Maniac Eyeball (24 page)

Some time later, motoring through a street in the little Port of La Selva, near Cadaqués, I see a window display of a full coffee service, each piece decorated with Millet’s
Angelus.
Enough to drive a person wild! Of course, statistics could show that there was a good chance I would come across such a set in a window, considering the frequency of reproduction of
The Angelus,
which has always exerted a fascination of virtually epidemic proportions. And one might ask how such a picture, which appears to be quiet, insipid, insignificant, and conventional, could so grip imaginations.

Just what does this picture try to say, that it should so be heard? What is there behind the appearances? What is the meaning of that man and woman, standing, motionless, facing each other, stuck there without a gesture, or a word, or even a movement indicated?

When I look at Millet’s
Angelus,
the first recollections to come out of my store of memory bring back the twilight and elegiac feel ing of childhood: the evensong of the locusts, the last daydreams at nightfall, the poetic declamations I recited at fourteen. What I might call the atavism of twilight, imbued with a feeling of the end of the world.

The woman with her hands together, in the same position as those on the postcards praying to St. Catherine to “send me a husband,” strikes me as symbolic of the exhibitionistic eroticism of a virgin in waiting – the position before the act of aggression, such as that of the praying mantis prior to her cruel coupling with the male that will end in his death.

As for the man, he is riveted to the spot, as if hypnotized by the mother – wiped out. To me, indeed, he stands in the position of a son rather than a father. It may be noted that in Freudian vocabulary his hat stands for the sexual arousal being hidden to show his attitude of shame over his virility.

The erotic significance of the wheelbarrow is as undeniable as that of the pitchfork driven into the plowed earth. The two sacks set in the barrow also have a meaning, as is evidenced by the general connotation given the popular postcard with the legend
Baisers en Brouette
(
Kisses In
Barrowfuls
). Regarding the fetishistic aspect of the wheelbarrow, I noted the fixation of the illustrious Postman Cheval, who also accorded a choice place in his ideal, delirious, and poetical pantheon to the wheelbarrow, having it speak thus:

“Now his work is at an end,

He enjoys his rest with grace;

And I, his humble little friend,

Am given a most honored place.”
[1]

I collected materials on peasant eroticism in view of a film to be entitled,
La Brouette de Chair
(
The Flesh
Wheelbarrow
). My intention was to show that peasants worn down by overwork eroticize their work instruments, and that the wheelbarrow was the very type of symbolic instrument
par excellence
. In a nineteenth-century Amer ican folk picture there is a woman holding her husband’s feet in her hands and pushing him ahead like a wheelbarrow, he holding a wheel between his two hands, while his rigid sex organ becoming an actual tool plows the earth and his balls appear as two cacti. The interpretation is obvious: as the Egyptian phallic mother with her vulture’s head, the American mother – here also representing the life-giving earth – gets fertilized, at the same time castrating her husband whose virility is reduced to no more than a reproductive role. In that picture, a happy sun looks down on the scene – the sun of absolute matriarchy.

That same summer, 1932, a madman in a fit punched a hole in Millet’s
Angelus
at the Louvre, after having long hesitated, he later stated, between it and Watteau’s
Embarkation For Cythera
or the
Mona Lisa
. (Freud’s demonstration of the incestuous attraction of that Da Vinci work is well known.)

I expressed my ideas and gave a detailed analysis of the whole set of delirious phenomena evoked by the tragic myth of
The Angelus,
but mislaid the manuscript at the time the Germans over-ran France in 1940. Twenty-two years later, I came across it again. In the interim I had found out that Millet had originally painted between the characters of father and mother a coffin that held their son’s corpse, but had later altered the picture for fear it might appear overly morbid.

In 1963, I requested Mme. Hours, who runs the Louvre laboratory, to have the painting X-rayed. The radiograph did bring out a geometrical shape at the mother’s feet. All became clear. My paranoiac-critical genius had sensed the main point. No other interpretation could account with such truth for the spell cast by
The Angelus,
and even if my vision was but mental intuition, this inter pretation was all the more sublime – as Gala was to say!

That study is one of the fundamental documents of the Dalí cosmogony. It is as important as the Perpignan railway station. Every year, when we leave Cadaqués for Paris, our old Cadillac takes us to the station at Perpignan, where I wait in the waiting room while Gala checks the baggage. There are people all around me. I feel as if isolated and that is when I have an instant of absolute pleasure. I have just left my Cadaqués studio and its stimulating climate of creative work in which I live in a state of perpetual alert, and am on my way to Paris with its gastronomical feasts, its erotic celebrations. I sit on my bench as at a border crossing, I feel myself available, and intense jubilation invades me, a monumental joyfulness. At this precise moment I visualize the painting I ought to have painted during the summer. I buy a scientific journal at the news-stand and read that, in operating for glaucoma, the eye anesthetic used is a “diffusion factor” made from wasp venom. I immediately recall that one day a wasp fell into my paint-pan and the fusion of the color pigments took place with miraculous flexibility and ductility. I wonder whether wasp venom could not be used as a color solvent. Since then, based on my intuition, I have had such a medium made and it is one of the secrets of my art of painting.

So, for years, the station at Perpignan has been a source of enlightenment, a cathedral of intuition to me. I long thought it was because genius needed a trivial place in which to assert itself. The Parthenon and Niagara Falls are too overwhelming! The absurd and the anodyne are better handmaidens to enlightenment. The memories of the unconscious let their passages get through only when the mind is vacant, and toilet seats are a high place for the state of grace, quite as good as the Perpignan station.

Then, in 1966, I found out that it was at Perpignan that the measure of earth, the standard meter, had been established. On a straight line twelve kilometers long, from Vernet to the outskirts of Salses, north of Perpignan, Pierre Méchain, in 1796, set the bases for the triangulation that led to determining the standard meter. I understood the fundamental metaphysical significance of this re search. The standard meter is not only one ten-millionth of a quarter of the earth’s meridian, it is also the formula for the density of God, and this place appears to me privileged among all places. The Perpignan station becomes a truly high place.

I then took a taxi and went slowly around the station, inspecting it as if it were some esoteric monument of which I had to find the meanings. The setting sun was ablaze and the flood of its light created flames on the facades and especially the central skylight of the station that seemed to become the center of an atomic explosion. About the station I could see a radiating aura in a perfect circle: the metal trolley cables of the streetcars that ringed the edifice and gave it a crown of glinting light. My penis sprang to attention with joy and ecstasy: I had seized truth, I was living it. Everything became overpoweringly evident. The center of the universe was there before me.

Physical, mathematical, and astronomical sciences are split over whether the world is finite or infinite. No one has yet answered that key question. At that moment, I knew that the world is limited on
only one side,
which is its axis. I cannot put into words the vision and certainty I had, but from that moment on there was no longer any doubt in me: cosmic space began in front of the facade of the Perpignan station in the area marked off by the circle of cables, and the universe ended at the same point.

This very limit was the proof of the existence of the universe; it showed that the hypothesis of permanent expansion was erroneous. Non-Euclidian space stopped at the point where it met the dimension of the mind. This limit could not be defined but could appear only as a vision, a snapshot of absolute time-space that illuminated me viscerally. I decided to have the Perpignan station cast in gold as a tran scendent image of truth. To me it is the laboratory in which the absolute values of the universe can be followed, and I inspect it with passion. Under the impulse of my paranoiac delirium, I have had attentive analyses of the monument made. All its measurements have been noted. Not only the general dimensions, but those of windows, doors, ticket windows, benches. I have had the posters photographed, and the timetables which in enlargement show me all the shapes of objective chance, and starting from my delirious impressions I will be able to set up a kind of seismographic system of the relationships of the universe with itself. The point is to bring total truth out of this microcosm of the universe. I am persuaded that the bible of the world is symbolically represented in the Perpignan station; I know this in my innermost self: all that is needed is to find the decoding key.

Each year supplies me with new proofs. Do you know that the only drawing Sigmund Freud ever made is a sketch of his student bedroom, which is exactly the same shape as the waiting room of the Perpignan station?

I am like the alchemist trying to apprehend the non-measurable through the measurable, and the power of my paranoiac-critical delirium will see me through. A meter is now defined as equal to 1,650,753.73 times the wavelength in a vacuum of the difference be tween the levels of 2 P 10 and 5 D 5 of a krypton atom, or the orange red radiation of krypton 86, but this precision to the thousandth of a micron is insignificant compared to my ability to conceive that the
x
of the radiations of krypton is an equivalence of God, whose temple is the quite derisory, anodyne Perpignan station, so made in order that none may suspect its importance, but which I have now designated as the focal point of all universality of thought.

Dalí, who was capable of conceiving the discontinuity of mat ter by watching flies fly and understanding the significance of their Brownian movements, who drew the structures of life, who gave the closest equivalencies of time-space in his limp watches, now reveals to the world the most essential of knowledge with the revelation that the world is limited on only one side. Dalí is a radar of the mind of greatest genius, whose painting is only a sign, and whose delirium is more holy than the ramblings of the antique Pythoness. Paranoiac-criticism will illumine the world.

“MY LIFE IS SETTLING BACK INTO A KIND OF CLASSICISM... I THINK I SHALL SUCCEED IN BEING A
CLASSICIST WHILE STILL REMAINING PARANOIAC.”
 

[1] Ferdinand Cheval (that is, Horse, in French) (1879-1912), a mail carrier by occupation, lived at Hauterives (Drôme) and with his own hands built an Ideal Palace. He wrote: “One day I stumbled on a stone and almost fell. This stone was of such a strange shape that I picked it up and carried it home, [thinking], if nature turns sculptor, then I can be bricklayer and architect...”

Chapter Eleven: How To Make Money

I believe in the humanism of the arsehole. Neither shit nor death should be hidden, and gold exalts and transcends man.

Gold has always seemed to me of hallucinating beauty. As a child I liked gold-braided costumes and for a long time I had a king’s cape with a gold crown that inspired many of my daydreams and characters. In the millennial memory of peoples, gold is connected with the sacred. Priests always associated it with divine power. But more than its rarity, its quality is in its essence itself, the perfection of which is the expression of the cosmic spirit. Gold is endowed with a fascinating magic, like that of purity and transcendence. I believe that gold is the most beautiful image of the soul. If I were not careful, I could easily succumb to the temptation of the golden metal that sub jugates me and paralyzes even the highest faculties of my paranoia c-critical system. For instance, one day an American publisher came to offer me a deal.1 I listened with proper detachment, baiting him on, tormenting him by turning down what I had accepted just a moment before, putting the irons to him, and finally getting him where I wanted him: he raised his offer 100 percent. I looked over at my chamberlain, Captain Moore, to savor the victory. He nodded to show his admiration. And then suddenly, the publisher opened his black case, removed a slipcover, and I saw the bright glint of four beautiful gold ingots. The publisher raised the tray they were on and four more bars of the pure metal met my eyes. My hands, naturally, went forward and I grabbed two blocks of the gold. I voluptuously let the light shine on them.

“They’re yours,” the publisher said. “I was told, master, that you like gold and I thought you’d enjoy being paid with it.”

I held on to my two ingots and nothing in the world could have gotten them away from me. In my excitement I pressed the cheeks of my arse together as if I had the colic.

“You can touch the others, too,” he said. “They’re all yours.” In any other circumstance, the genius of my critical mind would have immediately reacted, but I was in a real state of euphoria at the idea that all that shiny gold was mine.

I balanced one ingot on each of my knees and would have tried one on my head if I had not been afraid that it would fall. The publisher took out his fountain pen so we could sign the contract, when Captain Moore coughed discreetly.

“Before you sign, divine master, perhaps you will permit me to weigh those bars of gold. A simple precaution that my position in your employ requires,” he said with an Irish smile.