And, in 1950, pilgrims noted an oozing at the foot of the wall enclosing the tomb: a pinkish viscous liquid. The monks opened it up again: from the sloping end of the coffin a blood-stained liquid was oozing out. The body was still as supple as ever, and its arms and legs could bend easily. Dr. Choukrallah, who examined the body thirty-four times in seventeen years, states that the phenomenon is so unusual that perhaps no physician has ever seen its like and the history of medicine records no other. If the liquid oozing from the body each day weighs but one gram, in fifty-four years, this would make 19 kilograms and 710 grams (or just under 44lbs.). But the average quantity of all the blood and other liquids in a human body is 5 liters (equal to 5 kilo grams, or about 11 lbs.). Less cannot account for more: this is a self-evident scientific principle. And the red liquid coming from Father Charbel’s corpse is far greater than one gram each twenty-four hours. Any source should dry up if not replenished over a period of half a century. This is a source of wonder that causes me wonderment.
What Dalí Thinks Of Survival Operations
Horace pointed the way to us when he wrote, “Can man ever write verses worthy of being preserved with cedar oil?” And Dr. Hubert Larcher has stressed the amazing preservation of cedar beams twenty-five hundred years old discovered at Nemrud in the ruins of the palace of Assurbanipal. With a new polish, they can be seen glinting to this day at the British Museum.
The amazing preservation of these beams is doubtless due to the resinous substance called cedarwood oil, derived from cedars, which preserves all sorts of objects: books treated with it are immune from worms and mildew.
In the same way certain meats, as that of the peacock, are said to be incorruptible. It can be deduced that living man resists continual changes by fending them off with what might be called the “balsamic spirit” of the blood.
Putrefaction then would be the result of the loss of this vital balm. And the liquid that sometimes flows from the bodies of saints would be a balsamic, scented secretion, with an oily appearance, that can also take other forms: milk, blood, water, or dew.
Larcher, who has specially studied these oils, notes that myroblytic products seem to have a remarkable power of penetration, not only to spread through the body but also to leave it and even go through obstacles. Collin de Plancy said that the oil of St. Nicholas before the translation of his remains worked amazing cures by sweating through the marble. Moreover, myroblyte oil is said to be combustible.
From every viewpoint, these balms correspond to the idea that the alchemists had of the elixir of long life. More paradoxical yet: though burned at the stake, the bodies of St. Theodore and St. Fulcran remained entire. So that the combustible oil may also give non-combustibility to a body.
The example of Bernadette Soubirous who could leave her hand exposed to the flame of a candle without feeling it at all is significant. And we have all heard of the famous fakirs who each year dance barefooted on beds of live coals without being burned. Perhaps that is their secret!
For, the most amazing thing is that such properties are not reserved to saints: In 1932, Dr. Graves reported the case of an English alcoholic subject to D.T.’s. Toward the second day of one such fit, his pulse was rapid, perspiration copious, and his whole body gave off an odor exactly the same as that of musk.
This odor was so strong for forty-eight hours that it could be smelled despite energetic ventilation of all the rooms the patient had been in. It disappeared with the other symptoms of the fit.
There is the case of François de Paule, who smelled of musk while alive. And Dr. Hammond records the case of a woman patient who smelled of pineapple during attacks of chorea (or St. Vitus’s dance) and a man who smelled of violets in fits of hypochondria. A young man of thirty observed by Dr. Speranza had a forearm that exuded a perfume analogous to benzoin, yellow amber, or Peruvian balsam. He also cites two even more exciting examples: A contemporary psychoanalyst had occasion to treat a person who exuded a cadaverous stench, and under analysis it was found the patient was living with the ever-present obsession of a departed one. As treatment freed the patient from this fixation, the odor became weaker, and disappeared when the cure was complete.
A patient one day came to a Parisian dermatologist to see what could be done about his foul body odor. After careful checking, the doctor localized the source as the left ring finger. He had the patient take off his wedding band and washed the finger with alcohol: the odor disappeared. Later recurrences showed that the disagreeable smell was linked to the wearing of the band. Psychoanalysis revealed the patient was suffering from certain repressions connected with his marriage, which translated themselves into these typical reactions at contact with the band, the symbol of his matrimonial burden. Analytical treatment cured the patient of his complex and the odor resulting from it, and thereafter he could wear the wedding ring without untoward effect.
This example [Larcher says] allows us better to understand how in the cases of certain mystics localization of good smells may have to do with the state of the soul, the contents of the unconscious or of the conscious, or certain objects of contemplation, visions, or spiritual influence. Man is thus his own laboratory, within the secret of his blood, which contains the formula of time-space and life-giving matter.
The Immortality Formula Chosen By Dalí
To create an effect at the Figueras café, so people would say, “Dalí did not pass away like other people,” I chose hibernation; but I am sure there will be sensational discoveries in other areas. Not enough money has been given to such research. All those who die are victims of Jules Verne, for he is responsible for all the adventures in outer space that take our attention away from real problems. There is nothing to be found out there. It is more and more certain that there is only one magical planet, Earth, on which the phenomenon of life is the miraculous phenomenon. We live at the antipodes of the upsetting thought of Pascal, who believed we were but tiny crumbs lost in the cosmos. Since Teilhard de Chardin, we are convinced of the opposite. All cosmic materials converge toward the phenomenon of life on Earth.
There are some reassuring signs that the end of all these devil tries may be near: the astronauts are already forced to drink their own piss – which delights me – and probably soon will have to eat their own shit![1] They will have to shit on trays so as to make mushrooms grow very fast; they will eat the mushrooms, shit again, and so on. It is very amusing to see that, thanks to these interplanetary voyages, man is reduced to consuming his own excrement. That suits me just fine. If interplanetary exploration were left aside, and more attention given to deoxyribonucleic acid, which fits like a key into the cell by the same process as nasal spectroscopy of odors, we would be much closer to immortality. After all, the conquest of empty space, without eternal life, is of no interest whatever!
One daring hypothesis poses the problem of knowing whether the phenomena of life are not partially exempt from the second principle of thermodynamics, which says that energy constantly dissipates and the universe tends toward immobility and entropy. In this area, statistical laws are not absolute principles: reversibility of phenomena shows the ineptness of our means of observation. Herodotus had al ready said, “Given time enough, everything possible happens.” We are interested only in miracles!
I believe with Blanc de Saint-Bonnet that saintliness is a gift of the human personality. Obviously, Dalínian saintliness is immune to definition, and until my ascesis vouchsafes to me an angelic, luminous, and transcendental transformation, I see no reasons for not ar ranging to be hibernated. The price is right. One of the best specialists in the field, Professor Robert C. W. Ettinger, believes that one can be deep-frozen for ten thousand dollars. It would cost fifteen hundred dollars to be frozen in liquid helium, and five hundred dollars per year for replacing of evaporated helium and upkeep, but if a communal mausoleum were created the cost per individual would be less. With ten thousand dollars invested at 4 percent thirty years before death, deep-freeze until resurrection should be
fully taken care of. The Life Extension Society started by F.I.V. Cooper presently has seven hundred members planning to be deep-frozen. A certain number of periodical awakenings are planned, for the purposes of recycling, for with the acceleration of progress, which doubles every decade, in a century a frozen person brought back would have the mentality of a child of three.
In this domain, no need for miracles but just precise discoveries that are the simply logical development of known operative techniques and processes. The data are simple: it is known that hibernating animals naturally go into a deep sleep and bring their internal temperature down to 10 degrees Centigrade (or 50 degrees Fahrenheit). After the heart stops, the human brain can survive for two minutes. When the body temperature is brought down 7° C (12.6° F) , a person will survive fifteen minutes; below 10° C (50° F), survival continues normally. The problem then is to interrupt the vital processes – living micro-organisms have been found in samples of rocksalt crystals up to six million years old, so this can be done. At a temperature of –270° C (–436° F), energy stops dissipating. But, while possible for animals, for the sperm of a bull, a rooster, or even a man, such “chemical silence” – dehydration, desiccation as absolute zero temperature is approached, then unfreezing and rehydration – cannot be carried out with living human beings because of the brain. Ice crystals would burst the cells, or the mineral salts remaining after dehydration might reach a dangerous point of concentration.
The question then would be one of gradualness of refrigeration with concurrent injections of glycerine or glycerol to limit the osmotic shock. But this is getting down to detail – which in itself is reassuring because of its practicality.
How Dalí Sees The End Of The World
I decided to have myself preserved immediately after my demise so as to await the discovery that one day will allow mankind to bring Dalí the genius back to life. I am sure that a cure will be found for cancer, that amazing grafts will be perfected, and rejuvenation of the cells is just over the horizon. To restore life will be an ordinary operation. I will wait in my liquid helium without impatience.
There are however three things to be feared – apart from cell deterioration in my wonderful brain. They are that mankind, possessed of a kind of murderous madness due to the bad effects of overpopulation – like some species of Nordic rats that commit collective suicide – may start murdering the corpses. That the new life I some day wake up to may not be exactly mine, i.e., the divine Dalí body as it went to sleep: Would my unfreezing be a reanimation or rather the flower ing of someone new, the birth of a Dalí I would not recognize? And that humanity by that time may have forgotten me, a risk which in fact seems rather slight, for my immortal oeuvre will only continue to become more meaningful, and my legend will add even more to the prestige of my genius. I am just about guaranteed that in the centuries to come men of all eras will want to see, hear, and know of the new creations of the divine Dalí, and what a sublime adventure that will be for me!
I should not be unhappy if some day humanity declared my person to be sacred and that from generation to generation the torch of my body were transmitted as the eternal witness to evolution. Dalí wandering through time till the extinction of all suns – what superb delirium that!
That way, I should have cuckolded the whole world of all times and all climes!
“I SAY THAT THE MAIN AREA OF HIBERNATION OR DEEP-FREEZE OF OUR BODIES IS THE ARSEHOLE, SINCE IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT THE FIRST THING ANIMALS BEGINNING HIBERNATION DO IS TO STOPPER THEIR ARSES WITH A PASTE MADE OF MUD AND SHIT SO AS TO KEEP THEIR METABOLISM INTACT, AND AT THE SAME TIME GUARANTEEING THEIR INTIMACY WITH THEMSELVES!”
[1] Caga i menga: In his remarkable object-book, Dix Recettes d’Immortalité (“Ten Recipes For Immortality”; Paris: Editions Audouin Descharnes, 1973), Dalí presented his ideas about the “caga i menga” system, as follows:
“In my very earliest childhood, probably around the age of six, well before the onset of masturbation, I was very much interested in the welfare of mankind and had sociological dreams about every one on earth being happy. I always saw myself as being hailed from the tops of public monuments by grateful crowds and tears came to my eyes at the scope of the benefits I was getting for them. Then, later, I jerked off – for the first time – and said aloud, ‘Fuck man kind.’ I began to be interested in my own prick and my own sexual problems; mankind went from a state of high esteem to one of almost total contempt. But then, in the period when I loved mankind, I had invented what I called el sistema caga i menga, or ‘the shit-and-eat system’. Here, then, as Stendhal would have had it, are the specific de tails: the Towers of Immortality – each city was to have one – were fashioned after Brueghel’s Tower of Babel. Each inhabitant needing to defecate did it directly and in pecking order down on the in habitant of the next lower floor who needed to eat. Human beings, through methods of spiritual and alimentary perfecting, produced a semi-liquid defecation in all respects comparable to bees’ honey. Those below got the defecation from above in their mouths, and they in turn shit on those below them – which from a social view point guaranteed perfect stability; besides, everyone had enough to eat without even having to work. I saw nothing comical in this theory and believed in it firmly. But when I mentioned it to a medical stu dent, he told me that human excrement was utterly devoid of any vitamins, proteins, and so on, thus having no nutritive value whatso ever. So, I gave up my dreams of the Tower of Babel of Immortality, which, unlike the Biblical one that tried to reach to heaven, was to provide Immortality here on Earth.”
In the same book, he also contemplated the prospect of immortality through holography: “When I found out that one atom of holographic emulsion contained the entire image in the third dimension, I shouted without restraint: Let me eat it! That surprised everybody even more than usual, especially my friend Professor Dennis Gabor, Nobel Prize for Physics 1971. In so doing, I would have been able to accomplish, at least in effigy, one of my heart’s dearest desires: to eat the adored being Gala, to ingest into me, into my organism, atoms containing smiling holographic Galas, swimming at Cape Creus. Gala, Belka (Belka is Russian for squirrel), the super-sparkling squirrel, the hibernation specialist. So, here is the recipe for holographic Immortality: ‘With a glass of Solares water, swallow holographic information capable of bringing out images with a maximum of happy in stantaneousness of resurrection. After the Persistance de la Mémoire (“Persistence Of Memory” – the title that in 1930 already I had given to my famous limp watches), there will be the voluntary programming of desire: the image of a sybaritic squirrel coming back to life, to make man immortal.’ It was in 1948 that the English physicist Dennis Gabor, of the Imperial College of Science and Technology of London, described the principle of holography (from the Greek: “to inscribe all”), based on the properties of light interference and lasers. Holography allows for photography without a lens and restitution of the image in all of its three dimensions! In conformity with Leibnitz’ monadology, the eye needs only one fragment of a hologram in order to reconstruct the image con tained in the hologram as a whole! For every point in the hologram gathers the data come by diffraction from all points of the object. Apart from its applications in interferometry, spectroscopy, microscopy, acoustics, holography as already used by Dalí in painting is the key to the persistence of memory and its immortality, since 1.2 centimeters of emulsion can as of now store a hundred million elementary facts or bits of information!”
List Of Illustrations
Chapter 4: The Girl Of Ampurdan (1926)
Chapter 6: The Lugubrious Game (1929)
Chapter 7: The Great Masturbator (1929)
Chapter 8: The Enigma Of Hitler (1937)
Chapter 9: Autumn Cannibalism (1936)
Chapter 10: The Atavism Of Twilight (1934)
Chapter 12: Preparing The Dream Of Venus (1939)
Chapter 13: Resurrection Of The Flesh (1945)
Chapter 15: Leda Atomica (1949)
Chapter 16: S
istine Madonna (1958)
Chapter 17: Slave Market With Invisible Bust Of Voltaire (1940)
Chapter 19: Detail from Palace Of The Wind (1972)
Maniac Eyeball Page 33