Maniac Eyeball
credits
MANIAC EYEBALL
BY SALVADOR DALI (WITH ANDRÉ PARINAUD)
AN EBOOK
ISBN 978-1-908694-98-0
PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS
COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution
Originally published in French under the title
Comme On
Devient Dalí
by Éditions Robert Laffont, copyright © Robert Laffont S.A., Paris, 1973
All rights in the visual works of Salvador Dalí reserved by Fundación Dalí
Chapter One: How To Live With Death
I, Dalí, want my book to start with the evocation of my own death.
Not out of any sense of paradox, but so as to make understandable the genius of originality in my will to live.
I have been living with death ever since I became aware I was breathing; it has been killing me with a cold voluptuousness exceeded only by my lucid passion to outlive myself at every minute, every infinitesimal second of my consciousness of being alive. This continual, stubborn, savage, terrible tension is the whole story of my quest.
My supreme game is to imagine myself dead, gnawed by worms. I close my eyes and, with unbelievable details of utter and scatological precision, see myself slowly gobbled and digested by an infernal wriggling mass of big greenish earthworms, battening on my flesh. They set up in my eye sockets after having gnawed the eyes away and gluttonously start devouring my brain. I can feel on my tongue how they slaver with pleasure as they bite into me. Beneath my ribs, a breath swells my thorax as their mandibles destroy the gossamer tissues of my lungs. My heart holds out just a bit, for the sake of appearances, for it has always served me well.
It is like a big fat sponge gorged with pus, that suddenly bursts and runs out into a magma crawling with fat white maggots. And then there is my belly – putrid, stinking – that pops like a bubble full of carrion, a swarming compost of subterranean life. I fart one last time like an old volcano and tear apart in a dislocation of flesh and cracking of bones burst by the worms feasting on my marrow. I find it excellent training, and have been doing this as far back as I can remember.
The Earliest Dalínian Memory
I lived through my death before living my life. At the age of seven, my brother died of meningitis, three years before I was born. This shook my mother to the very depths of her being.
This brother’s precociousness, his genius, his grace, his handsomeness were to her so many delights; his disappearance was a terrible shock. She was never to get over it. My parents’ despair was assuaged only by my own birth, but their misfortune still penetrated every cell of their bodies.
And within my mother’s womb, I could already feel their angst. My fetus swam in an infernal placenta. Their anxiety never left me. Many is the time I have relived the life and death of this elder brother, whose traces were everywhere when I achieved awareness – in clothes, pictures, games – and who remained always in my parents’ memories through indelible affective recollections. I deeply experienced the persistence of his presence as both a trauma – a kind of alienation of affections – and a sense of being outdone. All my efforts thereafter were to strain toward winning back my rights to life, first and foremost by attracting the constant attention and interest of those close to me by a kind of perpetual aggressiveness.
Van Gogh lost his mind because his dead double was present at his side. Not I.[1] For I have always known how to encompass and control within my memory even my most atrocious recollections; I can even remember my intra-uterine existence.
I have only to close my eyes, pressing on them with my two fists, to see again the colors of that intra-uterine purgatory, the tints of Luciferian fire, red, orange, blue-glinting yellow; a goo of sperm and phosphorescent eggwhite in which I am suspended like an angel fallen from grace.
Dalínian Memories Of Fetal Existence: Intellectual Creation Or Obsession?
I was born like anyone else in horror, pain, and stupor. If I suddenly move my fists away and open my eyes wide in bright light, I again feel something of that shock which, filled with suffocation, choking, blindness, crying, blood, and fear, marked my entry into the world.
The dead brother, whose ghost was there at the start to welcome me, was, you might say, the first Dalínian devil. My brother had lived for seven years. I feel he was a kind of test-run of myself, a sort of extreme genius. His brain had burned out like an overheated electrical circuit through unbelievable precociousness. It was no accident that he was named Salvador, like my father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, and like me.
He was the wisely loved: I was but loved too well. In being born, my feet followed right in the footsteps of the adored departed, still loved through me, perhaps even more than before. The excess of love lavished on me by my father from the day of my birth was a narcissan wound, one I had already felt in my mother’s womb. Only through paranoia, that is, the prideful exaltation of self, did I succeed in saving myself from the annihilation of systematic self-doubt. I learned to live by filling the vacuum of the affection that was not really being felt for me with love-of-me-for-me; I first con quered death with pride and narcissism.
I have often seen death along my way under the most incongruous of circumstances. I am finishing a lecture at Figueras, my native city, before an audience including all of the local authorities. It is 1928. They have come to see and hear a local boy. I have put on an aggressive tone to shake up the sleepy locals, and at the end I almost shout at them, “Ladies and gentlemen, the lecture is over.” The crowd, hard put to keep up with me, has not yet understood I have dismissed it. I keep quiet. There is a silent, motionless moment, and suddenly the Mayor, sitting right in front of me, almost at my feet, drops dead as a doornail. They get up all around, full of excite ment and horror, carrying on. But I just stay where I am, without moving, contemplating the haggard face, the eyes forever closed, whose last expression had been animated by my thought.
Is Dalí Afraid Of Death?
Through that thought, the dead man was branded with the Dalínian seal. To me, the dead are a downy pillow on which I go to sleep, but I have often felt a horror of death.
I am five years old. It is 1909. One of my cousins, who is twenty, has shot a bat in the eye with his carbine, and put it in a pail. I throw a tantrum, and demand that he give me the small animal, and then run to put it in one of my secret places, a warehouse that I often hide in. I watch the trembling, suffering little mammal, shrink ing inside its prison. I speak to it, hold it, kiss its downy head. I begin to adore it. And the next day, first thing, I run to see it. I raise the pail, and find the animal already dying, lying on its back, with ants swarming over it; I can see its little panting tongue and the old man’s teeth around its nose. I regard it with infinite pity, then take it up and, instead of kissing it as I had first intended to do, suddenly in a kind of rage with one bite all but behead it. I am suddenly seized by the horror of what I have done, by the taste of blood I can feel in my mouth, and I frantically throw the little corpse into the washing vat at my feet alongside a large fig tree. I run away, tears streaming from my eyes. I turn back, however, but the bat has dis appeared.
Big black figs are floating on the surface of the water, like spots of mourning. Even today the memory of this can give me the shivers, and often just seeing some black spots is enough to bring that bat’s death back to me.
As a child, I also had a porcupine that disappeared one day. A week later, I found it dead in the henhouse. But I remember that at first I thought it was alive, for its bristles were being so actively moved by the packet of maggots oozing around the corpse. The head was disappearing under a greenish gelatinous mess. At that moment I lived to its delirious limit the strange fascination of that death, that unspeakable corpse, the rotting stink that rose from the biological offal. I was able to tear my eyes away only because my legs were buckling under me and I had to flee the stench. It was just the time when the gathering of lime-blossoms started, and as I came out of the henhouse, a-tremble with horror, I was blessed with the soothing scent of their aromatic leaves. But the fascination was too great. I held my breath and went back into the chicken coop once more to inspect the decomposing carrion. Then, back out to breathe the fresh air, and back again into the henhouse. Stench, fragrance, shadow and light, corpse and beauty of flowers: they kept alternating in a hysterical ballet until I was totally overcome by the desire, the need to touch that pile of vermin. I resisted at first and, the better to outwit my horrible desire, tried to jump over the porcupine. But by some sort of need to fail, I slipped and fell, with my nose almost right down in the mess of worms. I was horribly disgusted and, grabbing a grubbing-hoe, which to me was endowed with fetishistic powers, used the flat of the blade slowly to crush the porcupine: its skin finally gave way, revealing the teeming flesh beneath. I dropped the hoe and started to run away. I was breathless; the shock was overwhelming. I felt crushed. Yet I came back to retrieve my soiled fetish, which I then went and soaked endlessly in the waters of a stream, before throwing it down on the stacks of lime-blossoms drying in the sun. But I still had to let it soak in the dew of daybreak before it lost the stench of putrefaction. I had just brushed up against the horror of death.
How Dalí Remembers His Father’s Death
My father was dead when, having gotten there too late, I kissed his cold hard mouth with my ardently living lips. I have often said, paraphrasing Francisco de Quevedo, that the greatest of sensual enjoyments would be to sodomize my dying father. Can there indeed be for any man a more awful profanation or a greater proof of his own life, to give himself and to take, than this sacrilege, this defiance? Only my cowardice and circumstances kept me from committing it, but I can still dream of doing it.
García Lorca, whom I met in 1919 at the university, sometimes acted out his own death. I can still see his face, deadly and terrible, as he lay on his bed, trying to go through the stages of his slow decomposition. Putrefaction, in his version, lasted for five days. Then he described the casket, his coffining, the full scene of its closing, and the progress of the hearse through the bumpy streets of Granada. Then, when he was quite sure he had us all tense with terror, he would suddenly sit up, break into a wild gust of laughter that displayed all of his fine white teeth, and send us scurrying out the door as he went back to bed, to sleep quiet and free.
As a child, the slightest sign of death twisted my belly with fear, and the polymorphous perversity that I displayed so early was doubtless a deep reaction to the forces of life going into action within me against the forces of death. Born double, with an extra brother, I first had to kill him off in order to assume my own place, my own right to my own death. I remember once having atrociously scratched the cheek of my nanny with a pin, because a candyshop was closed, but mainly because her smooth, red, docile cheek was like a slate I could write my name on in blood: in Catalan, Dalí means Desire.
At five, I pushed a beautiful, curly-headed, little blond playmate off into space as I was helping him along on his tricycle. Going over a bridge that had no railing, and having made sure no one could see us, I shoved him off from a height of several meters down on to the rocks below, then pretending to be heartbroken ran home to get help. He was bleeding profusely.
The whole house was in an uproar. I can still see myself, on a little rocking chair, the whole time, rocking back and forth as I snacked on fruit and watched the feverish commotion of the parents, enjoying the peaceful dark ness in my corner of the sitting room; without the slightest remorse, as if relieved by my act, more than ever the master of my life.
A year later, I kick my little three-year-old sister, who is crawling on all fours, right in the head. I am going to go gaily on my way. But unfortunately my father sees me do it. He locks me up. I hear the latch snapping shut. I can picture his hugeness beyond the door. But I stay motionless and furious.
He is punishing me with the lock-up, so I may not see the comet that the whole family is watching for with eyes riveted to the skies. I alone am deprived of the unique spectacle. At the thought, I start to sob until I choke. Every tear in my body pours out and I scream so loud I lose my voice, until my mother starts to worry about it, and soon has him worried, too. I immediately understand how I can turn such situa tions to my advantage. I am six.