Maniac Eyeball (36 page)

How Dalí Established A Connection Among A Crust Of Bread, The Lace Maker, And A Rhinoceros

At age nine, in Figueras, pretending to be asleep, head down on my forearms leaning on the dining-room table, I tried to capture the interest of a young servant girl. That was when I experienced a strange pleasure: the crumbs of bread crust that were scattered on the tablecloth dug painfully into my elbows, but I could not register the pain if I were to remain motionless while the girl with the crackling skirts moved about me. At that moment was heard the song of a nightingale that moved me to tears. The pain and joy forever joined in my memory crystallized little by little in the shape of a delirious obsession with the theme of Vermeer’s
Lace Maker,
a reproduction of which hung in my father’s office, as I had sometimes furtively ob served through the door left ajar. From that moment on, moreover, I was to note that many emotions reached me through the elbow which was my Achilles’ heel (so that some day people will say: Dalí’s elbow).

Thus, in May 1955, having taken a knock on the elbow, I immediately had a sharp visualization of
The Lace
Maker.
And I asked the curator of the Louvre to allow me to make a copy of that Vermeer. With a great display of precautions, the painting was brought into a small room and I set up my easel in the presence of the staff of curators and a few friends. I observed with the most careful attention the highly upsetting picture, the excitement center of which is a needle that cannot be seen and is not actually painted but only suggested. It seemed to me that my elbow was hurting again and that the needle was stuck in it, giving me the feeling of experiencing a paradisiac sensation. Behind the appearance of the painting, calm, peaceful, the image of quiet happiness, was hidden a tremendous ultra-piercing energy that to me had the value of the antiproton that had just been discovered.

I went close to the picture and with my cane took a few measurements to check out an intuition. The curators, not daring to interfere, exchanged fearful looks at my savage approach to a work that they considered a unique treasure.

Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, I laid in on my canvas a set of rhinoceros horns in place of the lace maker I was supposed to copy. Their apprehension turned to stupefaction. I myself did not exactly understand the meaning of what I had done.

All summer, I worked on that
Lace Maker
problem and finally realized that my intuition had gone straight to the logarithmic curves of the picture, which corresponded exactly to rhinoceros horns. At Port Lligat, I got collections of rhinoceros horns which, in my reveries, started moving around like constellations, first forming amalgamated bread crusts but then little by little settling into a corpuscular ballet that reconstructed
The Lace Maker.
I got some fifty odd reproductions of the Vermeer, that I hung all over my olive grove; and even on the beach, when I went bathing with Gala, I took
The Lace Maker
along.

Indulging my obsession to satiation, I continued my research on the morphology of the sunflower dear to Leonardo da Vinci and it was then that I discovered that sunflower spirals have exactly the curve of rhinoceros horns.

By an even greater miracle, the virtually logarithmic curves of the sunflower soon in my eyes outlined the head dress of the lace maker, her cushion, as in a divisionist painting by Seurat. I was dazzled. The rhinoceros horn became a perfect example, nature-made, of logarithmic spirals, and its bestiality stood in opposition to the grace of the lace maker, that expression of chastity, purity, and absolute monarchy.

The lace maker now appeared as the pure symbol of that maximum of spiritual strength that the rhinoceros carried at the end of his nose. Crushed rhinoceros horn is a powerful aphrodisiac. Beauty and Eros are one. The admirable animal not only has a cock standing on the end of his nose, but his coitus lasts for almost an hour. He carries the Dalínian rite so far as to lay out his territory by depositing his excrements as benchmarks of his property. That much refinement deserves respect and attentive observation.

With this criterion I analyzed Gala’s face, and reconstructed it with eighteen rhinoceros horns; likewise a Raphael painting; but since everything is in everything and the opposite as well, by observing the rhinoceros’ arse I discovered it looked exactly like a closed sun flower. So this animal had the finest of curves on his nose, and on his arse a galaxy of perfect arcs. Suddenly I came across a photograph of a cauliflower. Nothing would do but that I get a mountain of cauliflowers to check on whether the lace maker was also in their spirals. She was. My mystical strength and my paranoiac-critical vision were such that all the truths subjacent to the world now appeared clearly to me.

Everyone cannot have my sensitive elbow. Everyone cannot be Dalínian, but each can take advantage of Dalínian discipline and turn clear eyes on reality. The social code of a perfect city is based on ecstasies that alone can transform desire, pleasure, anxiety, any opinion, any judgment into something sensational halfway between dream and reality.

The repugnant thus becomes desirable, affection turns to cruelty, ugliness into beauty, faults into qualities, and qualities can end up being dire wretchedness. So ecstatic a world can be known only in imagination. Become ecstatic so as to experience it!

I dream of a city full of Surrealist objects inducing ecstasy in a Gaudínian architecture. The Surrealist object according to the definition I have given of it historically is impractical. It has no use but to take a person in, exhaust him, stupefy him. The Surrealist object is made solely for the honor of thought. Flags and trophies have to be replaced by an arch of triumph of hysteria, made of limp structures, surmounted by aphrodisiac jackets, shiny with piss and emeralds. Each person can then indulge his passion for living in the bosom of a coherent universe unified by paranoia. Each becomes the conscience and measure of the world.

I was ten or so when I got Dullita up on ‘the Pichots’ tower. I was wearing a sailor hat that squashed my ears. At the top of the tower, I took it off and the cool evening breeze so deliciously caressed my ears that I remember that I felt I was at the same time rubbing elbows with love.

In July 1957, there was an exhibit at Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, of thirty-four paintings and forty-eight drawings and water colors, and at Brussels they showed my
Madone Sixtine
 (
Sistine Madonna
), the optical effects of which were a big hit. At one meter’s distance you saw the Sistine Madonna, and at three meters an ear that seemed to be painted with anti-matter. Who could have known that what that was, was the magnification of my childhood memory? Or that that work was dictated to me by my paranoiac-critical ambition to make use of every bit of my self and my memory, to live me even unto my substantific marrow?

Dalínian irrationality was at least becoming factual.

A few months later I was to go back to the myth of the ear when I made the monumental ear of Pope John XXIII in the shape of a manger for Orly – and even though I detest children – so as to make even more tangible the incarnation of that magic of love that one morning had rubbed against me facing the sky and the clouds.

The City of Paris, in 1958, was to award me its gold medal and the medal of French quality. I do not blink at one more contradiction, and it pleases me to be crowned for qualities I do not have, for then in my eyes my unseen virtues are being rewarded. When in that year I invented the
Ovocipede,
which is a plastic sphere, everyone interpreted this invention as a new method of locomotion, so I did not take the trouble to explain that it was essentially a question of materializing my paradisiac intra-uterine phantasms and allowing some others to relive their most secret dreams.

Societies do not like things that favor escapism or forgetfulness of codes. Escape files can be gotten into prisons only by hiding them beneath the reassuring crusts of nourishing everyday bread.

Is Dalí Sensitive To The Suffering Of Mankind?

“Pity is not my forte; it is the virtue of
filles de joie,”
said Nietzsche. I was once asked how I could live in Spain where so many people had an outstretched hand. I answered that I crossed Spain by Cadillac and knew that the Spanish people were a proud people, who did not hold out their hands, but died on their feet.

During the German Peasants’ War led by Thomas Münzer (which the nobles ended at Frankenhausen), one of his companions, before going to face execution, cried out, “O God, I am about to die, and in all my life never once did I eat my fill!” I cannot be moved by the inequality of the human condition, which is an obvious consequence of psychological inequalities and natural hierarchy, but I cannot imagine a society without highly developed gastronomy. I re member one night arriving at Saulieu just as the chef had finished making his truffle pasty.

“Ah!” M. Dumaine said to me, “you are just in time; the haze is rising beneath the oaks, but the sky is clear, you can count the stars and the truffles. The truffles give off their scent at this time and the humidity increases their virtues, so it is the one time when the pasty can really be well made. You’ll have a treat!” My imagination was at the zenith of desire. It was a royal feast.

A society without ortolans in paillotes, or without duck’s livers with raisins, or gastronomical talk, has not finished its evolution. A nation is not “ready” until it has at least fifty kinds of cheeses and great vintages.

In my system of values, gastronomy gets a mark of ten out of ten, dandyism and heroism likewise, but goodness gets a goose egg. Perversity, on the other hand, ranks right up there.

In an ideal city, woman will assume a new importance. Irrational gymnastics and the streamlined ensembles of
haute couture
will allow her to satisfy the wildest of her dreams. I foresee bodies with detachable parts so that feminine exhibition can achieve all of its splendor as each part of the anatomy comes separately and can be eaten in its own right. Displayed on pins, like the parts of a praying mantis: the tits, the thighs, the belly, the cunt, the shoulders – each would be a separate dish.

Toward this end, I have designed a whole outfit: the corset to be of great erotic power; fake tits held high and slightly descending, starting in the back – no reason why one should not consider additional series of tits; spring heels, edible panties, thighs and bellies delectable to satiation.

In 1928, at the very apogee of functionalist anatomy, I had already announced that the new sexual entertainment of woman would come through the utilization of her spectral capabilities, that is, from possible carnal dissociations and decompositions. The hologram will give us an almost perfect realization of this proposition.

What Does Dalí Think Of Freedom, Future, And Justice?

As has been understood, my whole “social” – how that word repels me! – vision is one of repression of freedom. In 1971, I wrote out my code, in the form of a poem, and I suggest that the faithful learn by heart at least these five lines of it:

“Shameless, shapeless human freedom, Romantic, imperceptive of the five perfect, unique polyhedrons. Imperceptive of the cages of divine geometry, The happy prison of the retina, Imperceptive of the continual pleasure of the pitiless, rigorous networks.”

Freedom is anarchy, the infantile exploitation of the being’s superior capability of will, the abuse of the divine.

Real freedom is the sublime duty to die for one’s country, the supreme voluptuousness of being a slave – but what can be said of those who have eyes yet will not see, ears yet will not hear?

Freedom is the contrary of monarchy. Freedom is bourgeois hypocrisy.

It is significant that France has given new currency to the architecture of Nicolas Ledoux by installing a vista center in the very locale of the futurist mausoleum that had been given to the beasts of the woods. The symbolism is obvious and the process, in spreading, should soon lead to the transformation of UNESCO into an undertaking of stupefying the public so as solemnly to consecrate its primary policy. I suggest that this hotbed of bourgeois boredom be transformed into a bordello of local color under the aegis of St. Louis, pioneer of love for sale.

I am betting on the debourgeoisification of culture to the extent that society deproletarianizes itself. The new cultural style will emerge from the return to currency of the great schools of thought victimized by materialism: the combinative wheels of Raymond Lully, the natural theology of Raymond de Sebonde, Paracelsus’ treatise, Gaudí’s inspired architecture, Francisco Pujols’ hyperaxiology, Raymond Roussel’s poetics... a pedagogy awaiting its masters!

The future belongs to the fantastic.

Democratic justice is of as doubtful a sex as a bearded woman. Real justice is monarchial. Dalínian justice is objective chance. I broke the windows of justice at five o’clock one afternoon on Fifth Avenue the day I knocked the pane out of the Bonwit Teller showcase in which my display had been sabotaged. I met justice in the person of the little Puerto Rican in the detention room at the police precinct who, on learning what I had done, defended me against the drunks and kicked away the whole passel of bums to protect me from their vomit.

Justice is that I, Dalí, the divine pig, sublime rhinoceros, may be able to consume ortolans to the end of the centuries as the consecration of an uninterrupted life of dandyism.

“I AM A MONARCHIST, IN A MORPHOLOGICAL MANNER.”

Chapter Seventeen: How To Read Dalí's Paintings