At times I would wait whole hours without any such images occurring. Then, not painting, I would remain in suspense, holding up one paw, from which the brush hung motionless, ready to pounce again upon the oneiric landscape of my canvas the moment the next explosion of my brain brought a new victim of my imagination bleeding to the ground. Sometimes the explosion occurred and nothing fell. Sometimes I would dash off in a mad and fruitless chase, for what I had thought was a partridge turned out to be just a leaf that the shock of the bullet had shaken from a branch. To win forgiveness for my mistake I came back hanging my head and humiliated myself before my master. Then I would feel the protective fingers of my imagination scratch me reassuringly between my two eyebrows, and I would close my eyes with fawning voluptuousness.
A violent pecking would occur inside my brow, and sometimes I would have to scratch myself with my two hands. One would have said that the colored parasols, the little parrots’ heads and the grasshoppers formed a seething mass just back of the skin, like a gay nest of worms and ants. When the pecking was over, I felt anew the calm severity of Minerva pass the cool hand of intelligence over my brow, and I said to myself, “Let’s go for a swim.” I would climb over the rocks and find a spot completely sheltered from the wind. There I would bask in the stifling heat, waiting till the last moment to dip into the icy water, plunging from the jutting rocks straight down into the Prussian blue depths, even more unfathomable than those of the Muli de la Torre. My naked body embraced my soul caressingly, and said to it, “Wait—she is coming.” My soul did not like these embraces and tried to elude the too violent impulses of my youth.
“Do not press me so,” said my soul, “you know perfectly well she is coming for you.”
After which my soul, who never bathed, went and sat down in the shade.
“Go—go and play!” she said, exactly as my nurse had done when I was little. “When you are tired come and get me and we will return home.”
In the afternoon, again, bent before my picture, I would paint with my body and soul until there was no more light in my room. The full moon caused the maternal tide of my soul to rise, and shed its insipid light over the very real full-blown feminine body, covered by sheer summer dresses, of the Galuchka of my “false memories” which had continually grown with the years. With all my soul I wanted her. But feeling her to be already very close I now wished the pleasures and tortures of expectation to be further prolonged. And while I yearned for the moment when she would come, more intensely than for anything in the world, I said to myself, “Make the most, make the most of this wonderful occasion. She is not yet here!” And with a delirious delight I dug my nails into each precious moment that remained to me to continue to be alone. Once more I wrenched from my body that familiar solitary pleasure, sweeter than honey, while biting the corner of my pillow lighted by a moonbeam, sinking my teeth into it till they cut through the saliva-drenched fabric. “Ay, ay!” cried my soul. After which I went to sleep beside her without daring to touch her.
She always awoke before I did, and when at sunrise I opened my eyes I found her already up standing beside my picture, watching. Did she never sleep?
I excuse myself for the crudeness I am about to commit by stating that everything I have just been saying about my “soul” is allegorical. But it was a familiar allegory, which occupied a quite definite place in my fantasies of that time. I make this remark because the story that I am about to tell, far from being an allegory, constitutes a true “hallucination,” the only one I have experienced in my life, and for this very reason it is necessary that I tell it scrupulously, while taking precautions lest it be confused with the rest of my fantasies or images. These, while sometimes endowed with a great visual intensity, never attain the degree of being hallucinatory.
It was on a Sunday, and as usual on that day I got up very late. It must have been about half past twelve. I was awakened by an immediate urge to relieve myself. I got up and went to the bathroom, which was down on the second floor. I had a bit of conversation with my father after leaving the toilet, where I had stayed about fifteen minutes, which he himself subsequently confirmed. (This eliminates the possibility that I may have dreamed that I went down to the bathroom—I was thus awake, and well awake.) I went upstairs again to my room, and barely had I opened the door when I saw sitting before the window, in three-quarter view, a rather tall woman wearing a kind of nightgown. In spite of the “absolute reality” and the normal corporeality of this being, I immediately realized that I was the victim of an hallucination,9 and contrary to everything I had anticipated I was in no way impressed. I said to myself, “Get back into your bed so that you can observe this astonishing phenomenon completely at your ease.” I got back into bed, but without lying down. However, during the moment that I stopped looking at the apparition to put my two pillows behind my back she disappeared. I did not see her gradually melt away, but when I looked again in her direction she had simply disappeared.
The incontrovertible fact of this apparition made me anticipate the possibility that others would follow. And from this time on, in spite of the fact that it was never repeated, each time I open a door I am aware of the possibility that I may see something that is not normal. In any case I myself at that time “was not normal.” The limits of the normal and the abnormal are perhaps possible to define, and probably impossible to delimit in a living being. But when I say that at this period I was abnormal I mean as compared to the moment I am writing this book. For since the period of which I am speaking I have made bewildering progress in this direction of normality, and in the direction not only of passive but even and especially of active adaptation to reality.
At the time when I had my first and only hallucination I derived satisfaction from each of the phenomena of my growing psychic abnormality, to such a point that everything served to stimulate them. I made desperate efforts to repeat each of these, adding each morning a little fuel to my folly. Later, when I saw the fruits of this folly threatening to clutter up my life, becoming so vigorous that it seemed as though they might deprive me of all the air I needed, then I rejected folly with violent kicks, and undertook a crusade to recover my “living-space”; and the slogan of this first moment—“The irrational for the sake of the irrational”—was one which I was to transform and canalize at the end of a year into that other slogan, which was already of Catholic essence—“The Conquest of the Irrational.” So that the “Irrational” which, at the moment of which I am speaking, I was treating with all the honors and ceremonials due to a true divinity was a thing which I already completely rejected at the end of a year. And while profiting by the secrets I had torn from it, and which it had yielded to me, during the promiscuity of our relations, I set out with fury, stubbornness and heroism to try to conquer it, destroying it pitilessly as I progressed, and at the same time trying to pull the entire surrealist group along with me.10
1929. I am, then, in the white-washed Cadaques of my childhood and my adolescence. Grown to manhood, and trying by every possible means to go mad—or rather, doing everything in my conscious power to welcome and help that madness which I felt clearly intended to take up its abode in my spirit. “Ay! Ay!” my soul would cry.
At this point I began to have fits of laughter. I would laugh so much that often I was obliged to lie down on the bed to rest. These fits gave me violent pains in my sides. What did I laugh at? At almost anything. I would imagine, for instance, three tiny curates running very fast in single file across a little Japanese gangplank, like the ones in the Tsarskoe Selo. Just at the moment when the last of the small curates, who was much smaller than the others, was about to leave the gangplank, I would kick him hard in the behind. I saw him stop like a hunted mouse, and take to his legs, recross the gangplank and run off in the opposite direction from that in which the others were going.
The little curate’s terror the moment I kicked him struck me as the most comical thing in the world, and I had only to imagine this scene to myself again to wri
the with laughter, unable to stop, to hold myself in, no matter under what circumstances I happened to find myself.
Another example, among innumerable ones of this kind, was that of imagining certain people I knew with a little owl perched on their heads, which in turn carried an excrement on its own head. This owl was carved, and I had imagined it to the minutest detail. The excrement always had to be a bit of my own excrement. But the efficacy of this little excrement-bearing owl was not uniform. It varied according to the individuals on whose heads I tried to balance it by turns in my imagination. For certain ones the comic effect was such as to provoke me to a paroxysm of laughter; for others it was completely inoperative. Then I would remove it from this head and try it on another one. And suddenly I would find the head, the exact expression of the face to go with my owl. And once it was in place I would contemplate the hilarious, infinite and instantaneous relationship which established itself magically between the face of the person I knew, who was completely unaware of what I had just put on his head, and the fixed stare of the owl balancing his excrement, and which provoked me to such spasmodic explosions of laughter that my family hearing from below the noise I was making wondered, “What’s going on?” “That child laughing again!” 11 my father would say, amused and preoccupied as he watered a skeletal rosebush wilting in the heat.
It was under these circumstances that I received a telegram from my dealer Camille Goemans. Aided and counseled by my father, I had in a series of letters reached a basis of agreement, by the terms of which I was to receive three thousand francs and he was to handle all the pictures I should paint during the summer, which would be exhibited in his gallery in Paris at the beginning of winter. He would have a percentage on the sale of each painting and would keep, besides, three canvases of his choosing. My father found these conditions honorable, and I did not give this matter a moment’s reflection. For that matter I had not yet acquired a precise notion of the value of money. I still had the impression that five hundred francs in small bills ought to “last” infinitely longer than a single bill of a thousand. I know that this will seem improbable to my readers, and only the testimony of my friends who knew me at this time could banish their doubts, which as a matter of fact are quite unfounded, for I am myself always the first to let them in on my mystifications.
Termite (Nevroptere)
Goemans arrived and was enthusiastic over Le Jeu Lugubre (The Lugubrious Game), which was not yet altogether completed. A few days later René Magritte arrived with his wife, and Eluard had just written that he would come later. Luis Bunuel also arrived at about the same time.
Thus within four days I was surrounded for the first time by surrealists who, when one came right down to it, had been attracted here by the unusual personality they had discovered in me. For Cadaques offered none of the comforts and conveniences indispensable to a resort, if one did not have one’s own house.
My fits surprised everyone, and this surprise which I observed on all their faces each time I burst out laughing only aggravated the intensity of my fits. Sometimes, stretched out on the beach of an evening to enjoy the coolness, everyone would be deep in a philosophic conversation, when suddenly I would interrupt them, showing that I wished to say something. But the moment I opened my mouth I would again explode with laughter. I finally gave up talking entirely, for instead of talking I could only laugh. My surrealist friends accepted my laughter with resignation, considering it to be one of the drawbacks of possessing a genius so manifest as mine. “Don’t ask Dali what he thinks about this,” they would say, “for naturally he will laugh, and we will be in for a good ten minutes of it.”
From hour to hour my fits of laughter grew more violent, and I caught in passing certain glances and certain whisperings about me by which I learned in spite of myself the anxiety which my state was beginning to cause. This appeared to me as comical as everything else, for I knew perfectly well that I was laughing because of the images that came into my mind. “If you could see what I imagine,” I would say to them, “you would all laugh even more than I do.” Finally I could no longer resist the avid curiosity which I saw reflected on all the faces.
“Imagine to yourselves, for instance,” I began, “that you see in your own mind a certain very respectable person. All right. Now go on and imagine a little sculptured owl perched on his head—a rather stylized owl, except for his face which must be quite realistic. You see what I mean.” Everyone, very serious, tried to represent to himself the image I had just described, and they said, “Yes, yes!”
“Well, then, imagine on the owl’s head a piece of my excrement!” I repeated, “Of my own excrement!”
Everyone still waited, and no one laughed.
“That’s it!” I said.
Then everyone laughed very feebly, as if to humor me.
“No, no,” I said, “I see it doesn’t make you laugh at all. For if you could see all this as I do you would be rolling on the floor.”
I was writhing with laughter in this way one morning when a car stopped in front of our house. It was the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, accompanied by his wife. They were tired from a long trip, having arrived from Switzerland, where they had been visiting René Crevel. They left us almost immediately to go and rest, and we arranged to meet at five o’clock at their hotel, the Miramar.
Eluard’s wife, Gala, struck me as having a very intelligent face, but she seemed to be in very bad humor, and rather annoyed at having come. At five o’clock our whole little surrealist group went to look up the Eluards. We drank in the shadow of the plane trees. I took a Pernod and had a little fit of laughter. My “case” was explained to Eluard, who seemed to be very much interested. But all the others, who were used to my fits, seemed by their expressions to say, “It’s nothing yet, wait a little and you’ll see!”
That evening, during the walk, I spoke with Gala of intellectual questions, and she was immediately surprised by the rigor which I displayed in the realm of ideas. She even admitted to me that earlier, as we were drinking in the shade of the plane trees, she had thought me an unbearably obnoxious creature because of my pommaded hair and my elegance, which she thought had a “professional Argentine tango slickness.” My Madrid period had in truth left its imprint on me in love of adornment. In my room I was always completely naked, but as soon as I had to go into the village I would spend an hour in fixing myself up, plastering down my hair, shaving with maniacal care, always wearing freshly creased white trousers, fancy sandals and pure silk shirts. I also wore a necklace of imitation pearls, and a metal cloth ribbon tied to one of my wrists. For evening I had had made shirts in a heavier material with low necks and very full sleeves, which I had designed myself and which gave me a completely feminine appearance.
Walking back, I spoke with Eluard. I saw immediately that he was a poet of the category of Lorca—that is to say, among the greatest and most authentic. I waited impatiently to hear him praise the landscape of Cadaques; but he “did not see it yet.” Then I tried to put a little owl on his head to see what effect it would produce. It did not make me laugh. I tried it on Lorca—this had no effect either. I tried it then on other poets. But no. It was as though the hilarity-provoking virtue of my owl had disappeared. I tried again and again; and even on those on whom it had formerly produced the most efficacious results—nothing. Then suddenly I imagined my owl upside down, with his head stuck to the sidewalk by my excrement. This provoked such a violent fit that I had to roll on the ground before I could continue my walk.
We accompanied the Eluards back to the Hotel Miramar, and we agreed to meet, all of us, on the beach in front of our house the next day at eleven o’clock and go swimming.
The following day I awoke well before sunrise, in the throes of a great anxiety. The idea that my friends, and especially the Eluards, would be there already at eleven o’clock, on the beach in front of my window, and that since I wanted to be polite I would have to go out, stopping my work an hour earlier than usual, greatly exasperated me,
ruining my whole morning in advance. In the framework of my window the morning sang the song of my impatience, and the pebbles stirred by a early fisherman sent a shudder through me. I should have liked to stop the rising course of the sun that was implacably advancing, so that in plunging back into the sea from which it came it would leave unbegun the uncertain battle that my presentiments announced to me.
But of what battle was I thinking? The morning shone like every other morning, perhaps with a little more of that utter foreboding calm which habitually precedes momentous events. After that “morning void” that kept my heart in suspense the myriad forms of life were stirring and awakening, with the daily noises a thousand times heard—the kitchen door just opened by the maid, struck several times with a closed fist before the key was turned and it made up its mind to open with a sandy crunching; the shepherd passing by with his tinkling flock. At this moment I shut my eyes to get the full impact of it, and to greet with dignity that troubling, intoxicating and symphonic odor of the sheep, in the midst of which the virile and arrogant odor of the ram resounded in my sniffing nostrils like a dominant genital note. I also made out, among a hundred others, the characteristic rhythm of the fisherman Enrique’s oar, coming always about ten minutes later than the passing of the flock. All this was repeating itself chronologically, and with the same accent as on other days. And yet... What was going to happen?
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 30