Maniac Eyeball (34 page)

I decide to paint the
Mystical Madonna,
later to be known as the
Madone de Port Lligat
(
Virgin Of Port Lligat
), which Pope Pius XII was to admire. But first I must get away from any religious formulation. The Renaissance cupolas that corresponded to the cupola of heaven in a flash of genius appear to me as the receptacles of con science. I go back to that theme in
Tête Raphaelesque Eclatée
(
Raphaelesque
Head Exploded
) and express a transcendent meta physical message in my
Mystic Manifesto.

I try to restrict myself to a monk’s work, and, when the Italian government commissions me to illustrate
The
Divine Comedy,
I dedicate myself to that work, which is to include two hundred watercolors. I start by making a bust of Dante to spoon up all the soup of my vision.[1] I have already related how human stupidity kept me from giving Italy the benefit of this Benedictine work. No matter; the work blossomed out in its sublime grandeur and it was enormously successful. The Rome exhibit in 1954 was a major event.

Works were being born from my brush in the lushest of mystical ecstasies. The
Christ Of St. John Of The Cross
was its apotheosis. I created
The Royal Heart
of gold and rubies in memory of my mother, who used to ask, “Heart, what do you desire?” as she bent over me. I asked Gala that question in turn and she answered, with that assurance always prescient of my own most secret desires: “A ruby heart that beats.” I gave it to her with outstretched hands. Then, for her, I painted
Galatéa Aux Spheres
(
Galatea With Spheres
), synthesizing all of my new mystical science of painting and my technique of quantified realism, in which each element of the picture exists by itself but contributes to creating a cosmogonic whole that transcends it. The face of my beloved Gala was born of the universal Brownian whirlpool, as the sacred image of the divine.

Crazy For God, Was Dalí Still Interested In Mankind?

Back in Paris, I decided to become a little less holy. Coco Chanel was in the midst of a sensational comeback. Her sayings were being repeated everywhere:

“Where should a girl perfume herself, mademoiselle?”

“Anywhere that she may be kissed.”

“Fashion is architecture: all a matter of proportions.”

“In fashion, only imbeciles never change their minds.”

“Be irreplaceable by being different.”

Marie-Hélène, the Baroness Guy de Rothschild, was sponsoring her return. Coco Chanel had made her a sensational ball gown out of a red taffeta curtain. Everyone congratulated her. Coco Chanel was back in business at the same old stand, intending to industrialize fashions. She was seventy-one years old. The decor had not changed since 1925; Coromandel screen and mirrors, a hundred and thirty models, according to the columnists. “A flop,” was the least unkind thing said about it.

In the U.S. she was feted. She Chanelized America with her tailored suits and No. 5, plugged by Marilyn Monroe (“What do you wear in the morning, miss?” “A skirt and sweater.” “In the afternoon?” “A different skirt.” “In the evening?” “The same thing, made of silk.” “And at night?” “Five drops of Chanel Number Five.”). No. 5 was to Coco Chanel what my mustache was to my character. We met again as two legendary companions, and she told me all the latest Parisian gossip.

Helena Rubinstein had come in with a maid who never left her side, and who was, as everyone in the rag business knew, a very talented copyist. She looked over all the collections, while the maid mentally made notes of all the hems and sleeves. She stole ideas shamelessly, buying only those gowns that could not possibly be plagiarized.

“Sometimes we got part of the theft back by selling her two numbers,” Coco Chanel said. “But after all she was just an American taking back her share of the Marshall Plan.” Helena’s big disappointment was Picasso. For years, she had wanted him to paint her portrait. Her friend Marie Cuttoli one day informed her that he had agreed to do it. She came over from New York, all excited. For days, she kept phoning; Picasso never took the calls. He was asleep, or out, at the beach, playing boules, or up in Paris... Actually, it was Picasso himself on the wire, faking his voice.

So one morning Helena Rubinstein just presented herself at La Californie, overlooking Cannes. And got in. That day, among the guests was Gary Cooper, with whom Picasso was playing cowboy. They finally made a date for the next afternoon at six, and for days on end she posed for Picasso. One evening, he told her, “That’s enough.” He had done over forty sketches of Helena, but not one complete: just her hands, her neck, her mouth, her chin, her eyes. But never together.

“What about my portrait?” Helena asked.

“It will have to be a posthumous work,” was Picasso’s reply.

“Damn that devil,” Helena Rubinstein would say after that whenever she was asked about the portrait.

And she was furious to learn that Picasso had added, “I only do portraits of the women I sleep with.”

What Relation Does Dalí See Between Eros And God?

I go deeper into mysticism through erotic delirium; perversely polymorphic, I translate each new awareness into gluttony. Eroticism is a royal road of the soul of God. It flows in the molecular structures. To me, it is the foundation of heterosexual urges. In exploring my desire, I explore my life.

I start to write my play,
Le Délire Erotique Mystique
(
Mystical Erotic Delirium
), which was to become
Tragédie
Erotique
(
Erotic Tragedy
), and can never be performed except for Dalínian initiates.

I also write
The Divine Marquis’ 120 Days Of Sodom
Upside Down,
as a tribute to the Marquis de Sade. And I paint
The Two Adolescents
and
La Jeune Vierge Autosodomisée
Par Les Cornes de sa Propre Chasteté
(
Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized By The Horns Of Her Own Chastity
).

Painting, like love, comes in through the eyes, and goes out through the short hairs of the brush. My erotic delirium leads me to extol to paroxysm my sodomizing tendencies. The long masturbatory discipline that for more than half a century has led me to the creation of a veritable cult of my own cock which I never ceased celebrating in all my work and actions, essentially notable for their aggressively phallic value, such onanistic ascesis could find its full flowering only in mythical sodomization.

I surround myself with the most sublime arses imaginable. I get the most beautiful women to strip. I always say that through the arse the greatest of mysteries can be plumbed, and I even succeeded in discovering a deep analogy between the buttocks of one of my lady guests at Port Lligat who had stripped for me and the universal continuum that I have named the four-buttocked continuum. I think up the most superb and wildest positions so as to keep myself in a state of paroxysmic erection and my happiness is complete when I am able to be present at a total sodomization.

To me, the essential is what the eye sees. I succeeded in persuading a young Spanish woman to allow herself to be sodomized by a lad of my acquaintance who was courting her. A girl friend and I for witnesses are important in my theater and act as accountants – settled down on a sofa in the bedroom. The two partners entered from opposite doors, she naked under her dressing gown, he without a stitch on and his tool at the ready. Immediately, he turned her over and without delay started going about his penis-tration. It was inside so fast that I got up to go over and inspect, to make sure they were not just putting on an act. I hate to be taken for a ride.

At that point, she exclaimed ecstatically, “It’s for Dalí, for the divine one!” This statement rubbed me the wrong way, for I immediately sensed how phony it was, the more so since the young stud was wildly furrowing her fundament and she was groaning with delight. So I demanded, “Admit that you adore that thing that’s up your arse!” And her play-acting stopped. Without further dissimulation, “Oh, yes,” she shouted, “yes, I adore it!”

And then I witnessed the most amazing thing one could dream of as an expression of phenomenal beauty: the young woman held solidly by the hips and screwed on to the man raised both her arms which she threw back, arching out her splendid bosom. Meanwhile her head fell back and her lips rose to meet those of the male who was making her come in such pain. It was a sort of perfection in gesture that turned the animal couple into a vegetable liana, thus providing an angelic vision. I have never been able to tell this story without each time having the wonderful feeling that I had violated the secret of perfect beauty. A miracle that I have never again found in such fullness.

I asked the partners to do it over again, but satiation, and perhaps an edge of nerves, kept them from reliving the grace. They did their best in trying to satisfy me, but finally collapsed on the bed. He who tries to play the angel, plays the brute!

I have deep appreciation for erotic strategy. Nothing is better than the conception, and to bring a couple to ecstasy fulfills me entirely. Everything is in the imagining and the regulating of the conjoining. I usually choose young, good-looking partners, in love with each other – or able to simulate it at least, for without passion coming through their coupling is a mere clinical experiment – and enjoy using the end of my cane switch to regulate each detail of the action: hand gestures, caresses, finger movements, stops, starts, penetration, rhythm, even including positions of bodies, legs, hair. I become the director of a play with two characters whom I inflame with desire and lead to ecstasy at will; and in their panting, their breathing, their whispering, their exhaustion, the outbursting of their joy, I seek an image of total life, as I bend over the couple, attentive to their every moan, to try to catch the secret of the shared paranoia we call love’s desire.

Which, of course, has nothing to do with my love for Gala, who remains to me unique, the only one in whom I can come by extolling the most sublime images of my architecture of beauty. She is my intimate truth, my
double
and my
one.

My eroticism is a game with precise rules and a discipline as rigorous as an initiation rite. The first thing is to select a series of beings who are among the chosen for their beauty and their sexual proclivities, then, having made the selection, to form them mentally into couples who do not know each other, bring them together through a network of contacts, dialogue, and situations that little by little will surprise, seduce, and convince the actors to submit to the rules of the Dalínian game, of which of course they will never appreciate the subtleties but in which they will be consenting and submissive slaves. My ambition is to make a lesbian out of an
enfant de Marie
and a pederast out of a cross-country runner. I have a knack for arousing curiosities, creating legends, establishing unexpected connections. This erotic diplomacy delights me up to the moment when, having aroused the passion of the two beings, I take them in my test tube and dip them into my basin, so that, bodies naked and desires exacer bated, they deliver themselves for my delectation to the pleasure of caresses orchestrated by the genius of Dalínian authority.

The height is reached when I have woven such a network of complicities around the couple, all of whose resistances have been wiped out or broken down, that they become the center of a sort of Mass, as in magical anticipation. I of course remain the one fixed point and in this spiderweb can entangle any of them I wish, when ever I wish, the anticipating being so acute for all of them, and my will emerges as the determining element of their metamorphosis. That is when I conceive a truly erotic ceremony.

It happens at such a period that I spend quite considerable sums in dinners, gifts, costumes, parties to achieve my own ends and subjugate and fascinate my actors. The preparations sometimes take months, as I put all the pieces of my jigsaw carefully together. I invent the most involved perversions, impose my most extreme whims on them, convince each of the participants to do the maddest things, and extract the fullest admissions from them. I make each one go through the imagining of his behavior in every last detail: you lie down like this, let yourself be stroked like that, with your legs at such and such an angle, the whole thing to start by the insertion of a straw that will be lighted and which you will withstand with out blinking until the last possible limit...

When each of them is thus perverted, converted, subjugated, exalted, I one day bring the whole Eros Battalion together in a place carefully conceived to raise their instincts and desires to the utmost paroxysm: mirrors, padding, light, rugs, suggestive scents. I insist that the whole rite take place with absolute precision, in a hierarchical rigor that determines not only the movements, but the positions, the attitudes, noises, clothes, the last detail of each operation. When I finally make my entrance, everything must be in place, under the management of a master of ceremonies, whom I call the notary – in memory of my father.

My rod is now stiff inside my trousers with a wonderful hard-on that swells the glans, and my balls become like two little metal bearings. I feel that the fantastic pleasure of fulfillment is about to possess me. Everyone is in his place, motionless, awaiting the signal that will start the event unfolding, toward which all of their wills have been tautened.

I am the omega point toward which the whole panoply of desires converges. And suddenly – inexorably – there is always one there who has gone against my inflexible law, some detail that abruptly refutes the regulation of the whole, a discordant note marring the harmony – or else I am the one who discovers like a catastrophe the item that makes it impossible to go through with my erotic Mass. And with one word I smash the complicity of all of them, wiping out all those efforts, sabotaging my own work. Everyone freezes, shocked, petrified in the horror of my displeasure, as if thunderstruck at having betrayed me. At the very moment when delirious, orgiastic life crowned by ecstasy was about to break out, the high priest that I am declares the holy group dissolved. Their blood running cold, wiped out, broken, everyone leaves, and I fall to my knees overwhelmed with joy, weeping over this sublime setback. All of my Catalan soul is whipped to exaltation by the absurd and magnificent gesture of renunciation. The intended, calculated setback occurring as the logical conclusion of lengthy research is the solemn
proof
of my will. The supreme reward to my pride, my outsizedness! The gesture of going beyond the simple consummation of the senses...