Modern psychology is in the process of discovering these es sential truths that I have been living for three-quarters of a century. My experience some day will be regarded as fundamental and become one of the great scientific revelations. For my schema, my corporeal image, my double started by being a dead boy. I had no corporeal image, fate having willed for me to be born without a body or in an angelic one, with putrefaction images to boot.
So I projected myself into bodies to seek out my structure. A useless quest, but one that afforded me a fantastic exploration of the world; a unique experience which is at the origin of my genius. Heautoscopy is the name given to the phenomenon of hallucinatory projection by split personality such as can be experienced in a dream or before a work of art. Splitting into a second personality endowed with great tactile lucidity and sensuality which can, for instance, move into a picture, to the space suggested by the artist, while one’s body remains standing before the frame. Goethe, De Musset, Dickens, Dostoyevsky even described similar states when in moments of intense literary creation.
Well, for my part, I lived through this phenomenon, not fortuitously or under the spell of a tremendous spiritual pull, but permanently, until I met Gala. So I set up in myself unusual psychic mechanisms and acquired data about the being and the real which are diamonds of cosmic value. My work yields only the visible part of the iceberg!
My canvases must be read as the archetypal projections of a new Plato’s cave. A new consciousness of humanity may start with me, Dalí. It is a journey to the country of horrors, to be sure, and of fear such as an explorer may feel in uncharted territory – and many is the time I provoked and felt death close by since the days when I jumped from the tops of walls or stairways to test my body, as in a slow-motion film with the sensations of my muscles and flesh bruised but alive – yet also a prodigious existential voyage in the sense in which Heidegger says, “To be is to burst upon the world.” I literally burst upon the world because I had no body.
Having no bodily analogy, I could not judge forms and objects about me. I could only experience them from within. Little by little I transformed this escape of the being, this transmutation into pure consciousness. Therein lies the quality of my genius. Unable to give a meaning to things, since I had no stable self as a frame of reference, I experienced them by possessing them, getting the feel of their configuration with unbelievable sharpness, however strange it might be. And my painting therefore has a character of prodigious revelation. Most human beings have never gotten outside their own bodies – only the most gifted of them, and then very briefly, for a mere fortuitous discovery most often literally and aesthetically transformed by reason. But I come on dripping with the “other” truths, my hands full of the treasures of the real, my eyes hallucinated with visions delirious but as true as our lives. That is my “message”. And from picture to picture you can readily imagine how my bodily image was little by little restructured beginning with Gala.
I had to reinvent everything. Each of the givens that are termed fundamental to the awareness of being was to me a battle and a conquest. When I say I correct nature as I paint, you must understand what my nature is. When in my 1956 Nature Morte Vivante (Animated Still Life; or, literally: Living Dead Nature) I show the fruit bowl floating in space with the fan and fruits and a cauliflower and a bird and a glass and a bottle emptying itself and a knife, in front of a window through which there is an endless moiré sea, while a hand holds a rhinoceros horn, I am defining and communicating a notion of time-space expressed through the vision of a levitation that shatters entropy. With the rhinoceros horn as maximum energy in minimum space, facing the infinite spaces of the sea, the picture becomes the privileged locus of a geometry that translates not only the loftiest scientific and philosophical speculations, but allows me, Dalí, existentially to know the truth of time-space and by that very fact a Dalínian truth of my person and my situation in the world. Each picture is a paranoiac-critical consciousness.
When Dalí Paints, Is He Trying To Teach Us Delirium?
There are creators enclosed within themselves, to whom seren ity is their reason for being. But I, Dalí, ever notoriously guilty of non-assistance to bodies in distress, can live only under stress. My paranoiac-critical method being the lookout of my drifting, I go from explosive mutation to explosive mutation and can communicate only the seismography of my living truth. My logic moves me to project about me all the images of the mystical body which has become Dalí.
Actually, I have no bodily dimensions. My self is Dalí, i.e., a time space endlessly modified according to my whims – my desire, my pride, my strength. Each picture is a code of dominant psychological genetics. Hard and soft, cold and hot, movement and repose, muscular bulges or purulence of the flesh, trompe-l’oeil or straight line, all translate and communicate the ecstasy or nausea, intoxication or lucidity that are necessary states for participation in the vision of the world I supply and the knowledge I reveal. In that sense, each picture is a Mass in which I distribute the Eucharist of a knowledge. This is no meaningless show but an initiation into the Dalínian mystique.
On my own account I am reliving the entire history of art. Through this discipline I have experienced every moment of human ity’s awakening to awareness at the same time that I was reconstructing my Dalínian envelope.
From the dreams of the Renaissance, which were to do color paintings of the archetypes of Greek sculpture, by way of the magic treasures of Velázquez, master of reflections and mirrors, to the fantastic world of nuclear physics, quantum mathematics, and the biology of deoxyribonucleic acids, I have gotten to the truth of the classical dome, the creation of the glorious Dalínian body, and the illumination of the station at Perpignan. In art and in my life, I have gotten back to the tradition ruled by the principles of legitimacy and hierarchy and do not fear perfection, for I know that none can attain it and my game (both jeu and je – my I as well) is to bring about the impossible. I am the Don Quixote of unreality.
How Dalí Illustrated “Don Quixote” And Revolutionized The Art Of Lithography
During the summer of 1956, the publisher Joseph Fôret arrived at Port Lligat with huge lithographic stones in his car. He wanted me to illustrate Don Quixote. I had trouble accepting the lithographic process, which struck me as limp and liberal. But Joseph Fôret obstinately kept coming back with more stones. His determination made me so aggressive that I could gladly have shot the calm inflexible little man.
And an angelic idea dazzled me. I would fire at the stones the harquebus bullet I had intended for the publisher. I wired him to get the weapon ready. The painter Georges Mathieu had made me a sumptuous present of a sixteenth-century harquebus with an ivory stock.
The event took place on November 26, 1956, on a pontoon on the Seine: surrounded by a hundred sheep, I fired a lead bullet filled with lithographic ink on to the stone, making a sublime splash.
I immediately made out the wing of an angel of perfect dynamism that reached the height of perfection. I had just invented “bulletism”. All I had to do now was dream to find the mathematical dispositions of my bullets. It became a considerable attraction. In New York, both TV and collectors wanted to get my harquebus shots. Each morning at the New York Military Academy I fired at a lithographic stone that instantly changed into dollars.
This invention of my genius antedated by a few months the most advanced nuclear physics experiments in which the harquebus of the cyclotron was used to penetrate the secrets of matter.
Born of a harquebus shot, Don Quixote also mobilized octopuses, sea urchins, and a cloud of small toads brought in by the storm to fashion my hero’s costume. Fancy, whim, and objective chance worked together to bring Cervantes’ most noble hero out of the stone.
I was careful to note for history that it was on July 25, 1957, St. James’ feast day, that the most sublime splash in the history of morphological science took place. I had taken an empty snail shell, filled with ink. My harquebus shot fired at very close range
created exactly the curve of the snail’s spiral with such precision and luxury of finesse that I understood this was a case of the appearance of a “pre-snail galaxy” state, a sort of archetype of the divine snail before its creation. I was at one of the summits of Dalínian vision.
Joseph Fôret was to request that in the same Dionysiac state I do the cover for his Apocalypse Of St. John, for which I conceived a bronze bas-relief weighing eighty kilograms, which was my first sculpture. In an apocalyptic surge, I took a hatchet to a wax plaque. I was working outside on a table set up on the beach at Port Lligat. In the wax, I embedded a piece of honey cake, for honey is the very image of the spiritual in the Old Testament, and I stuck in gold needles to show the radiation around the Christ above whom there was an agate symbolic of purity. Twelve real pearls represented the twelve gates of Jerusalem, and fourteen kinds of precious stones the foundations of heavenly Jerusalem.
I also laid out five hundred and eighty-five nails, correspond ing to the categories of soul given by Raymond Lully, the philosopher of genius, and finished the whole thing with a collection of knives and forks, elements of daily living – because the Apocalypse is meant to be eaten like a cheese.
Publisher Fôret was to make it the most expensive book in the world up to that time – but I was thinking mainly of St. John’s words themselves: “And I went to the angel, saying unto him that he should give me the book. And he said to me: Take the book and eat it up. And it shall make thy belly bitter: but in thy mouth it shall be sweet as honey.” (X:9) I was to complete the three inside illustrations of the book by way of a bomb that exploded in the old Paris winter bicycle race track. I had plastered the bomb to a watch, some medals, and some nails, that were thrown on to a copperplate and engraved into it. Over that explosive design, I drew and water-colored a Pietà.
The Apocalypse appeared at the same time that my illustrations for Don Quixote were exhibited, and the first volumes of The Divine Comedy reproducing my water-colors in lithography. I experienced the Apollonian intoxication of triumph and on this occasion published a text about divine cheese that I would like to recall to Dalínians whose mental jaws should be in perpetual motion:
“Romanticism perpetrated the foul crime of giving us to believe that hell was as black as Gustave Doré’s coal mines where you cannot see a thing. No, Dante’s inferno is lighted by the sun and honey of the Mediterranean. That is why the terrors of my illustrations are analytical and super-gelatinous with their coefficient of angelical viscosity.
“The digestive hyperesthesia of two beings devouring each other for the first time can be observed in the full light of day frenetic with mystical and ammoniacal joy.
“The mystique is the cheese; Christ is cheese, or even better mountains of cheese.”
But if Dante interested me for so long – over ten years – it was because of his vision of the angelic world: ...like a troop of bees, Amid the vernal sweets alighting now, Now, clustering, where their fragrant labor glows, Flew downward to the mighty flower, or rose From the redundant petals, streaming back Unto the steadfast dwelling of their joy, Faces had they of flame, and wings of gold: The rest was whiter than the driven snow...
The idea of the angel stimulates me. For if God is outside our ken, He is cosmic because without limits; but angels have shapes. Proton and neutron to me are angelic elements.
Raphael and St. John of the Cross are close to the angels. I try to approach the angelic world through the hyperesthetic paranoiac-critical chastity and spirituality of these illustrations. That is my discipline for getting to heaven.
For thirty years, in exile and condemned to death, Dante dreamt of Beatrice whom he had merely glimpsed. He took refuge in his vision: “It was given to me to contemplate a wonderful vision, in which I saw things that led me no longer to speak of this blessed being until the time when I might express myself with more talent about her. And it is toward that end that I work as hard as I can, as she indeed knows.”
He closes the fourteen thousand lines of his song by the two key words of The Divine Comedy: “Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Love which had allowed him to survive, and the stars in which he hoped to find Beatrice.
Through him, I imagine myself without Gala and am shattered by retrospective terror. I did not do a single one of those illustrations but that haunting idea had me beside myself.
But the fact is I never read Dante. I dreamt about him, and then Gala, looking at the drawings I had made, placed them in the text. The best story of that kind that I know is the one about the great Dante specialist, who had spent his whole life studying the great poet, to the neglect of his family, his pleasures, and his children. Finally, he lay dying. The family gathered around his bed, to hear his immortal last words. He murmured, “Dante bores the shit out of me.” And died, a free man. I will never have that problem.
In 1963 as a Dantesque antidote I did the Galacidalahcidesoxy-ribonucleiqué, which is one of my most angelic and transcendental pictures in which science and heaven form Gala’s arch of triumph. I published Le Journal d’un Génie (Diary Of A Genius) and Le Mythe Tragique de l’Angelus de Millet (The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus).
Tokyo, and then New York, with the four floors of the Gallery of Modern Art, were preparing huge retrospectives of my work.
When I did Salvador Dalí en train de Peindre Gala, Partici pant á l’Apothéose du Dollar dans lequel on peut aussi Apercevoir sur la gauche Marcel Duchamp déguisé en Louis XIV, derriere un Rideau à la manière de Vermeer qui se Trouve actuellement être le Visage In visible mais Monumental de l’Hermès de Praxitèle (Salvador Dalí Painting Gala, Taking Part In The Apotheosis Of The Dollar In Which One Can Also See On The Left Marcel Duchamp Disguised As Louis XIV, Behind A Curtain In The Manner Of Vermeer Which Happens Presently To Be The Disappearing But Monumental Face Of Praxiteles’ Hermes) business picked up. I was one of the kings of the world in terms of celebrity, rate of income, and the importance of my art and ideas. The rain of dollars was unabated. My chamberlain, Captain Moore spent most of his time writing up contracts and laying out five-year plans of work for me.
This was also the time when the sun of the Perpignan station illuminated me. My fate became imperial. The youth of painting was catching up with me. In 1936, I had done my Smoking Aphrodisiaque and the first thinking-machine that was the glorious earliest work of Pop Art; my Esclave de Michel Ange (Michelangelo’s Slave) and Lilith showed that in this field no one could top me. But I was already turning my attention to holograms, the three-dimensional images made with lasers, carrying on the research and painting of La Pêche Au Thon (Tuna Fishing), that transcend and sublimate all current revolutionary experiments, but within beauty and tradition so as to integrate all types of violence and the most extreme eroticism.
The Bible, the poems of Mao Tse-tung and Apollinaire, Casanova’s Memoirs, making jewels, designing fashions, doing photographic jigsaws, all held my attention, inspiring my verve and my hand. My determined eye made Dalínian signs of all values, which thus became gold.
I thought the time had come to make a break by organizing in the halls of the Hôtel Meurice in 1967 a tribute to Meissonier to announce the return to the hierarchy of values against negation, automatism, nihilism, skepticism. Enough of experimentation: Now for discipline, technique, and style!
And it happened that everyone was becoming aware that the pontiff of pompier art – whom I had always pitted against Cézanne – had invented a kind of painting that perfectly expressed the latest discoveries in physics and was more Einsteinian than any current work. Once more I proved to be right.
I had lived in the flesh and in my work an exemplary story for the men of my time. In that perspective of exchange, my fate took on the aspect of a universal myth. I, Dalí, disowned and driven out by my father, at the foot of my olive grove, among my fishermen, lived my passion to the full, like Christ. Imagining in my transports my assumption with my double – my mother – my Gala – all of them reinvented by my
love and my will power – having transcended my existence of rotting flesh into the essence of life, entirely reconstructed by my own creation, I had now but heroically to assume my immortality, looking without blinking, eyes wide open, at Velázquez’ Christ, the symbol of my dead brother whom my genius kept in a state of anti-gravitation, like one of the planets in the constellation over which I held sway.
“DON QUIXOTE IS A KIND OF MADMAN, THE MOST FETISHIST ON EARTH, WHO INTENDS TO POSSESS THE RAREST THINGS IN THE WORLD. SO I FELT THAT EACH OF MY ILLUSTRATIONS FOR DON QUIXOTE SHOULD BE THE RAREST OF THINGS THROUGH THE MEANS USED TO MAKE IT. EACH ELEMENT OF THESE LITHOGRAPHS MUST INVOLVE AN ELEMENT OF EXACERBATED QUIXOTICISM.”
Chapter Eighteen: How To Judge Picasso, Miró, Max Ernst, And A Few Others
It was his uncle Salvador who, by blowing the smoke of his cigar up the nose of the stillborn “blue” baby, brought him back to life: in this way, Picasso was born twice. I think that all his life something in him remembered that death and resuscitation. And that in his case – as in mine – a certain image of the body, his own body, never quite shaped up. One does not die with impunity before be ginning to live!
He always seemed to be afraid of suffocating and liked to go about naked to the waist, with the wind on his chest. The impression of quiet strength that he gave was merely an appearance. He was rather on the lookout, like those bulls that come into the arena think ing they have a lot of space, only to find themselves surrounded. His art had the aggressiveness of a lunge of the horns. In attacking the human figure and everything he could identify with it, minotaur, owl, rooster, bull, he “vented his anger” and acted the decoy of freedom. The slightest obstacle infuriated him.
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