Raphael’s skull is exactly the opposite of Freud’s; it is octagonal like a carved gem, and his brain is like veins in the stone. The skull of Leonardo is like those nuts that one crushes: that is to say, it looks more like a real brain.
I was to meet Freud at last, in London. I was accompanied by the writer Stefan Zweig and by the poet Edward James. While I was crossing the old professor’s yard I saw a bicycle leaning against the wall, and on the saddle, attached by a string, was a red rubber hot-water bottle which looked full of water, and on the back of the hot-water bottle walked a snail! The presence of that assortment seemed strange and inexplicable in the yard of Freud’s house.
Contrary to my hopes we spoke little, but we devoured each other with our eyes. Freud knew nothing about me except my painting, which he admired, but suddenly I had the whim of trying to appear in his eyes as a kind of dandy of “universal intellectualism.” I learned later that the effect I produced was exactly the opposite.
Before leaving I wanted to give him a magazine containing an article I had written on paranoia. I therefore opened the magazine at the page of my text, begging him to read it if he had time. Freud continued to stare at me without paying the slightest attention to my magazine. Trying to interest him, I explained that it was not a surrealist diversion, but was really an ambitiously scientific article, and I repeated the title, pointing to it at the same time with my finger. Before his imperturbable indifference, my voice became involuntarily sharper and more insistent. Then, continuing to stare at me with a fixity in which his whole being seemed to converge, Freud exclaimed, addressing Stefan Zweig, “I have never seen a more complete example of a Spaniard. What a fanatic!”
1 The bird always awakens in man the flight of the cannibal angels of his cruelty. Della Porta in his Natural Magica give the recipe for cooking turkey without killing it, so as to achieve that supreme refinement: to make it possible to eat it cooked and living.
2 I have always refused to eat a shapeless mess of oysters detached from their shells and served in a soup-dish, even though they were the freshest and best in the world.
3 It is only in writing down this anecdote that I am struck by the obvious connection, if only as a pure association of ideas, between the Virgin and the scales in the signs of the Zodiac. As she now appears in my memory, moreover, the Virgin was standing on a “celestial sphere.” This would-be mystification was therefore nothing more nor less than an anticipation, the first realization of the future Dalinian philosophy of painting; that is to say the sudden materialization of the suggested image; the all-powerful fetishistic corporeality of virtual phantoms which are thereby endowed with all the attributes of realism belonging to tangible objects.
4 Iberian Anarchist Federation.
CHAPTER TWO
Intra-Uterine Memories
I presume that my readers do not at all remember, or remember only very vaguely, that highly important period of their existence which anteceded their birth and which transpired in their mother’s womb. But I–yes, I remember this period, as though it were yesterday. It is for this reason that I propose to begin the book of my secret life at its real and authentic beginning, namely with the memories, so rare and liquid, which I have preserved of that intra-uterine life, and which will undoubtedly be the first of this kind in the world since the beginning of literary history to see the light of day and to be described systematically.1
In doing this I am confident of provoking the apparition of similar recollections that will begin timidly to people the memories of my readers, or at least of localizing in their minds a host of sentiments, of ineffable and indefinable impressions, images, moods and physical states which will progressively become incorporated into a kind of adumbration of their memories of pre-natal life. On this subject the quite sensational book by Doctor Otto Rank entitled The Traumatism of Birth cannot fail to enlighten the reader really curious about himself who desires to approach this question more scientifically. As for me, I must declare that my personal memories of the intra-uterine period, so exceptionally lucid and detailed, only corroborate on every point Doctor Otto Rank’s thesis, and especially the most general aspects of this thesis, as it connects and identifies the said intra-uterine period with paradise, and birth–the traumatism of birth–with the myth, so decisive in human life, of the “Lost Paradise.”
Indeed if you ask me how it was “in there”, I shall immediately answer, “It was divine, it was paradise.” But what was this paradise like? Have no fear, details will not be lacking. But allow me to begin with a short general description: the intra-uterine paradise was the color of hell, that is to say, red, orange, yellow and bluish, the color of flames, of fire; above all it was soft, immobile, warm, symmetrical, double, gluey. Already at that time all pleasure, all enchantment for me was in my eyes, and the most splendid, the most striking vision was that of a pair of eggs fried in a pan, without the pan; to this is probably due that perturbation and that emotion which I have since felt, the whole rest of my life, in the presence of this ever-hallucinatory image. The eggs, fried in the pan, without the pan, which I saw before my birth were grandiose, phosphorescent and very detailed in all the folds of their faintly bluish whites. These two eggs would approach (toward me), recede, move toward the left, toward the right, upward, downward; they would attain the iridescence and the intensity of mother-of-pearl fires, only to diminish progressively and at last vanish. The fact that I am still able today to reproduce at will a similar image, though much feebler, and shorn of all the grandeur and the magic of that time, by subjecting my pupils to a strong pressure of my fingers, makes me interpret this fulgurating image of the eggs as being a phosphene,2 originating in similar pressures: those of my fists closed on my orbits, which is characteristic of the foetal posture. It is a common game among all children to press their eyes in order to see circles of colors “which are sometimes called angels.” The child would then be seeking to reproduce visual memories of his embryonic period, pressing his already nostalgic eyes till they hurt in order to extract from them the longed-for lights and colors, in order approximately to see again the divine aureole of the spectral angels perceived in his lost paradise.
It seems increasingly true that the whole imaginative life of man tends to reconstitute symbolically by the most similar situations and representations that initial paradisial state, and especially to surmount the horrible “traumatism of birth” by which we are expulsed from the paradise, passing abruptly from that ideally protective and enclosed environment to all the hard dangers of the frightfully real new world, with the concomitant phenomena of asphyxiation, of compression, of blinding by the sudden outer light and of the brutal harshness of the reality of the world, which will remain inscribed in the mind under the sign of anguish, of stupor and of displeasure.
It would seem that the death-wish is often explained by that imperialist and constant compulsion to return where we came from, and that suicides are generally those who have not been able to overcome that traumatism of birth, who, even in a brilliant social midst, and while all the candelabra are sparkling in the drawing room, suddenly decide to return to the house of death. In the same way the man who dies from a bullet on the field of battle with the cry of “Mother!” on his lips expresses with truculence that wish to be born again backwards, and to return to the place from which he emerged. Nothing better illustrates all this than the burial customs of certain tribes, who inter their dead crouching and bound in the exact attitudes of the foetus.
But without requiring this categorical experience of the hour of death, man periodically recovers in sleep something of this artificial death, something of that paradisial state, which he tries to recapture in the minutest details. The attitudes of sleepers are in this regard most instructive: in my own case my attitudes of pre-sleep offer not only the characteristic curling up, but also they constitute a veritable pantomime composed of little gestures, tics, and changes of position which are but the secret ballet required by the almost liturgical
ceremonial initiating the act of delivering oneself body and soul to that temporary nirvana of sleep by which we have access to precious fragments of our lost paradise. Before sleep I curl up in the embryonic posture, my thumbs pressed by the other fingers so tightly as to hurt, with a tyrannic necessity to feel my back adhere to the symbolic placenta of the bedsheets, which I try, by successive efforts more and more closely approximating perfection, to mould to the posterior part of my body, irrespective of the temperature; thus even during the greatest heat I must be covered in this fashion, however slight the thickness of my envelope. Also my definitive posture as a sleeper must be of a rigorous exactitude. It is necessary, for instance, that my little toe be more to the left, or to the right, that my upper lip be almost imperceptibly pressed to my pillow, in order that the god of sleep, Morpheus, shall have the right to seize me, to possess me completely; as he wins me my body progressively disappears and becomes localized, so to speak, entirely in my head, invading it, filling it with all its weight.
This representation of myself approximates the memory of my intrauterine person, which I might define as: a certain weight around two roundnesses–my eyes, very likely. I have often imagined and represented the monster of sleep as an immense and very heavy head, with a single thread-like reminiscence of the body, which is prodigiously maintained in equilibrium by the multiple crutches of reality, thanks to which we remain in a sense suspended above the earth during sleep. Often these crutches give way and we “fall.” Surely most of my readers have experienced that violent sensation of feeling themselves suddenly fall into the void just at the moment of falling asleep, awakening with a start, their hearts tumultuously agitated by a paralyzing fear. You may be sure that this is a case of a brutal and crude recall of birth, reconstituting thus the dazed sensation of the very moment of expulsion and of falling outside. Pre-sleep reconstituting the pre-natal memory, characterized by the absence absence of movement, prepares the unfolding of that traumatic memory of a fall into the void. These falls of pre-sleep take place each time the individual either by excess of fatigue or by the paroxysmal need for escape from the day’s cares prepares for the most delightfully and exceptionally longed-for and refreshing sleep.
We have learned, thanks to Freud, the symbolic significance charged with a well determined erotic meaning that characterizes everything relating to aviation, and especially to its origins.3 Nothing, indeed, is clearer than the paradisial significance of dreams of “flight”,4 which in the unconscious mythology of our epoch only mask that frenzied and puerile illusion of the “conquest of the sky,” the “conquest of paradise” incarnated in the messianic character of elementary ideologies (in which the airplane takes the place of a new divinity), and in the same way that we have just studied in the individual pre-dream the frightful fall that awakens us with a start–as a brutal recall of the precise moment of our birth–so we find in the pre-dream of the present day those parachute jumps which I affirm without any fear of being mistaken are nothing other than the dropping from heaven of the veritable rain of new-born children provoked by the war of 1914, nothing other than the fall of all those who, unable to surmount the frightful traumatism of their first birth, desperately attempt to hurl themselves into the void, with the infantile desire to be reborn at all costs, “and in another way”, all the while remaining attached to the umbilical cord which holds them suspended to the silk placenta of their maternal parachute. The stratagem of the parachute is of the same nature as that which is utilized by marsupials; in effect the kangaroo’s pocket serves as a shock-absorber for the brusk transition of birth by which one is cruelly expulsed from paradise.
The marsupial centauresses recently invented by Salvador Dali also have this meaning of the parachutes of birth–“parabirths”–for thanks to the “holes”5 which the centauresses have in the middle of their stomachs their sons can at will enter and leave their own mother, their own paradise, so as to be able to become gradually habituated to the environmental reality, while consoling themselves in the most progressive manner for the memory, unconscious but incrusted in their soul, of that wonderful pre-natal lost paradise, which only death can partly restore to them.
External danger6 has the virtue of provoking and enhancing the phantasms and representations of our intra-uterine memories. When I was small I remember that at the approach of great summer storms we children would all run frantically with one accord and hide under the tables covered with cloths, or else we would hastily construct huts by means of chairs and blankets that were meant to hide and protect our games. What a joy it was then to hear the thunder and the rain outside! What a delightful memory of our games! All curled up in there, we especially liked to eat sweets, to drink warm sugar-water, all the while trying to make believe our life was then transpiring in another world. I had named that stormy weather game “Playing at making grottoes,” or else “Playing at Padre Patufet,” and this is the reason for the last appellation: Padre Patufet has been since olden times the most popular childhood hero of Catalonia; he was so small that one day he got lost in the country. An ox swallowed him to protect him. His parents looked for him everywhere, calling, “Patufet, Patufet! Where are you?” And they heard the voice of Patufet answering, “I am in the belly of the ox where it does not snow and it does not rain!”
It was in these artificial ox-belly-grottoes, constructed in the electric tension of stormy days that my Patufet imagination reproduced most of the images corresponding in an unequivocal way to my pre-natal memories. These memory-images that had so determining an influence on the rest of my life would always occur as a consequence of a curious game consisting of the following: I would get down on all fours and in such a way that my knees and hands would touch; I would then let my head droop with its own weight while swinging it in all directions like a pendulum, so as to make all my blood flow into it. I would prolong this exercise until a voluptuous dizziness resulted; then and without having to shut my eyes I would see emerging from the intense darkness (blacker than anything one can see in real darkness) phosphorescent circles in which would be formed the famous fried eggs (without the pan) already described in these pages. These eggs of fire would finally blend with a very soft and amorphous white paste; it seemed to be pulled in all directions, its extreme ductility adapting itself to all forms seemed to grow with my growing desire to see it ground, folded, refolded, curled up and pressed in the most contradictory directions. This appeared to me the height of delight, and I should have liked everything to be always like that!
The mechanical object was to become my worst enemy, and as for watches, they would have to be soft, or not be at all!
1 While engaged in the translation of my book Mr. Chevalier has called my attention to another chapter of “intra-uterine” memories discovered by his friend Mr. Vladimir Pozner in Casanova’s Memoirs.
2 Phosphene: a luminous sensation resulting from pressure on the eye when the eyelids are shut.
3 Leonarda da Vinci’s preoccupations in this regard (which became crystallized in the invention of his flying machines) are most instructive from the psychological point of view.
4 A symbol of erection by the contradiction which this phenomenon offers in relation to the laws of gravity: the bird a very frequent popular synonym for the penis, the winged phallus of antiquity–Pegasus, Jacob’s ladder, angels, Amor and Psyche, etc.
5 In my last exhibition a lady asked me, “Why those holes in the stomachs of your centauresses?” To which I answered, “It’s exactly the same as a parachute, but it’s less dangerous.” This, as might have been expected, was loudly greeted as a mystification, but I am convinced that the reader who has attentively read the preceding lines will judge my answer otherwise, while readily understanding that it was not so eccentric as it seemed.
6 The present war has furnished me several striking examples on this subject: during the air-raid alarms in Paris I would draw the curled-up and foetus-like attitudes that people would adopt in the shelters. There the external dange
r was further augmented by the intra-uterine evocations inherent in the darkness, the dimensions, etc. of the cellars. People would often go to sleep with ecstasies of happiness, and a secret illusion was constantly betrayed by smiles appropriate to a satisfaction absolutely unjustified by logic, if one did not admit the presence of secret activities characteristic of unconscious representations.
CHAPTER THREE
Birth of Salvador Dali
In the town of Figueras at eleven o’clock on the thirteenth day of the month of May, 1904, Don Salvador Dali y Cusi, native of Cadaques, province of Gerona, 41 years of age, married, a notary, residing in this town at 20 Calle de Monturiol, appeared before Senor Miguel Comas Quintana, the well-read municipal judge of this town, and his secretary, D. Francisco Sala y Sabria, in order to record the birth of a child in the civil register, and to this effect, being known to the aforementioned judge, he declared:
THAT the said child was born at his domicile at forty-five minutes after eight o’clock on the eleventh day of the present month of May, and that he will be given the names of Salvador Felipe y Jacinto; that he is the legitimate son of himself and of his wife, Doña Felipa Dome Domenech, aged thirty, native of Barcelona and residing at the address of the informant. His paternal grandparents are: Don Galo Dali Vinas, native of Cadaques, defunct, and Doña Teresa Cusi Marco, native of Rosas; and his maternal grand-parents: Doña Maria Ferres Sadurne and Don Anselmo Domenech Serra, natives of Barcelona.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 4