Maniac Eyeball (38 page)

My painting is that essential part of my existence that is located in the “hole” of my being, between what has been sensorially and physically lived and inquisitorial intelligence. I paint in order to be and to unite all the forces of my self.

And through my work which is my life I explore the most exalted of human secrets. That is why each of my blossomings is a harvest for all mankind.

What Stages Does Dalí Distinguish In His Work?

If all of the Dalí canvases could be brought together, they would make the existential file of Dalí’s mystical body.

Divine Dalí. Every being has within himself as it were a structural intuition of an image of his corporeality. Pierre Roumeguère describes three levels of reality: the body in the world, the self in the body, and the self in the world. But this image of our body which we have, which orients our perceptions, our feelings, our effect upon ourselves and the world around us, this model of ourselves is constantly being questioned and reconstructed. And that, only if we do have a feeling of our corporeality, a three-dimensional schema that rises to the threshold of consciousness and determines a projective dynamism...

Modern psychology is in the process of discovering these es sential truths that I have been living for three-quarters of a century. My experience some day will be regarded as fundamental and become one of the great scientific revelations. For my schema, my corporeal image, my double started by being a dead boy. I had no corporeal image, fate having willed for me to be born without a body or in an angelic one, with putrefaction images to boot.

So I projected myself into bodies to seek out my structure. A useless quest, but one that afforded me a fantastic exploration of the world; a unique experience which is at the origin of my genius. Heautoscopy is the name given to the phenomenon of hallucinatory projection by split personality such as can be experienced in a dream or before a work of art. Splitting into a second personality endowed with great tactile lucidity and sensuality which can, for instance, move into a picture, to the space suggested by the artist, while one’s body remains standing before the frame. Goethe, De Musset, Dickens, Dostoyevsky even described similar states when in moments of intense literary creation.

Well, for my part, I lived through this phenomenon, not fortuitously or under the spell of a tremendous spiritual pull, but permanently, until I met Gala. So I set up in myself unusual psychic mechanisms and acquired data about the being and the real which are diamonds of cosmic value. My work yields only the visible part of the iceberg!

My canvases must be read as the archetypal projections of a new Plato’s cave. A new consciousness of humanity may start with me, Dalí. It is a journey to the country of horrors, to be sure, and of fear such as an explorer may feel in uncharted territory – and many is the time I provoked and felt death close by since the days when I jumped from the tops of walls or stairways to test my body, as in a slow-motion film with the sensations of my muscles and flesh bruised but alive – yet also a prodigious existential voyage in the sense in which Heidegger says, “To be is to burst upon the world.” I literally burst upon the world because I had no body.

Having no bodily analogy, I could not
judge
forms and objects about me. I could only experience them from
within.
Little by little I transformed this escape of the being, this transmutation into pure consciousness. Therein lies the quality of my genius. Unable to give a meaning to things, since I had no stable self as a frame of reference, I experienced them by possessing them, getting the feel of their configuration with unbelievable sharpness, however strange it might be. And my painting therefore has a character of prodigious revelation. Most human beings have never gotten outside their own bodies – only the most gifted of them, and then very briefly, for a mere fortuitous discovery most often literally and aesthetically transformed by reason. But I come on dripping with the “other” truths, my hands full of the treasures of the real, my eyes hallucinated with visions delirious but as true as our lives. That is my “message”. And from picture to picture you can readily imagine how my bodily image was little by little restructured beginning with Gala.

I had to reinvent everything. Each of the givens that are termed fundamental to the awareness of being was to me a battle and a conquest. When I say I correct nature as I paint, you must understand what my nature is. When in my 1956 
Nature Morte Vivante
 (
Animated Still Life
; or, literally:
Living
Dead Nature
) I show the fruit bowl floating in space with the fan and fruits and a cauliflower and a bird and a glass and a bottle emptying itself and a knife, in front of a window through which there is an endless moiré sea, while a hand holds a rhinoceros horn, I am defining and communicating a notion of time-space expressed through the vision of a levitation that shatters entropy. With the rhinoceros horn as maximum energy in minimum space, facing the infinite spaces of the sea, the picture becomes the privileged locus of a geometry that translates not only the loftiest scientific and philosophical speculations, but allows me, Dalí, existentially to know the truth of time-space and by that very fact a Dalínian truth of my person and my situation in the world. Each picture is a paranoiac-critical consciousness.

When Dalí Paints, Is He Trying To Teach Us Delirium?

There are creators enclosed within themselves, to whom seren ity is their reason for being. But I, Dalí, ever notoriously guilty of non-assistance to bodies in distress, can live only under stress. My paranoiac-critical method being the lookout of my drifting, I go from explosive mutation to explosive mutation and can communicate only the seismography of my living truth. My logic moves me to project about me all the images of the mystical body which has become Dalí.

Actually, I have no bodily dimensions. My self is Dalí, i.e., a time space endlessly modified according to my whims – my desire, my pride, my strength. Each picture is a code of dominant psychological genetics. Hard and soft, cold and hot, movement and repose, muscular bulges or purulence of the flesh,
trompe-l’oeil
or straight line, all translate and communicate the ecstasy or nausea, intoxication or lucidity that are necessary states for participation in the vision of the world I supply and the knowledge I reveal. In that sense, each picture is a Mass in which I distribute the Eucharist of a knowledge. This is no meaningless show but an initiation into the Dalínian mystique.

On my own account I am reliving the entire history of art. Through this discipline I have experienced every moment of human ity’s awakening to awareness at the same time that I was reconstructing my Dalínian envelope.

From the dreams of the Renaissance, which were to do color paintings of the archetypes of Greek sculpture, by way of the magic treasures of Velázquez, master of reflections and mirrors, to the fantastic world of nuclear physics, quantum mathematics, and the biology of deoxyribonucleic acids, I have gotten to the truth of the classical dome, the creation of the glorious Dalínian body, and the illumination of the station at Perpignan. In art and in my life, I have gotten back to the tradition ruled by the principles of legitimacy and hierarchy and do not fear perfection, for I know that none can attain it and my game (both
jeu
and
je
– my I as well) is to bring about the impossible. I am the Don Quixote of unreality.

How Dalí Illustrated “Don Quixote” And Revolutionized The Art Of Lithography

During the summer of 1956, the publisher Joseph Fôret arrived at Port Lligat with huge lithographic stones in his car. He wanted me to illustrate
Don Quixote.
I had trouble accepting the lithographic process, which struck me as limp and liberal. But Joseph Fôret obstinately kept coming back with more stones. His determination made me so aggressive that I could gladly have shot the calm inflexible little man.

And an angelic idea dazzled me. I would fire at the stones the harquebus bullet I had intended for the publisher. I wired him to get the weapon ready. The painter Georges Mathieu had made me a sumptuous present of a sixteenth-century harquebus with an ivory stock.

The event took place on November 26, 1956, on a pontoon on the Seine: surrounded by a hundred sheep, I fired a lead bullet filled with lithographic ink on to the stone, making a sublime splash.

I immediately made out the wing of an angel of perfect dynamism that reached the height of perfection. I had just invented “bulletism”. All I had to do now was dream to find the mathematical dispositions of my bullets. It became a considerable attraction. In New York, both TV and collectors wanted to get my harquebus shots. Each morning at the New York Military Academy I fired at a lithographic stone that instantly changed into dollars.

This invention of my genius antedated by a few months the most advanced nuclear physics experiments in which the harquebus of the cyclotron was used to penetrate the secrets of matter.

Born of a harquebus shot,
Don Quixote
also mobilized octopuses, sea urchins, and a cloud of small toads brought in by the storm to fashion my hero’s costume. Fancy, whim, and objective chance worked together to bring Cervantes’ most noble hero out of the stone.

I was careful to note for history that it was on July 25, 1957, St. James’ feast day, that the most sublime splash in the history of morphological science took place. I had taken an empty snail shell, filled with ink. My harquebus shot fired at very close range created exactly the curve of the snail’s spiral with such precision and luxury of finesse that I understood this was a case of the appearance of a “pre-snail galaxy” state, a sort of archetype of the divine snail before its creation. I was at one of the summits of Dalínian vision.

Joseph Fôret was to request that in the same Dionysiac state I do the cover for his
Apocalypse Of St. John,
for which I conceived a bronze bas-relief weighing eighty kilograms, which was my first sculpture. In an apocalyptic surge, I took a hatchet to a wax plaque. I was working outside on a table set up on the beach at Port Lligat. In the wax, I embedded a piece of honey cake, for honey is the very image of the spiritual in the Old Testament, and I stuck in gold needles to show the radiation around the Christ above whom there was an agate symbolic of purity. Twelve real pearls represented the twelve gates of Jerusalem, and fourteen kinds of precious stones the foundations of heavenly Jerusalem.

I also laid out five hundred and eighty-five nails, correspond ing to the categories of soul given by Raymond Lully, the philosopher of genius, and finished the whole thing with a collection of knives and forks, elements of daily living – because the Apocalypse is meant to be eaten like a cheese.

Publisher Fôret was to make it the most expensive book in the world up to that time – but I was thinking mainly of St. John’s words themselves: “And I went to the angel, saying unto him that he should give me the book. And he said to me: Take the book and eat it up. And it shall make thy belly bitter: but in thy mouth it shall be sweet as honey.” (X:9) I was to complete the three inside illustrations of the book by way of a bomb that exploded in the old Paris winter bicycle race track. I had plastered the bomb to a watch, some medals, and some nails, that were thrown on to a copperplate and engraved into it. Over that explosive design, I drew and water-colored a Pietà.

The Apocalypse
appeared at the same time that my illustrations for
Don Quixote
were exhibited, and the first volumes of
The Divine Comedy
reproducing my water-colors in lithography. I experienced the Apollonian intoxication of triumph and on this occasion published a text about divine cheese that I would like to recall to Dalínians whose mental jaws should be in perpetual motion:

“Romanticism perpetrated the foul crime of giving us to believe that hell was as black as Gustave Doré’s coal mines where you cannot see a thing. No, Dante’s inferno is lighted by the sun and honey of the Mediterranean. That is why the terrors of my illustrations are analytical and super-gelatinous with their coefficient of angelical viscosity.

“The digestive hyperesthesia of two beings devouring each other for the first time can be observed in the full light of day frenetic with mystical and ammoniacal joy.

“The mystique is the cheese; Christ is cheese, or even better mountains of cheese.”

But if Dante interested me for so long – over ten years – it was because of his vision of the angelic world: 
...like a troop of bees, Amid the vernal sweets alighting now,
Now, clustering, where their fragrant labor glows,
Flew downward to the mighty flower, or rose
From the redundant petals, streaming back
Unto the steadfast dwelling of their joy,
Faces had they of flame, and wings of gold:
The rest was whiter than the driven snow...

The idea of the angel stimulates me. For if God is outside our ken, He is cosmic because without limits; but angels have shapes. Proton and neutron to me are angelic elements.

Raphael and St. John of the Cross are close to the angels. I try to approach the angelic world through the hyperesthetic paranoiac-critical chastity and spirituality of these illustrations. That is my discipline for getting to heaven.

For thirty years, in exile and condemned to death, Dante dreamt of Beatrice whom he had merely glimpsed. He took refuge in his vision: “It was given to me to contemplate a wonderful vision, in which I saw things that led me no longer to speak of this blessed being until the time when I might express myself with more talent about her. And it is toward that end that I work as hard as I can, as she indeed knows.”

He closes the fourteen thousand lines of his song by the two key words of
The Divine Comedy:
“Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Love which had allowed him to survive, and the stars in which he hoped to find Beatrice.