The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (79 page)

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the road from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that “promised land” which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian “planetary notions.” Other pieces
of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the “antediluvian” bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas. Other pieces still have remained lost in the folds of that night of the future illuminated by fifteen stars large as closed fists filled with seeds of liberty, and stirred by the patriotic wind which, coming from the fifteen states, makes the erect, fecundating and immobile serenity of the banners even more glorious...

My metamorphosis is tradition, for tradition is precisely this–change of skin, reinvention of a new original skin which is precisely the inevitable consequence of the biological mold of that which preceded it. It is neither surgery nor mutilation, nor is it revolution–it is renaissance. I renounce nothing; I continue. And I continue by beginning, since I had begun by finishing, in order that my end may be again a beginning, a renaissance.

Will I now at last age? I have always begun by death in order to avoid death. Death and resurrection, revolution and renaissance–these are the Dalinian myths of my tradition. I began my idyll with Gala with the intention of killing her. Today, at the end of my “biography,” after seven years of living with her, and at the moment of my metamorphosis into the Dali of tomorrow, I decide to marry again, concluding the romantic portion of my book by a true marriage. But instead of remarrying in a “revolutionary” way with another, I want to do it again with the same one, with Gala, my wife, and this time I want it to be affirmed and made sacred by the Catholic Church.

On my arrival in Paris I too, with Miro, wanted to assassinate painting. Today it is painting that assassinates me, for I only want to save it, and no technique in the world appears to me sufficient to make it live again! Thus it is proved that Dali is equal to Dali, that I am always the same, that my paradoxical tradition is the real force of my originality.

I continue...

Europe too...

From the thousand-faceted light-house of liberty I look at Europe. The whole confused experience of my life, my surrealist revolution in Paris, my ascetic and tormented retreats in Spain, my esthetic voyages to Italy, all becomes clarified and assumes the objective lucidity that comes with distance and with the sentimental wisdom of tragic perspectives. Not only do I understand what has happened, but also I see the future.

The old Greco-Roman civilization, after the experience of all those vain revolutions, and beneath the inquisition and the distress into which war has plunged it, it too is painfully changing its skin, dramatically finding its new skin, the skin of its tradition, still buried under chaotic hell. Post-War Europe was dying of its political, esthetic and moral
revolutionary experiments which have progressively devoured, weakened and reduced it. It was dying of lack of rigor, lack of form; it was dying, asphyxiated by the materialist scepticism of negativistic, nihilistic theories, of “isms” of all kinds. It was dying of arbitrariness, indolence, gratuity, psychological orgy, moral irresponsibility and promiscuity, the dehierarchization, the uniformization of the socializing tendencies. It was dying of the monstrous error of specialization and analysis, of lack of synthesis, lack of cosmogony, lack of faith.

Europe awakened from the sufferings of the last war with the messianic and chimerical mirage of the “revolution” which was going to change everything in the world. Its hopes have again become war. Europe will awaken from the nightmare of the atrocious torture of the present war, disillusioned by the “goodness” of the revolutionaries for which it will have paid too monstrously dear. It will awaken, I repeat, with its eyes at last opened and dry, from having exhausted its tears, upon the reality of the holy resuscitated continuity of its tradition. The present war only confirms, before all else, the bankruptcy of revolutions. Indeed, the collectivist, atheistic or neo-pagan utopias of Communism or of National-Socialism, whether they mutually aid each other or devour each other, are destined at last to be annihilated and vanquished, both of them, by the individualist reactualization of the Catholic, European, Mediterranean tradition. I believe above all in the real and unfathomable force of the philosophic Catholicism of France and in that of the militant Catholicism of Spain. Europe, after the present catastrophe of its experience of the post-machinist and materialist civilization of the Post-War, will sink into a kind of medieval period, during which it will again come to lean upon the eternal foundations of the religious and moral values and forces of its past of spiritual civilization. Out of the imminent spiritual crisis of those ephemeral Middle Ages will arise individuals of the coming renaissance.

Let me be the first fore-precursor of that renaissance! No unity of Europe could be more solid, tenacious, and menacing than that of its common distress, and even if Russian atheism be annihilated by the neopaganism of the Nazi ideologist Rosenberg, this neo-paganism can in its turn already be considered as absorbed and annihilated in advance precisely by that “unity of Europe” which, while being a consequence and an ambition of the conqueror, paradoxically but inevitably assumes the annihilation of the latter’s neo-pagan and pan-Germanic ideology.
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For the unity of Europe will be made, and can only be made, under the sign of the triumph of Catholicism. And if I am asked again today where the real force of Europe is to be found, I shall answer again that in spite of all immediate appearances it resides more than ever in the indivisibility of its spirit, in that indivisibility which is materialized in Bernini’s two rows
of columns,
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the open arms of the occident, the arms of St. Peter’s in Rome, the cupola of man, the Vatican.

When, in the beginnings of the history of culture, the men who were to found the eternal bases of Occidental esthetics chose, among the formless multiplicity of existing foliages, the unique and shining outline of the acanthus leaf, they materialized, in so doing, the immortal morphological symbol which was destined to become nothing less than the cosmogonic constant of Greco-Roman civilization, opposing that of Asia and the Orient, the lotus-blossom. The “plant-dream whirl” of the acanthus leaf hardened into the luminous concisions of the first Corin thian capitals, and since then it has not ceased to be the tradition of esthetic intelligence, the continuous force of Minerva through the vicissitudes of blind and obscure forces of history. The acanthus leaf, become divine through the force of the conception of its first ornamental concretions, was destined not to die. It was to live in all the future architectures of the spirit, and while changing the skin of its dreams of growth, it was throughout the convulsive events of the Occident to roll, curl, grow heavy, furl and unfurl, live and live again, sprout and sprout again. Often it would disappear beneath the revolutionary storms, only to reappear more esthetically perfected than before, in the serene calms of the renaissances...

Men kill one another; peoples bite the dust beneath the yoke of the victors; others swell like elephant lice with the bloody geography of territorial ccnquests. Revolution and middle-ages seem then to have destroyed that anti-historic “little life” of the acanthus leaf about which no one was thinking. But precisely while no one was thinking about it, behold, this leaf is born anew, green, tender and shiny, between the cracks of a brand-new ruin. And it is as though all the historic catastrophes, all the suffering of man, all the upheavals, hail-storms, deluges, and chaos of the Occidental soul are destined, with their transitory, stormy apparition and disparition, only to come at all times to feed the perennity of the acanthus leaf, only to maintain the ever-renascent immortality of tradition ever green, new, virginal and original...

The end of a war, the crumbling of an empire, and a hundred years of disorder have served only slightly to modify the tilt, the outline, the ornamental figure of the acanthus leaf, immediately reappearing in the first, still tender moldings of the budding new flesh of civilization. The acanthus leaf continues. From the Corinthian capitals, what life of tradi tion is that of the acanthus leaf, dying under the Christ, born again heavy and fecund with classicism with Palladio, nuptial in Rome, apotheotic in style under Louis XIV, hysterical under Louis XV, orgiastic
and aphrodisiac in the Baroque, guillotined by the French Revolution, modest and haughty under the Napoleonic Empire, neurotic and mad in the Modern Style, confined to an insane asylum throughout the Post-War, forgotten by all today during the present new war!

But it is not dead! For it lives somewhere, for it is unfurling its new bloom of spiny beauty in the shelter of the barbed wires of daily events, and more precisely within the brain of Salvador Dali. Yes! I announce its life, I announce the future birth of a Style...

All those who continue to imitate me by redoing “primary surrealism” are doomed to the limbo of lack of style, for to arrive at the creation of a style, instead of continuing to disintegrate, it is necessary to integrate, and instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

Finished, finished, finished, finished, finished, finished, finished, finished–what is finished!

The day I went to visit Sigmund Freud in his London exile, on the eve of his death, I understood by the lesson of classic tradition of his old age how many things were at last ended in Europe with the imminent end of his life. He said to me,

“In classic paintings, I look for the sub-conscious–in a surrealist painting, for the conscious.”

This was the pronouncement of a death sentence on surrealism as a doctrine, as a sect, as an “ism.” But it confirmed the reality of its tradition as a “state of the spirit”; it was the same as in Leonardo–a “drama of style,” a tragic sense of life and of esthetics. At this moment Freud was occupying himself mainly with “religious phenomena and Moses.”
And I remember with what fervor he uttered the word “sublimation” on several occasions. “Moses is flesh of sublimation.” The individual sciences of our epoch have become specialized in these three eternal vital constants–the sexual instinct, the sense of death, and the space-time anguish. After their analysis, after the experimental speculation, it again becomes necessary to sublimate them. The sexual instinct must be sublimated in esthetics; the sense of death in love; and the space-time anguish in metaphysics and religion. Enough of denying; one must affirm. Enough of trying to cure; one must sublimate! Enough of disintegration; one must integrate, integrate, integrate. Instead of automatism, style; instead of nihilism, technique; instead of scepticism, faith; instead of promiscuity, rigor; instead of collectivism and uniformization–individualism, differentiation, and hierarchization; instead of experimentation, tradition. Instead of Reaction or Revolution, RENAISSANCE!