness. The slang c’est au poil (it’s hair-perfect) means a situation or thing is exactly right, and many is the mechanic who has thus been heard describing a piece of precision work as fitting “down to a cunt hair”.
To have a mustache, a beard, long hair, to me seem to be essential conduct in a self-respecting society. They should even be a sign of social standing – with a special tax for fraudulent wearing by the classes sporting them without the right. Servants, in the nineteenth century, were forbidden to grow mustaches, which were th
e exclusive preserve of masters. Only after the 1914-1918 war, when trench soldiers became known as poilus (hairy ones), did house servants acquire the right to be facially hirsute. Indeed, there is no reason to make a display of one’s beard or hair as aggressive antennae if one has nothing to say, or protect, or go after. My mustache heretofore had hidden my (rhinoceros) tooth. I had just finished doing Dalí’s Moustache with Philippe Halsman, and was in New York for the retrospective exhibit of my two hundred Divine Comedy watercolors, when, going through Paris, I had happened on Vermeer of Delft’s Lace Maker, and discovered the importance of the rhinoceros horn.
How Dalí Established A Connection Among A Crust Of Bread, The Lace Maker, And A Rhinoceros
At age nine, in Figueras, pretending to be asleep, head down on my forearms leaning on the dining-room table, I tried to capture the interest of a young servant girl. That was when I experienced a strange pleasure: the crumbs of bread crust that were scattered on the tablecloth dug painfully into my elbows, but I could not register the pain if I were to remain motionless while the girl with the crackling skirts moved about me. At that moment was heard the song of a nightingale that moved me to tears. The pain and joy forever joined in my memory crystallized little by little in the shape of a delirious obsession with the theme of Vermeer’s Lace Maker, a reproduction of which hung in my father’s office, as I had sometimes furtively ob served through the door left ajar. From that moment on, moreover, I was to note that many emotions reached me through the elbow which was my Achilles’ heel (so that some day people will say: Dalí’s elbow).
Thus, in May 1955, having taken a knock on the elbow, I immediately had a sharp visualization of The Lace Maker. And I asked the curator of the Louvre to allow me to make a copy of that Vermeer. With a great display of precautions, the painting was brought into a small room and I set up my easel in the presence of the staff of curators and a few friends. I observed with the most careful attention the highly upsetting picture, the excitement center of which is a needle that cannot be seen and is not actually painted but only suggested. It seemed to me that my elbow was hurting again and that the needle was stuck in it, giving me the feeling of experiencing a paradisiac sensation. Behind the appearance of the painting, calm, peaceful, the image of quiet happiness, was hidden a tremendous ultra-piercing energy that to me had the value of the antiproton that had just been discovered.
I went close to the picture and with my cane took a few measurements to check out an intuition. The curators, not daring to interfere, exchanged fearful looks at my savage approach to a work that they considered a unique treasure.
Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, I laid in on my canvas a set of rhinoceros horns in place of the lace maker I was supposed to copy. Their apprehension turned to stupefaction. I myself did not exactly understand the meaning of what I had done.
All summer, I worked on that Lace Maker problem and finally realized that my intuition had gone straight to the logarithmic curves of the picture, which corresponded exactly to rhinoceros horns. At Port Lligat, I got collections of rhinoceros horns which, in my reveries, started moving around like constellations, first forming amalgamated bread crusts but then little by little settling into a corpuscular ballet that reconstructed The Lace Maker. I got some fifty odd reproductions of the Vermeer, that I hung all over my olive grove; and even on the beach, when I went bathing with Gala, I took The Lace Maker along.
Indulging my obsession to satiation, I continued my research on the morphology of the sunflower dear to Leonardo da Vinci and it was then that I discovered that sunflower spirals have exactly the curve of rhinoceros horns.
By an even greater miracle, the virtually logarithmic curves of the sunflower soon in my eyes outlined the head dress of the lace maker, her cushion, as in a divisionist painting by Seurat. I was dazzled. The rhinoceros horn became a perfect example, nature-made, of logarithmic spirals, and its bestiality stood in opposition to the grace of the lace maker, that expression of chastity, purity, and absolute monarchy.
The lace maker now appeared as the pure symbol of that maximum of spiritual strength that the rhinoceros carried at the end of his nose. Crushed rhinoceros horn is a powerful aphrodisiac. Beauty and Eros are one. The admirable animal not only has a cock standing on the end of his nose, but his coitus lasts for almost an hour. He carries the Dalínian rite so far as to lay out his territory by depositing his excrements as benchmarks of his property. That much refinement deserves respect and attentive observation.
With this criterion I analyzed Gala’s face, and reconstructed it with eighteen rhinoceros horns; likewise a Raphael painting; but since everything is in everything and the opposite as well, by observing the rhinoceros’ arse I discovered it looked exactly like a closed sun flower. So this animal had the finest of curves on his nose, and on his arse a galaxy of perfect arcs. Suddenly I came across a photograph of a cauliflower. Nothing would do but that I get a mountain of cauliflowers to check on whether the lace maker was also in their spirals. She was. My mystical strength and my paranoiac-critical vision were such that all the truths subjacent to the world now appeared clearly to me.
Everyone cannot have my sensitive elbow. Everyone cannot be Dalínian, but each can take advantage of Dalínian discipline and turn clear eyes on reality. The social code of a perfect city is based on ecstasies that alone can transform desire, pleasure, anxiety, any opinion, any judgment into something sensational halfway between dream and reality.
The repugnant thus becomes desirable, affection turns to cruelty, ugliness into beauty, faults into qualities, and qualities can end up being dire wretchedness. So ecstatic a world can be known only in imagination. Become ecstatic so as to experience it!
I dream of a city full of Surrealist objects inducing ecstasy in a Gaudínian architecture. The Surrealist object according to the definition I have given of it historically is impractical. It has no use but to take a person in, exhaust him, stupefy him. The Surrealist object is made solely for the honor of thought. Flags and trophies have to be replaced by an arch of triumph of hysteria, made of limp structures, surmounted by aphrodisiac jackets, shiny with piss and emeralds. Each person can then indulge his passion for living in the bosom of a coherent universe unified by paranoia. Each becomes the conscience and measure of the world.
I was ten or so when I got Dullita up on ‘the Pichots’ tower. I was wearing a sailor hat that squashed my ears. At the top of the tower, I took it off and the cool evening breeze so deliciously caressed my ears that I remember that I felt I was at the same time rubbing elbows with love.
In July 1957, there was an exhibit at Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, of thirty-four paintings and forty-eight drawings and water colors, and at Brussels they showed my Madone Sixtine (Sistine Madonna), the optical effects of which were a big hit. At one meter’s distance you saw the Sistine Madonna, and at three meters an ear that seemed to be painted with anti-matter. Who could have known that what that was, was the magnification of my childhood memory? Or that that work was dictated to me by my paranoiac-critical ambition to make use of every bit of my self and my memory, to live me even unto my substantific marrow?
Dalínian irrationality was at least becoming factual.
A few months later I was to go back to the myth of the ear when I made the monumental ear of Pope John XXIII in the shape of a manger for Orly – and even though I detest children – so as to make even more tangible the incarnation of that magic of love that one morning had rubbed against me facing the sky and the clouds.
The City of Paris, in 1958, was to award me its gold medal and the medal of French quality. I do not blink at one more contradiction, and it pleases me to be crowned for qualities I do not have, for then in my eyes my unseen virtues are being rewarded. When in that year I invented the Ovocipede, which is a plastic sphere, everyone interpreted this invention as a new method of locomotion, so I did not take the trouble to explain that it was essentially a question of materializing my paradisiac intra-uterine phantasms and allow
ing some others to relive their most secret dreams.
Societies do not like things that favor escapism or forgetfulness of codes. Escape files can be gotten into prisons only by hiding them beneath the reassuring crusts of nourishing everyday bread.
Is Dalí Sensitive To The Suffering Of Mankind?
“Pity is not my forte; it is the virtue of filles de joie,” said Nietzsche. I was once asked how I could live in Spain where so many people had an outstretched hand. I answered that I crossed Spain by Cadillac and knew that the Spanish people were a proud people, who did not hold out their hands, but died on their feet.
During the German Peasants’ War led by Thomas Münzer (which the nobles ended at Frankenhausen), one of his companions, before going to face execution, cried out, “O God, I am about to die, and in all my life never once did I eat my fill!” I cannot be moved by the inequality of the human condition, which is an obvious consequence of psychological inequalities and natural hierarchy, but I cannot imagine a society without highly developed gastronomy. I re member one night arriving at Saulieu just as the chef had finished making his truffle pasty.
“Ah!” M. Dumaine said to me, “you are just in time; the haze is rising beneath the oaks, but the sky is clear, you can count the stars and the truffles. The truffles give off their scent at this time and the humidity increases their virtues, so it is the one time when the pasty can really be well made. You’ll have a treat!” My imagination was at the zenith of desire. It was a royal feast.
A society without ortolans in paillotes, or without duck’s livers with raisins, or gastronomical talk, has not finished its evolution. A nation is not “ready” until it has at least fifty kinds of cheeses and great vintages.
Maniac Eyeball Page 27