Maniac Eyeball (5 page)

I discovered the way to relive the wonderful moments of my meeting with Galushka – which is what henceforth I shall call her. All I have to do is stare at the wet spot on the ceiling of Mr. Truiter’s classroom. I can transform real shapes at will, making them first into clouds, then faces, then objects. One might say that in my mind there is a projection-machine that radiates out through my eyes and follows my scenario on the ceiling screen. Whenever I wish, I can run it backward, correct some part of it, make a detail clearer, multiply bodies and situations to the point of orgy. First I make up Galushka’s sled with its furs, then a battle of wolves galloping along, their ferocious maws foaming with rage. Soon the ceiling is no longer big enough. I take as my target the sleeping head of Mr. Truiter, and use his beard to weave an enchanted carpet, transforming that forest into a city sumptuously ornate with cupolas, towers, and crenellations; Galushka is its princess. My games can go on indefinitely; I am amazed at my own docile power, which like a gift from heaven reveals a whole world to me.

I had a friend, as blond as I was dark-haired, as pink as I was swarthy. Everyone called him Butxaques, because, along with tight pants that clung to his buttocks, he wore a jacket with many pockets, and
butxaques
is Catalan for pocket. I let him in on the secret of my monkey and Galushka, during our delightful walks to the fountain, arm in arm like lovers. Our mouths met each time we left each other, and I was transported by this communion. Each day I gave Butxaques another present, as evidence of my feelings. Soon, there were no more small objects left at home, much to my parents’ amazement. My mother was surprised when Butxaques’ mother came to see her and brought back a soup tureen I had given him. This was the beginning of our cooling off, and finally our break. My presents had to stop, and Butxaques wanted no more of me. He even committed a sacrilege: he grabbed my monkey, made fun of me, and threw it out into the street. To me, he became the infamous traitor. I hated him even in my dreams.

It often happened that I could not tell the real from the imaginary, and I might have let myself be carried away by the rush of delirium with no feeling at all for reality. This fact was perhaps the only sign that I was in a special state. But the delirium I experienced was such that nothing in me rebelled against the temptation: on the contrary, I constantly increased the opportunities for it so as to run my waking dreams as I wished.

My intention was, while remaining awake, incessantly to increase my desires by all my imaginative possibilities. But I was not vet aware that with my genius I would invent the paranoiac-critical method, and at the time I mainly had the happy surprise of discovering the fantastic secret strengths of my body and mind that began to awaken. It was during my childhood that all the archetypes of my personality, my work, and my ideas were born. The inventory of these psychological materials is therefore essential. And since at the same time I was coming to realize my uniqueness and my genius, understanding of this period is a veritable formula for becoming Dalí.

Few Examples Of “Delirium” In Life

It is a little before Christmas, the year I am eight, and I am in the dining room with my uncle. At the end of the table are laid champagne bottles, rare and precious wine for the family ceremony to come. I am at the other end, gazing at them. My uncle, in an armchair, is reading his newspaper. Suddenly the maid, going through the room, exits with a loud slamming of the door. One of the bottles is shaken up and begins to roll. I watch calmly as it rolls past me; at the end of the table, it falls to the floor with great noise and a wondrous ejaculation. My uncle, at this point, looks up from his paper and at me.

Meanwhile, another bottle, under the same impetus, also starts to roll. He can see I will do nothing to stop it and rushes to catch it. My father comes in, and my uncle says to him, in bewilderment: “Your son is not like other people.” Then he explains how I reacted to the situation. But to me this recital constituted a divine liturgy: the bottle starting to go, rolling along, crashing into a geyser, what a series of wonderful steps! How explain that to these people?

Of course, chance was not always good enough to furnish me such diversions. I had to fill in with my own caprices. I have told how I scratched my infant-nurse right down to the bone with a pin, because she refused to get me a sugar-onion, when the candyshop was closed; how I pissed in bed or shit in bureau drawers. My days were thus made up of demonstrations of my irrational will, which was instinctively to become my system of life and thought. Sometimes adults paid no attention, but most often my caprices goaded them to amazement, stupefaction, and anger. My father one day told me to go and buy him some bread for a sandwich, specifying that he did not want me to bring bread stuffed with a French-style omelet, the baker’s specialty. When I got back, he saw the bread stained with egg yolk, and demanded, “What did you do with the omelet?” “I threw it away,” I told him, “because you told me you didn’t want it.” Naturally, he flew into a rage and I seemed even stranger in his eyes, but he made no greater effort to understand me.

At the same period, on vacation at the Pichots’, friends of the family’s, I decided to take a corn bath. I took off my trousers and poured a sack of kernels out on me, to form a big pile on my belly and thighs. I was wallowing in the enjoyment of the corn heated by the burning sun, and the prickling of the kernels against me, when Mr. Pichot came into the loft, where I was. I have never forgotten his amazed look. Nevertheless, he said nothing to me, but just turned and left. I was very much ashamed of having been caught in my quest for sensual pleasure, and I had such guilt feelings that I found it hard to get the corn back into its sack. The handfuls of grain seemed to me as heavy as so much lead. I had to learn how to handle shame and guilt and make them work to my advantage.

The clouds, meantime, helped me pursue my waking dreams. Lying on the balcony, I watched the foaming waves in the sky as they went by through the brilliant light. Breasts, buttocks, heads, horses, elephants paraded before my eyes. I was witness to monstrous couplings, titanic struggles, tumults, and gatherings of crowds. All the phantasmagorias of my childhood came back to life at my command.

Sometimes, thunder joined in, and I made Jupiter’s lightning part of my game. With training I became so adept that nothing could resist my will. All I needed to do was look at an object for it to be transformed and re-created to suit my whim.

What Limit Was There To This Power Of Re-Creation?

My powers ceased before the ideal and the real: I mean the wonderful little village of Cadaqués that I adored, whose every cove and rock I knew by heart, and which embodied for me the most incomparable beauty on earth. No need to embellish it with the fantasy of the mind. I never tired of contemplating its charms; at such moments, there always intervened the grasshopper, a diabolical insect, whose leaps paralyzed me. But I overcame them both.

I liked to watch the progress and conflict of shadows and lights across the rocks, every day. I invented a game that consisted of attaching an olive to a piece of cork, and setting it at the exact place where the last ray of the sun set. As I drank water at the fountain, I watched my olive; then, when the thing had happened, when it had exploded before my eyes with the final ray of the sun, I grabbed it, shoved it up my nostril, and ran until I was winded and expelled the olive from my nose with the violence of my breathing. Then, according to a very precise ritual, I washed it off and ate it with deepest pleasure. It was a way of ingurgitating nature and its strength.

As a very small boy I loved grasshoppers, which I always looked for, so as to collect their richly colored wings; then one day I noticed that a little fish I had caught, a “drooler”, had a face just like a grasshopper’s. I don’t know why, but this horrified me so that I had a fit. All of my playmates, of course, took advantage of my terror. I almost fainted when one of my girl cousins squashed a grasshopper against my neck; I broke the classroom window by throwing a book through it when I found a grasshopper crushed between its pages. It became an obsession. Until the day when I invented an antidote for my trouble: a folded-paper bird that I transferred all my obsessions, all my fears to, by telling one and all I was a thousand times scareder of it than of a grasshopper. From that moment on, my persecutors gave up grasshoppers in favor of paper birds, and I put on a terrified act that delighted them. Naturally, I had to pretend to be terrified – which was nothing compared to my real fear – and that eventually brought about my expulsion from school. The Father Superior was in the classroom when I discovered a paper bird in my cap. I had to scream loudly, because the whole class was watching me. And I refused to handle the object that I was being told to bring up to the teacher. I managed to spill a bottle of ink over the bird. ‘Dyed blue, it doesn’t scare me any more,” I said, as I delicately picked it up and hurled it at the blackboard. Unfortunately, my explanation was interpreted as impudence.

Along with the paper bird, one other object became part of the Dalínian panoply of my childhood: a crutch, which I found in our friends the Pichots’ loft. Seeing this instrument for the first time, I immediately elected it my fetish. Its functional strangeness appealed to me and the materials it was made of pleased me. I loved the worn and dirty fabric that covered the armpit support. This crutch to me meant authority, mystery, and magic, conferring on me a veritable will to power. It seemed to me that through it I was going to experience the voluptuousness of new caprices. Even today the crutch still holds a very special place in my oeuvre and my mythos. Every Dalínian ought to have his own personal crutch as a magic wand.

Evenings, I enjoyed going into the garden and biting just once into each of the vegetables and fruits, onion, beet, melon, plum. I let a little of the juice run into my mouth through the wound made by my teeth, but did not even retain the bit of pulp, like a vampire drawing his strength from the sources of life.

In this way, I allowed desire to develop in me, ever more desire, and an unquenchable need for satiation. Irrational forces took possession of me, new senses came into place, while my strangeness grew and grew.

It was at Cadaqués that I was to perfect my illumination and the awareness of my situation. It happened because one day I noted that the leaves of a certain tree had a life of their own.

I mean, they seemed to move of themselves. I was soon to find out that a tiny invisible coleoptera hid under the branches, and its movement caused the leaves to flutter. The mimesis was such that it took sustained attention to tell the insect from the leaf. Unbelievable as it may seem, no one else thereabouts had yet observed this phenomenon. So I was able to mystify everyone by pretending I had the power to bring to life the leaves I set down on the table; they moved when I hit the table with a pebble.

My discovery impressed me profoundly; it confirmed for me my powers of observation and deception, and revealed to me one of the secrets of nature I have never ceased using in my paintings. The leaf-insect became one of the favorite subjects of my paranoiac- critical delirium, and a source of extreme pleasure. I named it
morros de cony,
which, in Catalan, means a woman’s cunt, and is symbolic of deception and evil-doing.

The image was very fitting. I could have taken it for my own as well.

“I BELIEVE I AM A RATHER MEDIOCRE PAINTER IN WHAT I PRODUCE. THE GENIUS LIES IN MY VISION,
NOT IN WHAT I AM IN THE PROCESS OF CREATING.”

Chapter Four: How To Discover One’s Genius

Genius: You either have it or you don’t. Then let it settle.

Watch for its first shoots. Don’t try to rush it; it might go to seed. Don’t cut its excrescences too soon. Allow it to blossom in all directions until a clear path asserts itself. Pluck the first fruit. Season to taste and serve hot. A simple recipe that parents of a genius ought to know by heart. But how to know they are father and mother of a genius? It takes one to know one.

My maternal grandmother, Anna, who was ninety, after the death of one of her daughters fell into a kind of mild madness and took refuge in the past, remembering in great detail the events of her happy existence. She spoke in verse, reciting Gongora. We had become strangers to her, and her only contact with reality appeared at meal-times when she showed her fondness for meringues. An hour before her death, she half-rose on her bed and exclaimed, “My grandson will be the greatest of Catalan painters.” Then she fell asleep forever.

Impending death can bring clairvoyance. I made my first drawing on a little table, sitting on a low bench. I also adored decalcomanias, and my sister Maria and I spent whole days splashing in a saucerful of water to try to get the bright colored pictures off. I had a good eye for forms and colors. One day, in a bunch of bank notes, I immediately spotted the counterfeit my father had playfully slipped into it. I was never without my Art -Gowens, a collection of masterpieces of painting that my father had given me as a present. And a pad of sketch paper was always at hand: I drew the belltower, the lake, portraits, and soon took to singing as I worked, almost buzzing through my closed lips. “He sings like a golden hornet,” García Lorca would later say.

I was nine. My parents sent me on vacation to the Pichots’, at their estate two hours away from Figueras: The Mill Tower. They were a family of gifted artists, comprising six brothers and sisters. Ramón Pichot was a painter, his brother Ricardo a violoncellist, Luis a violinist, Maria an opera singer, Pepito, though having no specialty, was gifted in many ways, and Mercedes was to marry the poet Eduardo Marquina.

Pepito Pichot, his wife, their adopted daughter Julia, and I left by horse and buggy. We got there by evening, when there was just enough light for us to make out the tower that gave the place its name; it seemed magical to me, what with the regular gnawing sound of the mill mechanism like the inexorable noise of the passage of time, and the massive vertical stoniness that seemed crushing to me. I had to wait two days for a key to be brought so I could get into the edifice, which had charmed me in advance.