Maniac Eyeball (41 page)

“IN ALL THE STANCES OF MODERN ART, THERE IS A
SINGLE CONCERN WHICH IS PARADOXICALLY TO CREATE DIS-CONTINUITY OF MATTER. THE IMPRESSIONISTS START WITH THE DISCONTINUITY OF LIGHT WHICH IS THE PAROXYSM OF DISCONTINUITY, THEN COME SEURAT’S DIVISIONISM,
CUBISM, ABSTRACT PAINTING, FUTURISM; ALL ARE TRYING TO CUT UP A KIND OF DYNAMISM, TO BRING ABOUT A DISCONTINUITY OF MATTER. BEFORE THEM, IT WAS BELIEVED THAT MATTER WAS CONTINUOUS, BUT FOR A MODERN, MATTER IS DISCONTINUOUS.”

Chapter Nineteen: Dalí's Days With Dalí

Breakfast is brought to me and I put the tray on the bed, making a table of my knees. The cold of the metal through the sheets makes me shiver with pleasure. During this time, I sugar my coffee so violently that the liquid splashes on me. With a small spoon I stir the viscous mixture that I pretend to drink but let slowly run down my chin and neck. The hot sticky stream reaches my chest and spreads among the hairs.

A delicious lukewarm sensation invades me. Still apparently indifferent and awkward, I continue with the breakfast, my eye set on the window in which flies are lazily flying about among the sunny curtains. I fix my attention on one of them.

The coffee is now down to my belly button. My skin is voluptuously humid. I feel covered with some diluted spermatic fluid. With a casual finger I tap at my shirt that as a result sticks to my skin. Traces of the coffee appear through the material where the hairs adhere to it. I put the cup down and using the tip of my forefinger create a spotted shirt, each tap making a black spot of coffee. One fly, then two, buzz near me, attracted by the smell and the sugar. Their little membraned wings, quick and delicate, glint in the light and splatter rainbow colors. One is lively, one gliding. A light buzz of pleasure makes the air tingle in my ears. Both of them are messengers of summer and of childhood memories.

My soft viscous hairs harden gradually as they stick to the shirt and begin to draw as they weave into the fabric. A fly lights on a circle of coffee. I bend my head and look at his prominent eyes, with their facets in which I must seem huge with my blue-bearded chin. His chest is like a grain of wheat and the plastron of his belly shines like smooth shell.

He is holding on by the rear legs and using the two front ones to test the coffee spot, then sets down his trunk. He seems to be drinking a sugared droplet. I have moved a little and, quick as a flash, he is gone, cautious but not frightened. I know of no more valiant animals.

Playfully now, I push away the swarm of them assembled about me. There must be twenty making the signs of a buzzing constellation. I run my hand slowly over my chest so the whole shirt sticks and makes just one unit with the skin through the under shirt I am wearing beneath. I feel viscous, covered with sweet film, and the song of the flies makes me feel even better. A male drops lightning-like on the back of a female, but without evidence of roughness. He gets to work, as his partner tautens on her legs. Just what are the gentleman and lady feeling? They do not part quickly and as I make a move the female flies off carrying her conqueror on her back. Perhaps they will continue their nuptial congress in flight as the queen bee does. The coffee has dried on my belly and now there is a small crust that stretches my skin as it dries. I move the sheet and scratch with the end of my nail.

My tool is still dormant in its hairy tuft. I hesitate for a moment to titillate it. A fly lands on the glans and scratches it with a gossamer leg, lazily. I take pleasure in thinking of the legend that tells of the beauti ful woman in love with Endymion who woke him too often with her buzzing, so he turned her into a fly. Is she going to dig her toothy trunk into me? Or, like her Athenian courtesan ancestor, fleck me with the fleeting caress that will make my morning virility turgescent? I feel that if I dropped a drop of sweet coffee on my prick I would get the lick I want, but my moving disturbs the fly...

There is activity in the next room. My chamberlain is wait ing for me to get up. But this morning I will work in bed, still wearing the sticky undershirt and nightshirt that make a soft and complex cybernetic circuit with my skin, connecting me with all the life forces about me.

Flies are now all over the sugarbowl. One of them lands on my nose, making my eyes cross. Each fly is a queen, setting out her worldly goods as she sees fit, and tithing all about. I realize I am going to have to observe flies more closely, for, introduced into my paranoiac-critical system, they might bring me many of the keys to the most secret laws of the universe. For flies never die, perpetuating their genus infinitely, multiplying like light, weaving an immense network of collusions and intercommunications among all forms of the real with a wonderful economy of means, pure geniuses. Wise or delirious, mad or indifferent, they forge ahead with Brownian intelligence. Supposing they were as big as we, we would probably be nothing! Except for me, Dalí, for I am probably the only human being capable of seeing, and therefore thinking, like a fly.

The captain brings in two copperplates I am supposed to engrave for a Parisian publisher. Each morning after breakfast I like to start the day by earning twenty thousand dollars. I stick the plates down on my belly, raise my knees, and on that stand I set to work with the engraving point. I take real pleasure in cutting the metal as the steel tip moves along.

There is activity about me. I am like a boat afloat surrounded by light barks. The mail is brought in and the captain opens it. He throws the checks on the bed, calling off figures that I care fully make mental note of without appearing to.

As ever, my Jesuitical hypocrisy. Invitations to dinner, cocktail parties, theater tickets. I say yes, or no, as if at random, yet knowing exactly who is who, but also that I may change my mind, cancel what I promised, or reverse a refusal.

A friend has sent me an eighteenth-century picture of the statue at Gerona of St. Narcissus, patron of flies. It is well known that when Napoleon’s soldiers invaded the city, the ones who tried to pillage the church were suddenly attacked by a huge swarm of enraged flies, which came out of St. Narcissus’ thigh and drove them away. Frightened by the miracle, the nationalist soldiers of the Revolution abandoned the city. Since then, Narcissus has been venerated as the patron of flies.

Having this very morning paid my respects to these insects, it was only proper in paranoiac-critical logic that the same day I should receive a sign from St. Narcissus; it does not surprise me. I should rather have been surprised by the opposite.

But my ultra-localism is delighted by the fact that even in Paris signs can reach me from my native Catalonia, and that in the heart of feverish Parisian life my mind does not move away from true Dalínian values. Homage to St. Narcissus’ flies, to the facets of the parabolic eyes that allow the lasers of miracle to filter through, driving out the reasonable ness that was galloping in on war-like horses and now beats in retreat before the magical effects of faith. I love the fly, most paranoiac-critical insect of them all!

During the two periods I spend in Paris, en route between Spain and the U.S. – in October and May – I try to be in touch with all the currents running through this nervous, female city, and what pleases me most is being informed of the delirious temperature. How far too far can one go?

The light is turning blonde over the Tuileries, whose foliage I can see from my bed through the window. I put down my coppers. Little flecks of metal have fallen on my penis, and stick in the pubic hairs to irritate my skin. I lift the shirt to stretch the hairs of my chest that are stuck to it. I deliciously experience the eroticism of this dermic situation.

I remember having dreamt of white excrements, which in Danaë’s Freudian vocabulary cannot be mistaken.

The day will be a golden one. I tell the captain, who says he is ready, and go to the privy after stopping by a vase full of flowers to take out a jasmine and place it behind my ear.

My stool is very fluid, virtually odorless. I attach great importance to my excreta – which are the most dependable signs we have not only of our inner condition but of the quality of our immortality. A capital subject. In order to live happily, let us study shit. We wear away first in the arsehole. I would like to make my stools sweet as honey, which would be the sign of my existential success. Like the anchorites who chew roots and grasshoppers, I would like to reach the point where I do not swallow food, but merely masticate and spit it out. My progress is constant. I hardly fart at all any more, and only on awakening, very melodiously. This morning, I dedicated my fart to St. Augustine, prince of pétomanes, for I am in a mystical phase.

As I am going to appear before TV cameras, I decide to wear very narrow shoes that will painfully pinch my feet. With my undershirt stiff with black coffee making a kind of solid carapace, I can be sure my oratorical gifts will come out in all their perfection. There is hammering and shouting in the living room where a group of people are making up the decor of gilt-metal caves I have planned for Gala’s arrival.

Something runs between the metal tubes suspended from the ceiling. Three callers are announced, and I have all three sent up together: a red-headed tigress named Ariadne, publisher Joseph Fôret, as determined as ever, and a young man who wants to swap me a racing stable for the illustration of an edition of
Pantagruel
. They are about to have it out, when the telecast props are brought in. The phone rings. Two newspapermen make their appearance. My chamberlain announces that the richest fabric merchant in Europe is coming to offer me a deal to design the patterns for his next collection: he is a very important gentleman, checkbook in hand. He comes in at the same time as the TV crew. The photographs of the urinal in the Perpignan station that I requested are brought in. Three hippies and a guitar take their places on the sofa. The morning has begun.

I get up to welcome Mr. and Mrs. A. Reynolds Morse, the founders of the Salvador Dalí Museum at Cleveland (Beachwood), my fans. I always look at them greedily. Since I first met them, on my arrival in the U.S., they have devoted their entire fortune to the purchase of my pictures. They know all my work better than I, and collect everything that I publish. I am only sorry their example has not caught on better. The more so since they have grown considerably richer through their Dalínian passion. Their capital has quintupled, and thousands of visitors come to their foundation. Dalínian delirium always engenders gold and success. The pleasure they get from it is even greater than their fortune.

This morning, I have been asked to be the main attraction at the
Bal des Petits Lits Blancs
(Ball of the Little White Beds), Paris’ biggest annual charity affair. I answer that I am willing on condition that they put on the spectacle I have just at this instant conceived: a rhinoceros to be lowered from the ceiling to crush a one-and-a-half-meter bust of Voltaire filled with milk. The organizers swear they will do just what I want, but ask me to give them an explanation of the performance. I tell them the world needs some esotericism, that rationalism has desiccated everything, and that secret truths have to be put into circulation through the voice of divagation. During this demonstration, I will read a message, which I improvise on the spot.

The illustrious Monsieur de Voltaire possessed a peculiar kind of thought that was the most refined, clearest, most rational, most sterile, and misguided not only in France but in the entire world. Voltaire did not believe in angels or archangels, nor in alchemy, and he would not have believed in the value of the 1900-style entrances to the Paris Metro, nor in charity.

But mostly, of course, what Voltaire would never have believed was that ex-Surrealist Salvador Dalí would be coming to the Ball of the Little White Beds to extol the moral and artistic unity of the world in a setting of a subway entrance with a live rhinoceros hanging from above. It is just because Voltaire would never have believed it that I will be there.

I will be there to prove that the opposite of Voltaire is the rhinoceros. In fact, Voltaire has “everything inside”, while the rhino has “everything outside”, so that Voltaire is all depressions and the rhino, the most irrational and cosmic of all animals, is all relief. I too am all relief and there has often been speculation about the out sizedness of my mustaches, but fanatically I would have liked to have not two mustaches, one on either side of the nose, but two thousand two hundred and fifty-eight mustaches as hard and sharp as the spines of Mediterranean sea urchins, so that, prickly with mustaches all over, I might show the world that, as against Monsieur de Voltaire, Dalí believes in everything.

Morphologically, Voltaire is a body in retraction made up of dimples and hallows, whereas the rhinoceros is a compelling system of protuberances. In morphology as in metaphysics, the hollow is anti-virtue and protuberance virtue. And the rhinoceros also affords us a sort of Nietzschean “charity of power”.

St. Augustine the sublime wrote, “One enters truth through the gate of charity,” and I believe that for us artists of today those gates of charity are the Paris Metro entryways that feed all who have been starved on the abstract, starved on formlessness and plastic indeterminism, all those slaves to the non-objective. The gateways to the Paris Metro are the expression of infinite spiritual charity, the symbol and aesthetic expression of a great moment of the future. For the day is not far off when cybernetics will free us of want and deliver us into perpetual pleasure. Men, then, will have more than ever to become charitable to one another. They will then look at the subway entrances as at a source of new strength.