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REVERIE
BY SALVADOR DALÍ
AN EBOOK
ISBN 978-1-908694-30-0
PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS
COPYRIGHT 2011 ELEKTRON EBOOKS
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REVERIE
Port-Lligat, October 17, 1931, 3 o’clock in the afternoon
I have just finished eating and am going to stretch out on the couch, as I must do everyday for an hour and a half, after which, for the rest of the afternoon, I plan to write a part of a very long study on BöckIin, a study which has greatly preoccupied me for some time.
I also want to use this break to think about some points which seem to me particularly contradictory, especially the antagonism between the feeling of death and the absolute lack of distortion with regards to spatial notions, so striking in this painter. I convince myself of the necessity of taking some notes during my rest. So I look for something to write with, which is for me, right now, extremely difficult, not only because of several parapraxes, slips of memory... etc., but also because I won’t let myself write – for reasons none too clear – on the notebook which contains my earlier notes. I therefore would need a new notebook (especially) for imitations of the type which can be formed from simple unelaborated suggestions, otherwise the latter would muddle up the former. In the end I decide that I will be able to remember things very accurately without taking notes, since I am going to start writing as soon as the break is over.
I make all the necessary arrangements in advance, so as not to be disturbed while I lie down. I give orders not to bring me in my mail. I go and urinate and, at the same time, I can’t wait to lie down on the sofa. I then have a very particular notion of the pleasure that awaits me in the bedroom, a notion which opposes itself to the rather painful idea of the contradictions that I have to overcome. So I hurry. I run to my bedroom and on the way I experience a violent erection, accompanied by great pleasure and hilarity.
Reaching my bedroom, I stretch out on the sofa.
Immediately the erection gives way to a very faint desire to urinate, which suffices, in spite of its quasi-imperceptibility, to render fruitless all my efforts of reflection about frontality in The Isle of the Dead. From which spring considerations about this absurdity: that a very faint desire to urinate is capable of becoming very obstructive; an absurdity all the more marked, given my capacity to retain urine for hours on end, whether because I do not wish to disturb myself or because I want to procure for myself the pleasure of pissing up a storm. I am revolted by the thought of having to get up, but I feel there is nothing else to do and I opt for the concessions, I run once again to urinate. A matter of about four or five drops all told. Then, barely have I lain down on the couch when I jump up to dose the curtain which leaves the room in a semi-darkness. I lie down again, and then I feel completely disenchanted, as if I were missing something very important.
I don’t have the slightest idea of what it could be, which provokes in me a malaise that I predict will go away as soon as I know its cause.
All of a sudden and without helping myself along with any associations, I remember that, during dinner, I mentally selected (such as I was formerly in the habit of doing) a heel of bread, which was rather burnt, that I had decided to bring to the couch with me, in order to meticulously pick out the soft part of the bread and transform the crust into a sort of vase. Then, even more meticulously with my front teeth I would have munched, pierced and packed it down into minuscule finely ground pieces until it turned into a fine paste. Before swallowing it, I would have kept this paste parsimoniously on both sides of my mouth, under my tongue, and I would have worked it still more, feeling its faculty of adopting different consistencies in relation to the proportion of saliva. All this, so as to make the crust last longer.
No sooner had I found the representation of the piece of bread, the malaise disappears and I rush to look for the crust in question, which someone has already taken from the dining room and which I finally find in the kitchen.
However, I cut yet another crust which is very small and not burnt, therefore different from the ones I like most, but which I take anyway, especially since its shape is that of a very sweet little horn. I am on the sofa again, but with the two crusts, and this time without anything happening to me that might interrupt my thought.
I try to represent for myself as clearly as possible the famous painting of The Isle of the Dead.
Now I find it careless to have believed in the total absence of spatial distortions in this painter and especially in The Isle of the Dead.
My error lay in the limitation engendered by grossly reducing the idea of spatial disturbances simply to perspectival distortions.
The same sense of frontality that had struck me, in the beginning, in this picture, emphasizes a distinctly spatial “dominant”.
It now seems to me to be essential to my study to establish a system of relativity that would allow me to reduce (at least in passing), the distortions of perspective whose meaning I had studied at length in Vermeer of Delft and G. de Chirico. I think of the analytic insufficiency of the passage in which I claim to prove the unconscious funereal sentiment of these two painters, brought about by perspectival distortions linked to illumination. Here I am thinking concretely about a work by Vermeer entitled The Letter. It becomes impossible for me to picture it to myself in its entirety and with the lucidity that I desire. This is because of the emotional meaning which has just been born or released from the curtain, in the foreground (to the left) of the painting in question.
Then, I make my (very) little penis automatically jerk up, leaving on the sofa the small crust that I had been picking at. With one hand I play with the hair underneath my testicles, with the other, I accumulate a bit of the soft part of the bread, that has been removed from the crust.
Despite several completely sterile efforts to return to my thought, an absolutely involuntary reverie begins. I have just situated the curtain from the Vermeer painting in a dream I had had, several days earlier. Indeed, this curtain is identified in its shape, its position and above all its affective and moral signification with the curtain which, in the dream, was used to hide several little cows, in the back of a very dark stable, where, lying amidst the excrement and the rotting straw, I sodomize the woman that I love, as I’m very much aroused by the stench of the place.
HERE THE REVERIE BEGINS
I see myself as I am now but appreciably older. I have, moreover, let my beard grow just like in the long-buried memory I have of a lithograph of Monte-Christo. Some friends have let me use their large castle-farm for ten days where I intend to finish my study on Böcklin, which will constitute a chapter of a very large work that, for the moment, I’m calling Surrealist Painting Through The Ages.
After these ten days, I have to return to Port-Lligat where I will meet up with the woman I love, who presently is in Berlin, busy with amorous adventures, as in an earlier reverie.
The castle that they are lending me is called The Tower Mill. I had stayed there for two months when I was ten years old, in the company of a couple of intimate friends of my parents.
But, in the reverie, the castle is changed. It seems extraordinarily aged, and in places even seems in ruins. The pond in the garden has become twenty times bigger. I am not satisfied by its real location in the garden either, surrounded by enormous oaks hiding the sky. Now, I have transported the pond to the
back of the house so that it can be seen from the dining room, together with the Böcklinian sky of clouds and storms that I remembered having contemplated from the same spot, which dominates a very vast and open horizon. The pond has also changed place, because I was always used to seeing it length in perspective and, in my fantasy, it appeared to me crosswise. I see myself from behind, in the dining room, finishing my snack made up of the heel of a loaf of bread and chocolate. I am dressed in a black velvet suit, similar to the one that my friend the owner of the castle wore during my childhood visit, the only difference being an extrordinarily clean little white linen cape, attached to my shoulders by three little safety pins. The remains of the bread in my hand, I descend very slowly the main staircase of the castle which faces the courtyard. The staircase is in semi-darkness, due to the pre-twilight hour aggravated by the densely cloudy weather. As I descend, I hear the sound of very light, almost imperceptible, rain. I think: “Why bother going down, it’s raining,” but I go down. There I am in the entrance full of dry leaves that emit a strong odor of decay which, mixed with the odour of animal excrement coming from the courtyard, send me into a mild confusion that leaves me dreamy.
Suddenly, I leave this state of ecstasy through a very erotic emotion.
It occurs when my drowsy gaze encounters the half-open door of the stable which I recognize, without the slightest doubt, as being the one in the dream.
But this emotion becomes extraordinarily accentuated as soon as I notice the well-known presence of the oscillating tops of the cypresses, which in reality form a group separating the courtyard (right after the stable) from the prairie where, in my reverie, my fantasy has placed the vast pond.
The emotion caused by the cypress tops results from the instantaneous association with another group of cypresses situated in a public place near Figueres, called “Log-Fountain”.
This group of very old, bushy cypresses surrounded a paved circle at the centre of which, amidst well-worn stone seats, flows a ferruginous fountain. A little aluminum glass was attached to a small chain. The foliage of the cypresses, starting almost at ground level, and their tops joined together with iron rings, formed a cupola, in such a way that the fountain was enclosed inside the cypresses.
Whence an enormous shadow and a great coolness which earned this spot my family’s favour. After the Sunday walk, they would take me there to drink on hot spring evenings, after having sat and rested on the cool and worn-down seats. I wasn’t allowed to get close to the water until I had eaten the bread and chocolate. This fountain was still strictly forbidden, outside of the hot season, for, come autumn, we had to pass in front of it without stopping, because of the dangerous humidity of the place. In pursuit of my reverie, it is essential that the cypresses from behind the wall of the courtyard be substituted with those of the “Log-Fountain”. In the almost total darkness of the night that had suddenly fallen, I see the extremities of the cypresses from “behind the yard” come together and form a single thick, black flame. From the moment I noticed the odour in the yard till now, I abandoned myself to the following automatic acts: several times I introduced the soft part of the bread, amassed over a long time, into the holes in my nose. I removed it slowly with my fingers, while simulating a certain difficulty, as if it were a bit of snot.
Sometimes, quite the contrary, I would project the soft bread just by exhaling. It was especially pleasant when I was under the illusion that it was a piece of snot, an illusion which, almost always, was bolstered by and in direct relationship to the time lapse between the initial introduction of the bread into the nose and its subsequent expulsion.
The procedure of expulsion by exhalation was not without its inconvenience. The bread ball might fall anywhere and looking for it amongst the folds in my clothes or on the sofa sometimes managed to disturb and almost interrupt my reverie, especially when (and this happened frequently) the soft bread rolled under my body in such a way that in order to pick it up, I was obliged to arch my back. And thus would I pull away from the sofa. I would prop myself up on head and feet alone, enabling myself to grope around on the sofa. I would end up finding the soft bread ball. The closer it had rolled towards my feet, the harder it was to pick it up by the convulsive procedure, which many times, after painful efforts, I had to give up to go sit down on the sofa, all the while looking all around myself and lifting my buttocks, in anticipation of the possibility that the ball might be right where I was sitting.
But then I would raise my buttocks in a rather inexplicable fashion, an operation that is always carried out rather brusquely, in little jumps that rarely gave me the time to pick up the ball.
I was obliged to repeat these leaps several times, fearing with each jerk that the ball would end up jumping on to the floor, launched by the sofa springs. Each time this risk made me shake with fear, a very sensitive fear, localized in my heart.
Sometimes, when the ball had come out of my nose, I would keep it a while between my nose and my top lip.
All the while projecting hot air from my nostrils, in such a way as to make the bread-ball lukewarm, and then slowly start oozing and softening.
All these operations I perform out of preference with one hand (the left hand), while the right mobilizes my penis which is considerably heavier, without having yet reached the state of erection.
At the exact moment in which I had had the representation (of an extraordinary visual clarity, it must be noted) of the aluminum goblet attached to the chain, I had hurriedly removed the ball which was in my left nostril and inserted it with care, as deeply as I could, under the prepuce that my fingers are holding, because all of a sudden there is a slight erection which is over at once.
CONTINUATION OF THE REVERIE
The very day that I encountered the stable of the dream in the castle courtyard, after the evening meal, while I am having coffee and a glass of cognac, I conceive, in the form of a reverie, a project to be carried out in my general reverie. I very quickly expose this sub-reverie portion. It is extremely long and complex and I consider it more suitable for a special expose. I therefore note here only general details that are essential to the continuation of the general reverie, which, in their absence, would be a lot more difficult to follow. In short I want to realize the dream act of sodomy in the stable that I have just identified with the one in the dream. But this time, the woman I love is replaced by a young girl of eleven, named Dulita, whom I met five years ago. This girl had the very pale face of an anemic, light-coloured eyes that are very sad and vague, making a very violent contrast with a body exceptionally developed for her age, very well shaped; her gait and lazy gestures are extremely voluptuous to me.
To fulfill my fantasy of sodomizing Dulita in the stable, I had to invent several stories which would create the conditions of dream, this similarity being indispensable to the development of my reverie. Here is the one I adopt.
Dulita’s mother, a rather beautiful woman, about forty, a widow and alway dressed in black, falls madly in love with me and accepts, out of masochism, my fantasy of sodomizing her daughter, even consenting to help me with all her strength, all her devotion.
To this end, I send Mathilde, Dulita’s mother, to Figueres. She must contact Gallo, an old prostitute I met way back when, who is extraordinarily perverse and experienced. Putting her in touch with Dulita, it seems to me, is essential for the latter’s coming initiation.
As soon as Mathilde, Dulita and la Gallo are settled in the château, they are formally forbidden to talk to me and even to communicate with me, whether by gesture or writing. Dulita must believe me to be deaf and dumb and a great scholar whom the slightest troublesome gesture might seriously disturb. Every evening, after the meal, the table is entirely cleared and coffee and cognac are brought out. It is the only meal, the only moment in the day when I am with Dulita and the two women, because, the rest of the day, I stay shut up in my office where I am writing my study on Böcklin and where I take all my other meals.
It is at this time o
f the evening, in complete silence and meditation, that I transmit, through writing, all my decisions regarding the accomplishment of my fantasies, with the most microscopic details and nuances.
It is Gallo who is the first to receive my communications, and it is to her that befalls the entire responsibility for accomplishing (exactly to the point of mania) all my orders, which she, in her turn, sometimes communicates to Mathilde. Depending on the situation, she can also content herself with giving the latter certain indications she considers essential.
This is the way it should go for five days. Dulita must not suspect anything; on the contrary, she should even be prepared by extremely chaste and edifying readings, surrounded with great gentleness and tenderness as if she were preparing for her first communion, which moreover, she is to take in a short while from now. On the fifth day, Dulita will be taken to the cypress fountain two hours before sunset. There she will have a snack of bread and chocolate, and la Gallo, with help from Mathilde, will initiate Dulita, in the most brutal and coarse manner. As visual aids she will use a profusion of pornographic postcards, from which I will have earlier made a precise choice of overwhelming pathos.
The same evening, Dulita will have to learn everything from la Gallo and her mother, namely that I was not a deaf-mute, that in three days I will sodomize her amid the excrement of the cow stable. For three days, she will have to act as if she knew nothing about any of this. She is rigorously forbidden to make the slightest allusion to anything that has just been revealed to her (that is to say that she, Dulita, would know that I knew that she knew).
Everything, right until the precise moment of the stable, must continue in silence and with the appearance of the everyday.
In order to fulfill the program of fantasies that I have just lived through in general reverie, one of the essential conditions that had to be met was the completely inescapable necessity, for me, in watching Dulita’s initiation, by the cypress fountain, through the dining-room window, which, in reality, is impractical, because of various conflicts that are perfectly physical in nature, such as, for example, the cypresses, which completely surrounded the fountain. Thus was I prevented from observing Dulita’s initiation, which was to take place precisely inside the fountain. The small front door that you had to bend your head to pass through would not do. But a new fantasy, which appears particularly exciting to me, comes, bringing a solution to this first conflict. A fire, caused by an enormous pile of dry leaves improperly extinguished, had partly burnt the cypresses in front of the fountain, leaving it exposed, but in such a way that a badly burnt branch could still present a very weak and almost non-existent difficulty to the contemplation of the scene with Dulita.
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