Maniac Eyeball (22 page)

I myself can interpret six, eight, or ten images at the same time from a single vision. My paranoiac-critical capacities have few limits. In the case of some of my paintings everyone who looks at them sees something different. The paranoiac vision may come to the fore by contagion of anybody’s imagination. Paranoiac systematization influences the real and orients it, predisposes it, and implies lines of force that coincide with the most exact of truths. My limp watches are not just a fanciful and poetic image of the real; this vision of runny cheese is in fact the most perfect definition that the highest of mathematical speculations can give of space-time. The image was born spontaneously in me and on the basis of this paranoiac-inspired picture one can consider that I have wrested from the irrational one of the most colossal archetypes of its arsenal of secrets. For, better than any mathematical equation, the limp watches give a definition of life: space-time condensed to the highest potential, to create the Camembert whose putrefaction brings forth the mushrooms of the mind, sparks that are capable of igniting the great cosmic motor.

It is time for us, in the history of thought, to see that the real as given to us by rational science is not all of
the real. 
The world of logical and allegedly experimental reason, as nineteenth-century science bequeathed it to us, is in immense disrepute. The very method of knowledge is suspect. The equation has been formulated by skip ping over the unknowns and assuming a part of the problem to have been solved. In the end, it will finally be officially recognized that reality as we have baptized it is a greater illusion than the dream world.

Following through on my thought, I would say that the dream we speak of exists as such only because our minds are in suspended animation; the real is an epiphenomenon of thought, a result of non-thought, a phenomenon of amnesia. The true real is within us and we project it when we systematically exploit our paranoia, which is a response and action due to the pressure – or depression – of cosmic void.

I believe my paranoia is an expression of the absolute structure, the proof of its immanence. My genius consists of being in direct contact with the cosmic soul.

Dalí’s Reflection On The World: A True Cosmogony

I am essentially a visionary, a sort of sounding board for total truth. My intuitions are fundamental. Likewise, I believe that the universe around us is but a projection of our paranoia, an enlarged image of the world we carry within us, I think that the object our eyes isolate from the real or that we invent is a pure expression of our delirium crystallized. A simple secretion. Objectivity is but a snare and a delusion: in truth, merely a relationship of forces in temporary suspension. Caldéron speaks of the “traitorous world”. What an admirable expression!

I am thinking of my eye, the only proof I can give of the brilliance of my soul, the expression of my feelings, which projects my paranoiac force and re-creates and transmits the message of the real... What is this eye? A glob of humors, a knot of muscles, a film of flesh and nerves irrigated by a flow of acid? Beneath that appearance lurk galaxies of microscopic electrons, agitated by an impalpable wave, itself the fluid of a quasi-immaterial energy. At what level, then, the real? The truth, to me, to Dalí, is in the magnifying-glass I aim at the world, called my eye, through which there takes place an exchange that for that moment is known as real. As for me, what I project is truer than true and it is all that is true. Real is there fore equal to unreal. An implacable syllogism.

Paranoia, moreover, does not express itself solely in a system atized projection, it is also the formidable breath of life. And this mad exaltation that drives me to exist has as much consistency as the images it animates. I know that the world is not a dream because my life is evident to me as it is to the world and my dreams arise from it. And the sole evidence of reality resides in that breath of live forces that agitate me and color all things. But what void! What disparate ness! What strangeness all about us! How can we believe in substance in itself? What is substance? God? It sometimes seems to me that at the tip of my paintbrush or of my cock in orgasm – at the second when Gala’s coming goes through me like a wave bounding back – I have a deep sense of infinite reality, a micron of absolute structure, the
élan vital
of becoming. And in all finality I believe that the real is but eternal becoming. Sometimes in the thrill of beauty I seem to experience that wave that comes to me in ecstasy. In an archangelical beauty, without gender, without principle, which is
like a certainty of God.

When Dalí Experiences The Certainty Of God

I bend over Gala, her body a galaxy, traversed by lightning waves, swept by eruptions of desire, convulsed by tensions, erections, shiverings. I am transported to the stars of a universe in state of be coming. But this face is something quite more than just a material trace, just a tissue of life. The lines, shapes,
éclat
, smile, are a
presence
of a being in its power, its uniqueness, its unity, its radiance. Here before me. It tells me it is. It awaits me, wants me. Calls to me. Receives me. This is not merely an interchange of energies, erections, sensations, a rubbing of epiderms to bring about electrical and biological discharge; not just two intelligences trying to understand each other, but a ball of fire bursting out of an unknown sky. Two forces uniting to create a bit of the infinite. A spark that spreads through the universe in all its dimensions. A unique something that tran scends our lives, and justifies, Everything – Her, Me, the Totality of the World – Gala is herself, and all women; and also the cosmos. And the desire biting at my skin, inhaling me, grabbing me, exalting me, suddenly feeds on my most intimate substance, the densest of my deepest realities. We are welded; time and space become a single reality, a fusion-point of the absolute structure. Beyond life, we project a bridge, a rocket, toward unknown wonders. We are the greatest hope of the world. All men live in me; all women under me – in Gala! The world is full, new, absolute.

I slowly withdraw my cock and look at that weeping root. My hand slowly strokes her breast. Our eyes open as the words The End fade in on the screen of the real while the picture, the chair, the bed, the curtain, the window come clear. We come back down to an indifferent earth knowing that real life is somewhere in an unknown dimension to which desire and paranoia alone can lead us. Dalí means Desire, and I am the symbol of all the desires in the world. The desire to possess life in its totality, to go beyond it, reinvent it – without death. In the space of dream.

Is Science, To Dalí, But An Approach To Dream?

Science – which appears to give us the key to power over the world – in fact carries us away from the power which can be born only of total intuition, flashing between mind and reality. Rationalism, experiment are merely control elements.

The irrational faculties alone open the doors of the universe to us. Art is a school of depth, knowledge and initiation. I say art and do not say aestheticism or plasticism, the model that illustrates my thought being
art nouveau
as the expression of the delirious.
Art nouveau
is an expression of which with
The
Visible Woman
as early as 1929 – I helped to have the characters of profound originality recognized. And it was not just for its reaction value against the right angle and golden number that until then had ruled the plastic arts, but for the profound revolution it implies in its anti-functionalism and its extolling of the exaltation of desires. A compendium of
art nouveau
figures brings out soft abdomens, women’s hair, aquatic plants, and limp, hydrocephalous col umns. An art of metamorphosis, a materialization of smoke, wave, and the immaterial,
art nouveau
is both sculptured water and the most edible of cakes. It brings together the two poles of existence and its erotic expression is properly cannibalistic.
Art
nouveau
brings out our unconscious mechanisms, our megalomania, our exhibitionistic capri cious feeling. It smashes all creations of measure, order, balance, good taste, to exalt dream and fantasy and suggest that we devour our own desires. It lays before our eyes images of a beauty fed on Eros, fear, anal sadism, onanism, in other words glorifying the truths of Self. Back to one’s sources so as to dip once more into the deeper truths of the Being and the All and that
élan vital
from which de cadent Greco-Roman art has estranged us (when I say
élan vital
, I am not referring to the silliness of Bergsonism nor the primitive aesthetics of the lovers of African art). I say that mystery, pathos, eroticism, madness are no more found in barbaric fetishes than in the columns of the Parthenon. A race must find force of expression in its biological and psychological depths and
art
nouveau
is the mark of that explosive reaction against all aesthetic taboos. It is time for a new cultural revolution that might bring forth a new style and reverse the degrading powers of the bourgeois who eliminated nudity, dreaminess, and lyricism from existence. Gaudí and Ledoux, I proclaim, are the great wizards of the future, and paranoia the force of exploitation of the world.

What, To Dalí, Is The Greatness of Gaudí?

What I love in Gaudí is his vitality. His brain is at the tips of his fingers and tongue. He’s gustative. His architecture aims to embody the sum of all gluttonous sensations. It strikes me as the idea of man’s desire incarnate. The Sagrada Familia is a gigantic erogenous zone prickly with gooseflesh aching to be stroked by hand and by tongue.

I remember Lorca in front of the admirable facade of the Sagrada Familia claiming to hear a
griterio
– a cacophony of shouts – that rose stridently to the top of the cathedral, creating such tension in him that it became unbearable. There is the proof of Gaudí’s genius. He appeals to all of our senses and creates the imagination of the senses. Gaudí researched this deeply by studying the applications of acoustics. He turned his bells into organ pipes. He applied the same attention to the color scheme for a polychrome
mise-en-scène
of his constructions. Like Catalan folk Christmas mangers, in which the characters are modeled after actual persons, each subject had its original coloring and even the roosters had red cocks combs. Gaudí had composed a chromatic palette to correspond to his polyphonic scale. Everything in his work, light as well as silence, “transports us elsewhere”, and none was more adept than he at using bad taste to throw us, decondition us, tear us away from the sterility of good taste.

He provokes us down to our innermost depths. Through him, everything is metamorphosis, nothing is taboo nor set any longer, the Gothic rejoins the Hellenic, which in turn merges into Far Eastern forms. He calls forth paranoiac vision and multiplies all interpretations. In Catalan,
to come
is written
gaudí.
The Sagrada Familia is the cathedral of the paranoiac-critical method, thus, of the pure science of systematically creative and fatal delirium. The fact that today the Sagrada Familia remains only a “gigantic rotten tooth” should not turn attention away from its true meaning. It is a magnetic tuning-fork whose waves spread ceaselessly and penetrate all minds receptive to the irrational that often practice and live
art
nouveau
unwittingly.

When we automatically roll a bus transfer between our fingers, making it into a tube, cutting it up, we are creating
art nouveau
forms! The butcher slicing calf’s liver is doing
art nouveau
!

What The Catalan Future Is To Dalí

To be a Catalan today is to have the greatest opportunity for the future. Like being a Jew in the time of Nero! One of those persecutees from Judea who in two thousand years conquered the world. A Catalan donkey in its chromosomes has the genius of paranoiac conquering power. The Catalan philosopher Raymond Lully, an alchemist and metaphysician who wrote
The Twelve Principles Of Philosophy,
mystic and martyr – he was stoned to death at eighty at Bougie (Algeria) by Arabs – inspires me. Like him, I believe in the transmutation of bodies. I am sure that our capacity for delirium will one day lead the Catalan people to the highest glories through the powers of paranoiac imagination.

According to another Catalan, Francisco Pujols, there is an angel in us who sees the light of day only after a long series of mutations – begun at the start of the mineral kingdom to reach man after going through the vegetable and animal. I am in the angelic phase of my existence. I am approaching the absolute and I have perfected a whole series of methods for completing myself, from delayed orgasm to ejaculation over the idea of my death. The world will soon see Dalí turned angel! Having renounced all that he might take, burning desire refusing to satisfy or even express itself, extolling anticipation so as no longer to be anything but a blazing hearth of unfulfilled pleasures. Catalan thought will dazzle the world. It reaches the sources of the depths. And I give it the power of coming to awareness. In becoming exorcised, through the strength of Gala and her love, I found the pathways to the method of truth. Paradoxically, I channeled my delirium through reason, as in art I found my expression through classicism. I turn my contradictions into a veritable coherence. I can truly say I do not know when I begin simulating or when I tell the truth, but I do know when and where delirium ends. Through the pitiless demand of cold intelligence, I transformed part of my personality into an analytical faculty and won back from madness a domain that I turned into power and creation. The only difference – need I repeat? – between a madman and me is that I am not one.

When I heard of the death of Lidia’s son whom I had tor mented a bit and who starved himself to death in the grip of his psy chosis, I was seized with the horrors and found myself unable to eat in my turn. A terrible self-punishment drove me. That was a time when I lost confidence in my painting, feeling that Velázquez had already given all the answers. Gala, who was first to employ my method by explaining to me that my artistic death had just crystallized over the death of Lidia’s son, showed that if I were to set about drawing by obeying only my talent, which was immense, I would be able to start eating again. There was some bread and anchovies on the table. While listening to Gala, whose gifts of persuasion were getting into me wave after wave, I mechanically picked up the food and started to chew. An hour later I was drawing. Introducing a ferment of consciousness into a flow of desires creates eroticism; in a paranoiac
élan
it provokes genius; in a psychosis it effects a cure by transmuting the light into a laser.