Maniac Eyeball (43 page)
I decided to have myself hibernated. This is connected with my ultra-localism.
In Figueras, there is a small cafe that fancies itself headquarters for the sporting crowd, known as Sport Figuerense. A good share of my doings are aimed solely at that spot: I act in terms of what people there will say about me. International opinion means less to me than their reactions!
Let’s say I die. I don’t want them simply to say, “Dalí is dead,” but I want them to add: “Once more, Dalí is not like the rest. He’s had himself hibernated!”
Señor Carbona held court every evening in this cafe. The invariable subject of conversation at his table was his mausoleum. He wanted to have a magnificent tomb built. He described it to us in detail and everybody chimed in.
One evening the man who was scouting for the ideal place for him came on the scene. “Señor Carbona,” he said, “I’ve found it – a perpetual view of the Gulf of Rosas, a guarantee that no other building will ever be put up between the grave and the sea, no sea breeze, no mountain wind, and very cheap to boot.” Carbona listened impassively, then said,
“I’m not interested in it any more.” Everyone was floored. For six years, there had been talk of nothing else. Why, they asked, this change of heart?
“I thought it over,” Carbona said. “What if I don’t die?” That was the real question. Dr. Hubert Larcher, one of the world’s greatest teratologists, published a thesis a few years ago, titled
Will Blood Conquer Death?.
In it he asked: What if the body should not die? If our corpses became sort of life factories? There are people who, alive, are rotters, and have a foul smell (especially in our consumers’ society among bureaucrats who stink much worse than the others), but when saints die they become perfume factories. Not only saints, but also great courtesans.
According to Dr. Larcher, blood is in natural contact with the cosmos. It is perhaps the matter that alchemists were after when they peered into their retorts looking for what was inside themselves all the time.
More than fifty saints are known to have died in the “odor of sanctity” – which is not just an expression but an objective reality. Some saints’ bodies, after death, can distill scented balms and oils with infinite virtues, known as myroblytes. The most famous case is that of St. Teresa of Avila, who died at the age of sixty-seven and six months on the eve of October 15, 1582. The nuns had to leave the door and windows open all night despite the weather. Lilies, jasmine, and violets seemed to have pooled their most alluring essences in the aroma that was beyond compare.
Anything brought near the body took on the same scent. Her limbs remained supple, flexible, and the arms could be bent and stretched, as if she were still alive. The alabaster white forehead had lost all its wrinkles and the lips formed a half-smile.
The corpse, without slitting or embalming, was placed in a wooden coffin and lowered into a very deep hole dug beneath the grille of the nuns’ chancel. Workmen threw a great quantity of lime stone and moist earth over it before sealing the sepulchral stone. The nuns at Alba, the day of the funeral, distributed her clothes: her veil, her sleeves, her coifs, cut up as relics; even the bits of rope from her alpargatas. All of these things had the aroma that exuded from the coffin, and for nine months the scent kept coming through the layers of stone and earth of her tomb.
A year later, the rotted, earth-and water-filled coffin was opened: humidity had rotted the clothes, but the body itself, though covered with greenish mud, remained absolutely intact. Its flesh was soft, white, and scented. Most amazingly of all, perhaps, an oil was running drop by drop out of her limbs. The nuns gathered it on a great many pieces of fabric, which retained the scent. Her leather belt was removed, and the bishop of Tarazona asserted that eighty years later the belt still had its delicious aroma.
In 1594, Mother Anne of Jesus, sent by the superiors of the order from Madrid to the Salamanca convent, visited the tomb. She noted that on Teresa’s shoulders there was a bright spot that looked like fresh blood. “I applied a cloth which immediately became bloody; then an other, which was moistened in the same way. In the meanwhile, the skin remained intact without any sign of a wound or tear. I leaned my face against our sainted mother’s shoulder, reflecting on the great ness of this wonder, for she had been twelve years dead and her blood flowed like that of a living person.”
I would also cite the case of a Maronite monk, Charbel Makhlouf, who died at seventy on December 24, 1898, at the her mitage of St. Maron’s monastery at Annya (Lebanon). One time when the local police chief and several men were out hunting some fugitives from justice who they thought were hiding in the woods, they approached the monastery under cover of darkness. First they saw a dim light, which grew brighter and shone near the monastery door to the east of the chapel. They thought the culprits must be hiding there and rushed the place. But they saw nothing. They then knocked at the door of the monastery. When it was opened, they questioned and searched, but found nothing nor anyone other than the proper in habitants. When they told the Father Superior and the monks what they had seen, the Superior answered, “For some time already, we have been told that some people see a light where you did; it is the monastery crypt, where Father Charbel is buried.” The tomb was opened the following year in the presence of the Father Superior, some monks, and ten persons who had witnessed the funeral. The body was tender, fresh, and supple, though covered with white mold. Good red blood, mixed with water, flowed from its side, without any trace of corruption. Thirty years later, the body was placed in a wood coffin covered with zinc, still as perfectly preserved as ever.
And, in 1950, pilgrims noted an oozing at the foot of the wall enclosing the tomb: a pinkish viscous liquid. The monks opened it up again: from the sloping end of the coffin a blood-stained liquid was oozing out. The body was still as supple as ever, and its arms and legs could bend easily. Dr. Choukrallah, who examined the body thirty-four times in seventeen years, states that the phenomenon is so unusual that perhaps no physician has ever seen its like and the history of medicine records no other. If the liquid oozing from the body each day weighs but one gram, in fifty-four years, this would make 19 kilograms and 710 grams (or just under 44lbs.). But the average quantity of all the blood and other liquids in a human body is 5 liters (equal to 5 kilo grams, or about 11 lbs.). Less cannot account for more: this is a self-evident scientific principle. And the red liquid coming from Father Charbel’s corpse is far greater than one gram each twenty-four hours. Any source should dry up if not replenished over a period of half a century. This is a source of wonder that causes me wonderment.
What Dalí Thinks Of Survival Operations
Horace pointed the way to us when he wrote, “Can man ever write verses worthy of being preserved with cedar oil?” And Dr. Hubert Larcher has stressed the amazing preservation of cedar beams twenty-five hundred years old discovered at Nemrud in the ruins of the palace of Assurbanipal. With a new polish, they can be seen glinting to this day at the British Museum.
The amazing preservation of these beams is doubtless due to the resinous substance called cedarwood oil, derived from cedars, which preserves all sorts of objects: books treated with it are immune from worms and mildew.
In the same way certain meats, as that of the peacock, are said to be incorruptible. It can be deduced that living man resists continual changes by fending them off with what might be called the “balsamic spirit” of the blood.
Putrefaction then would be the result of the loss of this vital balm. And the liquid that sometimes flows from the bodies of saints would be a balsamic, scented secretion, with an oily appearance, that can also take other forms: milk, blood, water, or dew.
Larcher, who has specially studied these oils, notes that myroblytic products seem to have a remarkable power of penetration, not only to spread through the body but also to leave it and even go through obstacles. Collin de Plancy said that the oil of St. Nicholas before the translation of his remains worked amazing cures by sweating through the marble. Moreover, myroblyte oil is said to be combustible.
From every viewpoint, these balms correspond to the idea that the alchemists had of the elixir of long life. More paradoxical yet: though burned at the stake, the bodies of St. Theodore and St. Fulcran remained entire. So that the combustible oil may also give non-combustibility to a body.
The example of Bernadette Soubirous who could leave her hand exposed to the flame of a candle without feeling it at all is significant. And we have all heard of the famous fakirs who each year dance barefooted on beds of live coals without being burned. Perhaps that is their secret!
For, the most amazing thing is that such properties are not reserved to saints: In 1932, Dr. Graves reported the case of an English alcoholic subject to D.T.’s. Toward the second day of one such fit, his pulse was rapid, perspiration copious, and his whole body gave off an odor exactly the same as that of musk.
This odor was so strong for forty-eight hours that it could be smelled despite energetic ventilation of all the rooms the patient had been in. It disappeared with the other symptoms of the fit.
There is the case of François de Paule, who smelled of musk while alive. And Dr. Hammond records the case of a woman patient who smelled of pineapple during attacks of chorea (or St. Vitus’s dance) and a man who smelled of violets in fits of hypochondria. A young man of thirty observed by Dr. Speranza had a forearm that exuded a perfume analogous to benzoin, yellow amber, or Peruvian balsam. He also cites two even more exciting examples: A contemporary psychoanalyst had occasion to treat a person who exuded a cadaverous stench, and under analysis it was found the patient was living with the ever-present obsession of a departed one. As treatment freed the patient from this fixation, the odor became weaker, and disappeared when the cure was complete.
A patient one day came to a Parisian dermatologist to see what could be done about his foul body odor. After careful checking, the doctor localized the source as the left ring finger. He had the patient take off his wedding band and washed the finger with alcohol: the odor disappeared. Later recurrences showed that the disagreeable smell was linked to the wearing of the band. Psychoanalysis revealed the patient was suffering from certain repressions connected with his marriage, which translated themselves into these typical reactions at contact with the band, the symbol of his matrimonial burden. Analytical treatment cured the patient of his complex and the odor resulting from it, and thereafter he could wear the wedding ring without untoward effect.
This example [Larcher says] allows us better to understand how in the cases of certain mystics localization of good smells may have to do with the state of the soul, the contents of the unconscious or of the conscious, or certain objects of contemplation, visions, or spiritual influence. Man is thus his own laboratory, within the secret of his blood, which contains the formula of time-space and life-giving matter.
The Immortality Formula Chosen By Dalí
To create an effect at the Figueras café, so people would say, “Dalí did not pass away like other people,” I chose hibernation; but I am sure there will be sensational discoveries in other areas. Not enough money has been given to such research. All those who die are victims of Jules Verne, for he is responsible for all the adventures in outer space that take our attention away from real problems. There is nothing to be found out there. It is more and more certain that there is only one magical planet, Earth, on which the phenomenon of life is
the
miraculous phenomenon. We live at the antipodes of the upsetting thought of Pascal, who believed we were but tiny crumbs lost in the cosmos. Since Teilhard de Chardin, we are convinced of the opposite. All cosmic materials converge toward the phenomenon of life on Earth.
There are some reassuring signs that the end of all these devil tries may be near: the astronauts are already forced to drink their own piss – which delights me – and probably soon will have to eat their own shit![1] They will have to shit on trays so as to make mushrooms grow very fast; they will eat the mushrooms, shit again, and so on. It is very amusing to see that, thanks to these interplanetary voyages, man is reduced to consuming his own excrement. That suits me just fine. If interplanetary exploration were left aside, and more attention given to deoxyribonucleic acid, which fits like a key into the cell by the same process as nasal spectroscopy of odors, we would be much closer to immortality. After all, the conquest of empty space, without eternal life, is of no interest whatever!
One daring hypothesis poses the problem of knowing whether the phenomena of life are not partially exempt from the second principle of thermodynamics, which says that energy constantly dissipates and the universe tends toward immobility and entropy. In this area, statistical laws are not absolute principles: reversibility of phenomena shows the ineptness of our means of observation. Herodotus had al ready said, “Given time enough, everything possible happens.” We are interested only in miracles!
I believe with Blanc de Saint-Bonnet that saintliness is a gift of the human personality. Obviously, Dalínian saintliness is immune to definition, and until my ascesis vouchsafes to me an angelic, luminous, and transcendental transformation, I see no reasons for not ar ranging to be hibernated. The price is right. One of the best specialists in the field, Professor Robert C. W. Ettinger, believes that one can be deep-frozen for ten thousand dollars. It would cost fifteen hundred dollars to be frozen in liquid helium, and five hundred dollars per year for replacing of evaporated helium and upkeep, but if a communal mausoleum were created the cost per individual would be less. With ten thousand dollars invested at 4 percent thirty years before death, deep-freeze until resurrection should be fully taken care of. The Life Extension Society started by F.I.V. Cooper presently has seven hundred members planning to be deep-frozen. A certain number of periodical awakenings are planned, for the purposes of recycling, for with the acceleration of progress, which doubles every decade, in a century a frozen person brought back would have the mentality of a child of three.