Maniac Eyeball (37 page)

The clown is not I, but rather our monstrously cynical and so naively unconscious society that plays at the game of being serious, the better to hide its own madness. For I – I can never repeat it enough – am not mad. My sanity has even attained such a level of quality and concentration that there is no more heroic or prodigious personality in our century, and except for Nietzsche (who, however, died mad) there is no equivalent in previous ones. My painting bears witness to that.

Yes, I can never repeat it enough, while my painting is but a fragment of my cosmogony, it is the most significant expression of my truth. Decipher! Decipher! Then you will experience the vertigo of the human absolute.

As an axiom of my oeuvre, I state that there is no such thing as a lazy masterpiece. Any creation requires the tension of the entire being: talent is not enough. My painting – in the formula I have engraved once and for all – is the hand and color photography of the latent, superfine, extravagant, hyperaesthetic images of concrete irrationality. I advise all Dalínians to learn that by heart, for each word of it has its own weight as initiation and revelation.

This is not an “intellectual” definition. I think with my entrails, my viscera, my body. I fell in love through my ear at the top of a tower; I discovered concrete reality through my elbow; I appreciate metaphysical, aesthetic, and moral values through my jaws. I proclaim that man’s first philosophical instrument is his jaw, which allows for awareness of the real. I am ahead of the men of my time, because my entire body is directly plugged in to the real.

Because of that I have always had a premonitory gift which came out, for instance, six months before the Spanish war in a premonition of the “Spanish civil war”. But of course I am more interested in the specific case of Dalí than in any current events. Indeed I am interested only in the case of Dalí. For it is I, always and everywhere, who am asserting myself in my work.

There is a great struggle going on between nature and me. I have to correct her. The painting of a still life (or, as we say in French,
nature morte:
dead nature) is a way of rectifying the real by the creation of an entropy clear to all. I am fascinated by death. It is my subject. And one vein of my work is to make death colloidal, to stretch it, milk it, like the teat of a cow, to get the milk of the resur rection of the flesh from it.

But eroticism comes before anything else; the eroticism that flows within us and springs from the helicoidal structure that I painted in the deoxyribonucleic cell.

Everything born of my brush is erotic. Ultra-concrete and ultra-abstract, the point is always to dominate the heterosexual angst of the polymorphously perverse character I am to the point of self-sodomization.

Since the
Limp Watches
, I am historically the one who was able to give the equivalence of the space-time equation, but my entire art transmits the quality of the most modern angst because it is the expression of a delirium beyond any dimension of the real. My painting is truly that of the four dimensions enhanced by the affirmation of a paranoiac-critical soul.

Time is unthinkable without space, is what my paintings say, as well as all Dalínian “subjects”, the infant-nurses with supersoft windowed backs, the
Pharmacien de
Figueras ne Cherchant Absolument Rien
(
Figueras
Pharmacist Looking For Absolutely Nothing
),
Le Téléphone
dans le Plat
(
Telephone On A Platter
),
Les Tables de Nuit
Molles
(
Limp Night-Tables)
, all of which celebrate both my outsize lust for life and my will to transcend it.

And when I paint invisible figures as in
Le Marché
d’Esclaves avec le Buste Invisible de Voltaire
(
Slave Market
With Invisible Bust Of Voltaire
), I force the imagining of a new reality – new and coherent time and space. With my moiréed canvases, the microscopic texture of which contains three-dimensional images, I free the real from its terrifying vertigo by creating the gooseflesh of space-time which “at will” can be or not be. In the same way, my
Sistine Madonna
is an ear made of anti-matter or of the Virgin’s face, depending on the stereoscopic effect.

I am the only painter whose art solves the problem of the density of matter. I succeeded in mineralizing forms so as to give a nutritive and tastable equivalence of time-space. I made a dish of my dizziness, my metaphysical angsts. Each work is like a Eucharist that helps digest the real, i.e., by supplying the gastric juices with materialized images of irrationality.

At a time when the Cubists were moving away from four dimensional reality by trying in vain to convince themselves of the existence of an intellectually and plastically real world that could reassure them, I spent four months painting a basket of bread which, by the power of its density, the fascination of its immobility, creates the mystical, paroxysmic feeling of a situation beyond our ordinary notion of the real. We are at the borderline of dematerialization of matter by the sole power of the mind. Beyond, there are only energy and life tamed and maintained in artificial shapes. The spiritualization of painting starts with the mineralization of shapes to end at the uranium of life.

If one is to penetrate the magic of the universe, the spiritual energy that we paralyze through our fears must first be freed. Am I afraid of a lack of testicles? I paint the testicles of Phidias’ torso and my fear disappears, at the same time that the rhinocerotic disintegration of Phidias Illisos appears, a formidable mystical response to the pressure of the real.

My minute attention to detail is in contrast to the great lazi ness of modern art, in which everything is slipshod and goes from minimal to minimal, to end up in the nothingness which is just what must be conquered. In the whole history of art there is no heresy, no inversion greater than the phenomenon of contemporary artistic creation denying its own existence. The vertigo of vacuum ends in the cancer of the mind. The illumination of my life was that I understood I was the savior of modern art and the basic reasons of my imperialistic power; for my entire being is an inexhaustible treasure from which spring the lines of force of a truth that soon will become universal. I can say that I am today the man nearest to the existence of God; the least mad of men and the term
divine
sometimes applied to me expresses an existential reality.

How Dalí Interprets His Divine Case

In the beginning there was madness – which I fled. And the whole history of my art and life, until I met Gala, is the most terrifying struggle against the death of the mind. Professor Pierre Roumeguère (in
Gala, Dalí les Jumeaux Divins
[
Gala,
Dalí, Divine Twins
]) analyzed the dramatic turns of this adventure, which is like the Passion of Christ. As is known, three years after the death of my seven-year-old elder brother, my father and mother at my birth gave me the same name, Salvador, which was also my father’s. This subconscious crime was aggravated by the fact that in my parents’ bedroom – an attractive, mysterious, redoubtable place, full of ambivalences and taboos – there was a majestic picture of Salvador, my dead brother, next to a reproduction of Christ crucified as painted by Velázquez; and this image of the cadaver of the Saviour whom Salvador had without ques tion gone to in his angelic ascension conditioned in me an archetype born of four Salvadors who cadaverized me. The more so as I turned into a mirror image of my dead brother.

I thought I was dead before I knew I was alive. The three Salvadors reflecting each other’s images, one of them a crucified God twinned with the other who was dead and the third a dominating father, forbade me from projecting my life into a reassuring mold and I might say even from constructing myself. At an age when sensibilities and imagination need an essential truth and a solid tutor, I was living in the labyrinths of death which became “my second nature”. I had lost the image of my being that had been stolen from me; I lived only by proxy and reprieve.

As far back as my memory – which is prodigious – can go, I feel only a post-natal homesickness, a profound attachment to my intra-uterine life, preferable to the reality that was violating and dispossessing me. I am aware of my being and person as of a double. I was indeed, as soon as I apprehended the existence of things, absent from myself and forced at every moment to check on my belonging in the world – whence my polymorphous perversity, in order to set up an authentication of my whims. But I had no outlines. I was nothing, and yet all. Since I was being denied, I floated in indecision, in shape lessness. My body and my mind lived in the soft and ambiguous and I existed in things as well as in landscapes. My psychological space had not crystallized into a body, but was on the contrary spread through indefinite space, suspended between heaven and earth as in the ascension of the angel, my dead brother to the right of the Saviour. My thought moved naturally within this dimension of unreality in which my strength and my dynamism of life flourished, whereas my own body was a kind of mirage that I was aware of only by mimesis. I slipped through it as through a hole in unreality.

My favorite psychiatrist, Dr. Roumeguère, asserts that, perforce identified with a dead person, I had no truly felt image of my own body beyond that of a putrefied, rotten, soft, worm-ridden corpse. And it is true that my earliest recollections of existence are connected with death (the bat my cousin killed, the porcupine). My sexual obsessions are linked to limp turgescences. I dream of cadaverous shapes, distended breasts, oozing flesh, and the crutches I am soon to adopt as objects of sacralization, in my dreams as a short time later in my pictures, are indispensable instruments to maintain the equilibrium of my feeble notion of reality that endlessly escapes through the holes I cut even through the back of my infant-nurse. The crutch is not merely a support element, but its fork is a proof of ambivalence. The riddle of bifurcation whips my imagination to its paroxysm. Contemplating my spread hand and the quadruple fork of my fingers, I can extend the bifurcation indefinitely and remain dreamily pensive for hours. I have a true hallucinogenic power without hallucinogenics.

Superiorly gifted, I organize my struggle against death, erect in my full transcendental strength. I invent all possible lives for myself through Butxaques, my little chum who might have been my dead brother, then with Dullita, who occupied my dreams for so long. But the phantasms only exacerbate my lust for life and I fall into those attacks of laughter or masturbation that lead me to the paroxysm of my anxieties, until, at last, Gala arrived.

A 1940 canvas,
Araignée Du Soir – Espoir
(
Spider
Of Evening – Hope
) perfectly expresses the reality of my deeper drama. A child with angelic wings is seated in the left corner of the picture, hiding his eyes so as not to see a sexual cannon supported by a crutch from which emerges a hollow-socketed horse with a muscular body already in the process of putre faction, its forward legs forming the arms of a winged victory that in turn ends in a gigantic runny foot that connects with a long limp breast also oozing out of the cannon like a sperm. Before this penis-cannon, a limp woman broken in two, supported by the branch of a tree, planted in a geometrical frame, plays a limp violoncello with a viscous bow.

I leave it to others to interpret this and say whether the angel-child is my brother and the fiery horse surging from the cannon my self; whether the cannon is the penis of my aging father, and the woman my mother, with the cello as symbol of the groans detected coming from their conjugal bed, in turn symbolized by the tree planted in the rectangle.

All I can say is that the limpness, the viscousness, the gelatinousness do portray in my mind the vital feeling I long had of my body and of the life of my being.

Gala brought me in the true sense of the term the structure that was lacking in my life. I existed only in a bag full of holes, limp and shapeless, always on the lookout for a crutch. By attaching myself to Gala I found a spinal column and in making love to her I filled my skin. My sperm, until then, got spilled in masturbation, as if thrown into the void; with Gala, I got it back and was revivified by it. I thought at first that she was going to devour me, but on the contrary she taught me to eat of reality. In signing my paintings Gala-Dalí, all I did was to give a name to an existential truth, since without my twin Gala I would no longer exist.

Through Gala, I acquired not only the right to my own life, but the male and female part of my genius and the ability to put a distance between me and all my phantasms.

The paranoiac-critical method is Gala first and foremost. Now there are four of us (woman-man-Dalí; man-woman-Gala) exploring the world; and my work, ever since, has celebrated this new strength. With Gala I returned to the very earliest joys, the heterogeneous paradise of the suckling babe, my total oral pleasure, and the blinding spiritual dominance.

My appetite became ferocious and my intelligence prodigious. Since then I have filled the world with my most wonderful paradoxes that bring together opposites and antinomic values: anarchism-monarchy; chaste-eroticism; God’s-atheistic-passion; and classical-baroque aesthetics. All possible variants of the Gala-Dalí myths. And it is since then that I have been able to appreciate on a par with Raphaelian perfection the admirable anatomy of a naked woodcock on a platter, well hung and flamed in very strong alcohol. All Dalínian truths start in the mouth and assert themselves through visceral response.

My painting is gastronomical, spermatic, existential. It is ne ther intellectual nor sentimental. Dalí feels nothing, knows no emotion, cannot be moved, not even by my love life. My intelligence does not rest on emotion; on the contrary, it is protected and thereby can develop omnisciently.