When, in the beginnings of the history of culture, the men who were to found the eternal bases of Occidental esthetics chose, among the formless multiplicity of existing foliages, the unique and shining outline of the acanthus leaf, they materialized, in so doing, the immortal morphological symbol which was destined to become nothing less than the cosmogonic constant of Greco-Roman civilization, opposing that of Asia and the Orient, the lotus-blossom. The “plant-dream whirl” of the acanthus leaf hardened into the luminous concisions of the first Corin thian capitals, and since then it has not ceased to be the tradition of esthetic intelligence, the continuous force of Minerva through the vicissitudes of blind and obscure forces of history. The acanthus leaf, become divine through the force of the conception of its first ornamental concretions, was destined not to die. It was to live in all the future architectures of the spirit, and while changing the skin of its dreams of growth, it was throughout the convulsive events of the Occident to roll, curl, grow heavy, furl and unfurl, live and live again, sprout and sprout again. Often it would disappear beneath the revolutionary storms, only to reappear more esthetically perfected than before, in the serene calms of the renaissances...
Men kill one another; peoples bite the dust beneath the yoke of the victors; others swell like elephant lice with the bloody geography of territorial ccnquests. Revolution and middle-ages seem then to have destroyed that anti-historic “little life” of the acanthus leaf about which no one was thinking. But precisely while no one was thinking about it, behold, this leaf is born anew, green, tender and shiny, between the cracks of a brand-new ruin. And it is as though all the historic catastrophes, all the suffering of man, all the upheavals, hail-storms, deluges, and chaos of the Occidental soul are destined, with their transitory, stormy apparition and disparition, only to come at all times to feed the perennity of the acanthus leaf, only to maintain the ever-renascent immortality of tradition ever green, new, virginal and original...
The end of a war, the crumbling of an empire, and a hundred years of disorder have served only slightly to modify the tilt, the outline, the ornamental figure of the acanthus leaf, immediately reappearing in the first, still tender moldings of the budding new flesh of civilization. The acanthus leaf continues. From the Corinthian capitals, what life of tradi tion is that of the acanthus leaf, dying under the Christ, born again heavy and fecund with classicism with Palladio, nuptial in Rome, apotheotic in style under Louis XIV, hysterical under Louis XV, orgiastic and aphrodisiac in the Baroque, guillotined by the French Revolution, modest and haughty under the Napoleonic Empire, neurotic and mad in the Modern Style, confined to an insane asylum throughout the Post-War, forgotten by all today during the present new war!
But it is not dead! For it lives somewhere, for it is unfurling its new bloom of spiny beauty in the shelter of the barbed wires of daily events, and more precisely within the brain of Salvador Dali. Yes! I announce its life, I announce the future birth of a Style...
All those who continue to imitate me by redoing “primary surrealism” are doomed to the limbo of lack of style, for to arrive at the creation of a style, instead of continuing to disintegrate, it is necessary to integrate, and instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.
Finished, finished, finished, finished, finished, finished, finished, finished–what is finished!
The day I went to visit Sigmund Freud in his London exile, on the eve of his death, I understood by the lesson of classic tradition of his old age how many things were at last ended in Europe with the imminent end of his life. He said to me,
“In classic paintings, I look for the sub-conscious–in a surrealist painting, for the conscious.”
This was the pronouncement of a death sentence on surrealism as a doctrine, as a sect, as an “ism.” But it confirmed the reality of its tradition as a “state of the spirit”; it was the same as in Leonardo–a “drama of style,” a tragic sense of life and of esthetics. At this moment Freud was occupying himself mainly with “religious phenomena and Moses.” And I remember with what fervor he uttered the word “sublimation” on several occasions. “Moses is flesh of sublimation.” The individual sciences of our epoch have become specialized in these three eternal vital constants–the sexual instinct, the sense of death, and the space-time anguish. After their analysis, after the experimental speculation, it again becomes necessary to sublimate them. The sexual instinct must be sublimated in esthetics; the sense of death in love; and the space-time anguish in metaphysics and religion. Enough of denying; one must affirm. Enough of trying to cure; one must sublimate! Enough of disintegration; one must integrate, integrate, integrate. Instead of automatism, style; instead of nihilism, technique; instead of scepticism, faith; instead of promiscuity, rigor; instead of collectivism and uniformization–individualism, differentiation, and hierarchization; instead of experimentation, tradition. Instead of Reaction or Revolution, RENAISSANCE!
1 Fetish: a tangible, objective and symbolic materialization of desire; by sublimation, a wish, a “prayer.”
2 In French, societe anonyme, which explains Dali’s subsequent play on the word “anonymous.”–Translator’s note.
3 Or “romantically classic.”
4 A military intelligence committee that functioned during the terror in Barcelona.
5 Involuntary neologism, composed of the word odio (hatred) and Odisea (Odyssey).
6 To Tristan Bernard is attributed the witty remark, on the day of occupation of Paris: “We spent the whole period of the war exclaiming, about the Germans, ‘We’ll get them! We’ll get them!’ Well, we’ve got them!”
7 It has been demonstrated that one does not defend the country with Maginot lines constructed with false material and false politics, undermined by revolution. But the French soldier who comes from the concentration camp and who weeps already becomes once more a “Catholic stone,” a stone of the Cathedral of Chartres, a tradition and a force.
EPILOGUE
I am thirty-seven years old. It is July 3oth, 1941, the day I promised my publisher I would finish this manuscript.
I am completely naked and alone in my room at Hampton Manor. I approach the wardrobe mirror and look at myself; my hair is still black as ebony, my feet have not yet known the degrading stigma of a single corn; my body exactly resembles that of my adolescence, except for my stomach which has grown bigger. I am not on the eve of a voyage to China, nor am I about to get a divorce; neither am I thinking of committing suicide, nor of jumping over a cliff clutching the warm placenta of a silk parachute to attempt to be reborn; I have no desire to fight a duel with anyone or with anything; I want only two things: first, to love Gala, my wife; and second, that other inescapable thing, so difficult and so little desired–to grow old.
And you too, Europe, may I find you on my return a little more aged by all “that.” As a child I was wicked, I grew up under the shadow of evil, and I still continue to cause suffering. But since a year ago I know that I have begun to love the being who has been married to me for seven years; and I am beginning to love her as the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church demands, according to its conception of love. Catholic love, said Unamuno, is, “If your wife has a pain in her left leg, you shall feel that same pain in your left leg.”
I have just finished writing this long book of the secrets of my life, for this life that I have lived, this alone, gives me authority to be heard. And I want to be heard. I am the most representative incarnation of postwar Europe; I have lived all its adventures, all its experiments, all its dramas. As a protagonist of the surrealist revolution I have known from day to day the slightest intellectual incidents and repercussions in the practical evolution of dialetical materialism and of the pseudo-philosophical doctrines based on the myths of blood and race of National-Socialism; I have long studied theology. And in each of the ideological short-cuts which my brain had to take so as
always to be the first I have had to pay dear, with the black coin of my sweat and passion. But if I have participated, with the lucid fanaticism characteristic of the Spaniard that I am, in all the speculative searches, even the most contradictory, I have never in my life been willing, on the other hand, to belong to any political party whatsoever. And how should I be willing to do so now, today, when politics is already in the process of being devoured by religion?
Since 1929 I have ceaselessly studied the processes, the discoveries of the special sciences of the last hundred years. If it has not been possible for me to explore all corners of these because of their monstrous specialization, I have understood their meaning as well as the best! One thing is certain: nothing, absolutely nothing, in the philosophic, esthetic, morphological, biological or moral discoveries of our epoch denies religion. On the contrary, the architecture of the temple of the special sciences has all its windows open to heaven.
Heaven is what I have been seeking all along and through the density of confused and demoniac flesh of my life–heaven! Alas for him who has not yet understood that! The first time I saw a woman’s depilated armpit I was seeking heaven. When with my crutch I stirred the putrefied and worm-eaten mass of my dead hedgehog, it was heaven I was seeking. When from the summit of the Muli de la Torre I looked far down into the black emptiness, I was also and still seeking heaven!
Gala, you are reality!
And what is heaven? Where is it to be found? “Heaven is to be found, neither above nor below, neither to the right nor to the left, heaven is to be found exactly in the center of the bosom of the man who has faith!”
THE END
At this moment I do not yet have faith, and I fear I shall die without heaven.
Hampton Manor
Twelve o’clock noon.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 53