Maniac Eyeball (35 page)

Then I am in an unaccustomed dimension, an absolute where only the
quality of God
reigns: a totally irrational universe in which everything is sublime and transcended, and my joy itself is a mystical delirium. There is no longer any vice or virtue, good or evil, flesh or spirit – orgasm becomes ecstasy and fulfillment of mind. I attain a harmony that is located in the very space of the soul. In my own way I doubtless rejoin the path of high tradition which, from knightly love to the Cathars, the Hindu sages, the anchorites of the desert, al lowed the transmutation of sexual energies by provoking the dazzling of the mind. The barriers of desire abruptly broken provoke an ejacu lation of non-consummation. I have then only to pick up my brush and allow it to channel the outpouring of my genius which flows from the sources of the absolute.

I do not seek to be any better understood. My secrets are too grave, and reserved for a Nietzschean élite. The rules of my chess game are one of the disciplines that lead me to pray to my God and to increase my genius.

Are Dalí’s Games All Innocent?

Erotic fantasies take up much of the time I do not devote to painting. My pleasure is in constantly renewing the details, the props, and the people. I have only an embarrassment of riches, taking my pick from the humanarians of New York or Paris where a hundred society women itching with erotomania are always ready to submit to my whims. Not to mention the high-class professional ladies of pleasure, whom I call “Danièles,” and whom I sometimes use for the structuring of my acts. The rule is that the Danièles are never to take any initiative in word or in gesture. Their total passiveness is
de rigueur
during rehearsals. But while my devotees are working at arousing them, during these preparatory exercises, it happens I sometimes do not pass up the opportunity: a bit of voyeurism, skillful handplay, lusting lips may tempt my sap, but never as much as the brutal renunciation of pleasure that I dream of inventing.

Why Dalí Keeps Gala Out Of His Erotic Orgies

Gala is the kind of Puritan the Surrealists were. She really suffers from knowing the details of my erotic Masses; and I wish to cause her no pain, not even the slightest. She is not jealous, merely sensitive. And I have to make an effort to overcome my tendency to speak contentedly about my vices.

With her, I never make more than allusions. Our love remains the symbol of passion, purity, self-forgetfulness. Eroticism is for others. Gala and I are but one. The screen of my love’s magic circle isolates her from any erotic fantasies. And moreover I only love her the more for her intransigence and purity. A great love, like a great painting, can be successful only if rid of all overflow and all distracting elements. When I paint, a part of my self is happily elsewhere. I hear a conversation, dream of an invention, my memory speaks to me, and between eye and arm the way is absolutely clear. The picture takes shape according to its own laws born of an automatic reflex, but my erotic imagination is indispensable to my health. My work is but the setting of my erotic theater of which Gala is the soul.

Eroticism is a way of setting up a barrier against the sense of death and the anxiety of time-space. I feel a Dionysiac rage to celebrate life but refuse to be the dupe of the senses, the obsessions, the instincts of life. I am determined to try all of its possibilities without letting myself be conditioned by appearances. To fulfill its eroticism would be a way of making myself submissive. Toying with it and going beyond it is a strength I turn to advantage.

Fifteen years before Crick and Watson, I drew the spiral of deoxyribonucleic acid through the genius of my intuition, which shows I am in tune with universal structures; likewise, I know that eroticism is the generating principle that animates molecules, and it is my con viction that, in celebrating eroticism in disregard of all traditional morals and beyond all sexual appetites, I am serving the principle of all life by bringing together creature and creation. And when the atavistic thirsts arise within me and I transcend them, that is when I am in the epicenter of my love for Gala.

I discovered the great unity of the universe. My love for Gala is the spiritual energy that brings together all possible Dalís and all the cells of my being in one single Dalí just as deoxyribonucleic acid is the memory of God in the service of every element in the world.

Eroticism, like hallucinogenic drugs, like atomic sciences, like Gaudí’s Gothic architecture, like my love of gold, comes down to a common denominator: God is present in everything. There is the same magic at the heart of things and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God and the whole universe tends toward the perfection of the human being. For having understood this, divine justice helps me in the shape of objective bits of luck in my most everyday gestures

I discovered the laws of painting when I understood that the human mind evolved in function of its ideas about space. To Euclid, the plane, the point were idealized objects having roughly the same consistency as cold tapioca.

Descartes, on the other hand, manufactured a kind of bare cupboard with three theoretical dimensions in which Newton placed a dream apple. Einstein, with relativity, uncovering to us the fourth dimension of time, gave us the means to a delirium in which we could meet God. Rationalism went right back to its place.

All mystiques, whether religious, nuclear, hallucinogenic, or of gold, have the same divine heaven as my painting celebrates, which found its expression in the
Sacrament Of The Last Supper
that I did for the famous collector Chester Dale, who donated it to the National Gallery in Washington. In that picture can be read all of my cosmogony: the union of time and space which is the secret of God.

“TO A PAINTER, EVERY BRUSHSTROKE IS THE EQUIVALENT OF A TRAGEDY EXPERIENCED.”
 

[1] In Dalí’s sculpture, Dante’s laurels are made of small spoons.

Chapter Sixteen: How Dalí Invents A Paranoiac-Critical City

I am a pig. A divine pig brought up in society and “possessed by desire” – which is the Catalan translation of my name.

Human beings have little effect on me, but I need to make use of them, and, snout foremost, I charge, sneak, gluttonously swallow anything before me while perfectly knowing which cesspool to avoid. I have paranoiac-critical printed circuits that act as antennae and my delirium is one of pure lucidity.

The best of all worlds to me is the one in which I can wallow with the greatest delectation, the one that has the finest garbage heaps and the most perfected bowels of mental constipation – through press, TV, and radio. But my veneration goes to hereditary monarchic society in which the most rigorous moral order reigns, on condition of course that I be its great man. Spain, which awarded me its Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic, is entitled to all my gratitude – I know no gratitude, nor admiration nor feeling, other than for Gala, but Gala loves Spain which is where she has her castle and I love Gala, so the syllogism is implacable.

Monarchy is the father recognized and celebrated, the dome of God upheld by the pillars of wisdom, it is the order that covers all disorders, the individual in his spiritual family.

All regimes merely ape the monarchic order with more or less demagoguery and efficiency. They are all hierarchical monarchy in disguise. They are decoys used to introduce into people’s mental circuits the impulses orders, and norms that they would otherwise not accept. But, make no mistake about it, monarchic order runs the world. I would even say a gerontocratic monarchic order.

There was a time when Mao in China, Stalin in the USSR, Eisenhower in the U.S., Churchill in England, De Gaulle in France, De Gasperi in Italy were masters. They were all over seventy! The ages since then have changed, but not the methods. Political hypocrisy is on the wane. Peoples get used to realities. They end up by seeing that nothing except electricity, running water, and penicillin, has truly changed since the Bourbons. Not even in the various countries. That is why I expect to see Rumania with a king again, Russia with a czar, and China an emperor. America has no tradition, which is too bad. With all of its kinglets of oil, crime, and deep-frozen foods, the vassals are ready for a suzerain.

One or two revolutions will allow us to see the light of day some time soon. The monarchic order, like Eros, is established in deoxyribo nucleic acid. Our Brownian motion cannot change that. There is an immanence that brings us back to the truth. Who the king is hardly matters; what counts is the order.

Take Monsieur Le Corbusier’s abject architecture, the Swiss heaviness of which gave indigestion to thousands of young architects and artists. For a time, it was possible to believe that it would rule over the city of men. But how now? The weight of his cement dragged him down (Le Corbusier died of drowning), and his work, which had been intended as “functional”, turned out merely to be simple-minded. Now people just yawn at it. Even the big complexes that were the basis for his architectural vision have been abandoned in favor of “individual folly”. The world has had enough of logic and rationalism as conceived by Swiss schoolmasters. I have nothing against Swiss bankers or cuckoos, on the contrary, but the country ought to stop exporting architects!

Gaudí, the admirable, creates beauty which is the sum-total conscience of our perversions. Gaudí, Catholic, apostolic and Roman, knew how to translate into stone his religious vision which “jibes” with the people’s soul. Look at the expiatory temple of the Sagrada Familia, the most perfect iconography of folk Christianity and piety, not only because Gaudí immobilized in the mineral a blade of grass, a flock of fowls, and even the sheepherder on whom he modeled Judas – in other words, the world and the people – with naive truthfulness, but because he exactly translated and extolled the remorse of con science, that great Christian concern, on which the whole of civilized intelligence of the twentieth century is based, as is everything great that has been accomplished in the past two thousand years. Take away the remorse of conscience, society will crumble! It is the fuel and the motor. It explains our morality and our subconscious, our vocabulary and our silences, our vices and virtues, our ambitions, dreams, ideas, and faiths.

An architecture must make its time explicit and especially dress it up. Monsieur Le Corbusier’s geometry is a small bit of home work by a schoolboy trying to solve theoretical problems, not the ex pression of the vital needs of a period.

We have to return to sense. Gaudí’s fingers were at the tip of his brain. I believe in erogenous architecture, not ideological. I be lieve in polychromatic architecture that satisfies the eye as does a mosaic. I believe in an architecture that takes sound values into ac count, I mean the harmony of the spheres. Total visual decoration must indeed take into account harmonic resonances. I believe in an architecture of bad taste, to the extent that good taste is castrated!

In 1925, I met M. Le Corbusier, who told me that Gaudí was the shame of Barcelona and with Swiss oafishness (I have nothing against Swiss bankers) asked my ideas about the future of architecture. I told him I thought it would be “soft and hairy”. I have not changed my mind and am just waiting for technique to catch up with me, for I am still a little ahead of it. In the interim, M. Le Corbusier confessed his errors about Gaudí, but he betrayed his own soul!

The divine pig that I am – did I forget to mention it? – has a rhinoceros horn. Truth of the matter, I am a rhinoceros, with mustache. In 1954, in the midst of my mystical phase, I discovered that for half a century I had been painting rhinoceros horns without even knowing it. I attach great importance to such attributes as beard and hair, all hairiness in general which always carries essential social significance. Hirsuteness, even before Samson, was identified as a sign of virility and strength, and my mustaches are the fangs of my personality. In popular parlance,
avoir un poil
sur la langue
(to have a hair on one’s tongue) means “somesing is in ze way”, whereas a hair on the soup designates unwelcome out-of-placeness. The slang
c’est au
poil
(it’s hair-perfect) means a situation or thing is exactly right, and many is the mechanic who has thus been heard describing a piece of precision work as fitting “down to a cunt hair”.

To have a mustache, a beard, long hair, to me seem to be essential conduct in a self-respecting society. They should even be a sign of social standing – with a special tax for fraudulent wearing by the classes sporting them without the right. Servants, in the nineteenth century, were forbidden to grow mustaches, which were the exclusive preserve of masters. Only after the 1914-1918 war, when trench soldiers became known as
poilus
(hairy ones), did house servants acquire the right to be facially hirsute. Indeed, there is no reason to make a display of one’s beard or hair as aggressive antennae if one has nothing to say, or protect, or go after. My mustache heretofore had hidden my (rhinoceros) tooth. I had just finished doing
Dalí’s Moustache
with Philippe Halsman, and was in New York for the retrospective exhibit of my two hundred
Divine Comedy
watercolors, when, going through Paris, I had happened on Vermeer of Delft’s
Lace Maker,
and discovered the importance of the rhinoceros horn.