Maniac Eyeball (23 page)

Paranoia, thanks to my critical method, develops like a cellular blossoming. It proliferates as soon as it can feed on what is called the real. I conquered my delirium. But it is necessary to know what taunted lucidity this perpetual victory requires. I am Dürer’s Knight facing death, ceaselessly walking between the human and the non-human above the abysses. My whole being is a field of work that I unify through my will. If for one second this wave of force stops, Dalí no longer exists. I am the triumph of conscious life. I exist totally every thousandth of a second. I cannot be sidetracked from this existential battle under pain of death.

Sitting on the pot, yawning, farting, shaving, combing my hair, bathing, I am constantly present and the slightest rumble in my viscera is as essential as the movement of the stars. First of all, because I believe that each stage of our lives, each movement of our beings, each thought partakes of the totality of the universe and its correspondence. Each wave has a corresponding star, blade of grass, breath of wind. Our freedom is a bubble inserted into the great All. A toothache is a tempest somewhere else. Moreover, nothing is more important to Me than Me, otherwise I cease to be and it is by listening to my life that I best serve and nurture my genius.

Finally, body and awareness of being are the best radars of reality – the only ones we know of to tell us that a world exists outside ourselves. It is necessary to make the effort to emerge from the sleep that forces us to exist within the limits of our physical prisons. Our energy must spread its rays as does a sun. We must understand the analogical forms that shape on our inward screen like phosphenes and interpret them so as to decode the secrets of the universe. There is no such thing as chance. Everything corresponds to everything. Intelligence and imagination invent nothing. They remember and decode. Their role is not to reinvent the real but to lessen the distances between things. Genius consists first of all in putting one’s finger or tongue or penis on the truth of forms.

Dalí’s genius lies in having eliminated the appearances of the right angle, the logic, the aestheticism that lock reality into cages and returning to it the organic, malleable, limp forms on which a true network of correspondences can be established. My limp watches, for example, are the symbol of this illustration. I call for all things to be challenged by starting from sensual, carnal, erotic, existential evidence. Let us walk through the world in the image of Dalí! We are at the heart of a labyrinth and can find our way while becoming labyrinths ourselves. By mimesis, my paranoia took on the analytic hardness of Cape Creus granite, my imagination acquired the power of the metamorphoses by wandering along these perpetually changing shores. My delirium battened on the dream-like anguishes and mysteries created by the interplay of winds, rocks, and sea. I chose this place as the privileged center of my world, where the most intimate contact arises between the earth that bore me and the being that I am. Yes, I am Cape Creus and each of my rocks is a lighthouse forming the constellation of my internal navigation. In the center there is the “Great Masturbator”, with his huge nose, immense eye lids, a rock of strangeness the fascination of which still has the power of the Sphinx over me. In painting it, I attempted to tame it; I merely extolled its image and made it mythical, and its personage must now be wandering somewhere deep in dream memories since I set it afloat. For the Great Masturbator belongs to me and I alone know how to celebrate the Mass of his paranoiac passion.

One has to have heard the north wind come over the mountains to play the organ in his granite portals, caressed his craters, bloodied the tips of his needles with one’s feet in order to be able to speak to him and be heard. I alone can raise his closed eyelids so as to understand his gaze into eternity. He is my awareness of being, the radar echo of my self. My whole life is an alchemy that transmutes everything into gold. And as long as I remain anchored to these rocks in the heart of my Catalonia, the source of my delirium of living, inspired by my Catalan genes, I shall never cease transcending all fatalities.

Dalí Must Constantly Be Dalí

There is no urgency for me greater than to become Dalí, that is, the center of the greatest tension of intelligence, sensuality, and power that there is. My lucidity constantly reveals to me the secrets of the world and first of all of myself, from whom all begins. I leave nothing in the shadow of the phantasms that arise, for light alone can provide my delirium with its true strength. Were I to drop vigilance for one second I might be taken unaware by a nightmare monster. I one day discovered I was attracted to Stalin because of the sphinx who was my father, the greatest of my bosom enemies, most magnificent of the tyrants of my unconscious. By a sort of projection I had recomposed the impulses of my unconscious around the image of the Little Father of the Peoples.

From this experience I understood the hold that the “Man of Steel” had over his contemporaries through the Oedipus complex. He appeared as the fatal father whose power one must endure in order to grow in one’s own eyes and whom one venerated in his worst excesses because he embodied fatality. After his death, when his memory was being vomited upon and his statues were being unscrewed while street signs with his name were wrenched off, his carcass wasn’t worth much. I should have bought his mummy. I would have made a Dalínian sarcophagus for it in my garden at Cadaqués. It would have become the center of a phallic, Oedipal, perhaps orgiastic cult, a big game of the kind I like.

But I regret nothing, for as long as I can move I will be able to touch the beautymark that Gala has behind her ear, and I will have my talisman, my strength, my cathedral, my greatest attention.

I have said that Picasso had the same beautymark and my greatest pleasure one day had been to touch both ears at once so as to feel the absolute beautymarks of genius and love, reflections of the internal sums of beings. In my paranoiac-critical cosmogony, the beautymark has un usual importance. I have naturally assimilated all so-called scientific knowledge about it: the fact is, there is none!

I therefore imagine that it is an external sign – as folkways contend – of the internal existence of an unusual structure. A drop of absolute structure set in this body as a diamond is set in its case. Proof that a bit of the al chemist’s elixir is there, that the golden number is present somewhere in the architecture of that head, an angelic spark somewhere in that soul! I find it normal that Gala like Picasso – exceptional beings – should bear the same divine seal in the same place.

My passion for Gala is enhanced by the value of the sacred. This double discovery belongs integrally to the structure of ourselves; it adds the final touch to my internal geometry. Every time I touch Gala’s ear, I am caressing my dead brother (my double), Picasso (who was a kind of Oedipal father) – therefore, my father, and beauty; but Gala is also my mother, since she symbolizes Leda and her divine twins. My index finger against Gala’s beautymark makes me feel I am possessing my whole physical, legal, legitimate, holy, and mythical family. A sort of prodigious, paranoiac-critical mammoth orgasm.

Dalí Wins Out Over Death

My delight in existence is on this level: to shower death with a fireworks of life. I follow death, but it fascinates me by its eternity as does the “Great Masturbator” motionless before the waves. I believe that I love it despite my fear, but I cannot picture myself dying. If something were one day to finish, it could only be in one giant orgasm. A cosmic coming. That thought excites me as it used to transform Lorca who hid his anxiety by mimicking his death and then got up laughing and transfigured. I have only to think back on the picture of my dead brother placed alongside the reproduction of the Velázquez Christ in my parents’ bedroom, and I get the shivers.

I feel surrounded by all the departed I have accumulated during my lifetime. I expect the obsession to make me dizzy. Then I tell myself that each of them is at work for me, forming the humus of my own spirituality, nourishing my genius, and I suddenly become a superb cannibal battening on the angelic corpses of all his dead friends. They all contribute to my glory. My true glory: the one that warrants lasting – not only in memories but as an eternal Dalí.

I believe that all these departed solidify my life like so many buttresses. I take unheard-of strength from them. I have an answer to all challenges, and my ability to overcome all obstacles is prodigious. I am like that
phyllomorpha
laciniata
of my childhood discovered when I was nine on the paranychia of the hills of Cadaqués. A mimetic magician, it disappeared beneath the leaves of the shrubs and made one think they had come alive. And when, to the amazement of the fishermen, I amused myself by setting them down on a table and ordering them to move, and they soon started moving, I was taken for a wizard. No one else had noticed this phenomenon. I gave my pal the phyllomorph the name of the Catalan expression for deception,
morros de cony
(cunt-lips). I admired its prodigious capacity for hiding to the point of invisibility, the better to exist. Then I discovered that the
morros de cony
had on its back a parasite which in turn was covered by a pyramid of eggs chiseled like golden diamonds – themselves probably endowed with even more amazing virtues. I asked a biologist to study whether these polyhedrons were not the expression of the germ of pure life that might, say, be the cure for cancer. This intuition deserves to be checked out.

Paranoiac-critical logic leads me to divine and find the road that, from Cadaqués, an exceptional place, by way of the
morros de cony
and its parasite, revealed to me the golden eggs and the absolute structure in which my genius can see itself reflected in the mirror of the unity of the world. My oeuvre since then merely translates the transcendent mimesis of the
morros de cony
as crystallized and sublimated, as illustration of the paranoiac-critical adventure.

The basic knowledge about the truths of life comes to us by the paths of reason, but what comes by intuitive flashes requires our being available before the world. The state of half-sleep is one of the privileged moments with a value similar to that of the openness of the soul in childhood, in which deep communication can take place. If I were able to remember or photograph the hypnagogic images that run across the screen of my eyelids before I doze off, I am sure I would discover the greatest secret of the universe. A machine ought to be invented which, like contact lenses, would record the input of dreams and allow their retrieval. A successful painting is nothing but a recollection of one of those prodigious mo ments. It includes all the bits most essential to the human being. To look at a painting is to receive messages from the absolute. Fifteen years before Crick and Watson I drew the spiral of the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid, the basis of all life), at the urging of a psychoanalyst, because I had always known what it was, deep in my dreams.

In 1931, I painted
The Persistence Of Memory,
containing all biological knowledge in its intuitive truth. Someone someday will have to wind up my limp watches so they can tell the time of absolute memory, the only true and prophetic time.

A Few Examples Of The Paranoiac-Critical Method

The genius of paranoiac-critical activity is to associate limp paranoia with tough criticism; the gooey with the sharp; force of life
par excellence
with mind; to reach the deepest intuition. Two fundamental examples: the tragic myth of Millet’s
Angelus
and the railway station at Perpignan.

I have always been obsessed by the image of Millet’s
Angelus,
which I discovered in early childhood, and I felt an inexplicable malaise at seeing the peasant man and woman facing each other motionlessly. I looked at the solitary figures, wondering what bound them together.
The Angelus
through the years gradually became the most internally puzzling, the densest work of painting I know.

In June 1932, the image of the picture suddenly appeared in my mind with phenomenal power. I could not stop talking about
The Angelus
with unbelievable constancy and admiration. The picture appeared with urgent insistence not only in what I said but in what I dreamt – although I did not dream the picture itself – but to me it was somehow
different
from everything else I had ever seen, somehow
exclusive,
and it moved me to excessive emotion, quite without logical explanation. It became the source of delirious images not through its intellectual or artistic value but by its psychic significance which had a whole world of associations that sprang up in stantly and took on their own life, revealing the existence of a drama far from the official version of calm and rest that the subject is supposed to mean.

My attitude at this time is induced by that paranoiac power of interpretation, and objective chances increase: I play with some pebbles I picked up on the beach to make objects out of them, attracted by their unusual shapes. I mechanically put two of the stones facing each other, and suddenly their position brings the
Angelus
couple involuntarily back to my mind, to the point that they become unbelievably precisely transformed into each of the characters. The man’s figure seems deformed to me, eroded by the mechanical action of time and tide, and becomes an anxiety-ridden silhouette. I under stand the association to be clearly delirious.

Returning from bathing, I go through a field, trying to avoid the grasshoppers that I have feared since childhood. I can clearly see a fisherman coming in the other direction toward me. Just as we are about to pass each other, I jump to one side to avoid him, but by some sort of awkwardness I bump into him violently, and at that very moment the image of Millet’s
Angelus
flashes through my mind.

In one of my daydreams, going through the Madrid Natural History Museum with Gala at twilight, I see among the shadows thrown by the gigantic insects the terrifying form of the
Angelus
couple. Leaving the museum, I feel an overwhelming urge to bugger Gala in the deserted entryway and do so with wild delight.