The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (6 page)

This representation of myself approximates the memory of my intrauterine person, which I might define as: a certain weight around two roundnesses–my eyes, very likely. I have often imagined and represented the monster of sleep as an immense and very heavy head, with a single thread-like reminiscence of the body, which is prodigiously maintained in equilibrium by the multiple crutches of reality, thanks to which we remain in a sense suspended above the earth during sleep. Often these crutches give way and we “fall.” Surely most of my readers have experienced that violent sensation of feeling themselves suddenly fall into the void just at the moment of falling asleep, awakening with a start, their hearts tumultuously agitated by a paralyzing fear. You may be sure that this is a case of a brutal and crude recall of birth, reconstituting thus the dazed sensation of the very moment of expulsion and of falling outside. Pre-sleep reconstituting the pre-natal memory, characterized by
the absence absence of movement, prepares the unfolding of that traumatic memory of a fall into the void. These falls of pre-sleep take place each time the individual either by excess of fatigue or by the paroxysmal need for escape from the day’s cares prepares for the most delightfully and exceptionally longed-for and refreshing sleep.

We have learned, thanks to Freud, the symbolic significance charged with a well determined erotic meaning that characterizes everything relating to aviation, and especially to its origins.
³
Nothing, indeed, is clearer than the paradisial significance of dreams of “flight”,
⁴
which in the unconscious mythology of our epoch only mask that frenzied and puerile illusion of the “conquest of the sky,” the “conquest of paradise” incarnated in the messianic character of elementary ideologies (in which the airplane takes the place of a new divinity), and in the same way that we have just studied in the individual pre-dream the frightful fall that awakens us with a start–as a brutal recall of the precise moment of our birth–so we find in the pre-dream of the present day those parachute jumps which I affirm without any fear of being mistaken are nothing other than the dropping from heaven of the veritable rain of new-born children provoked by the war of 1914, nothing other than the fall of all those who, unable to surmount the frightful traumatism of their first birth, desperately attempt to hurl themselves into the void, with the infantile desire to be reborn at all costs, “and in another way”, all the while remaining attached to the umbilical cord which holds them suspended to the silk placenta of their maternal parachute. The stratagem of the parachute is of the same nature as that which is utilized by marsupials; in effect the kangaroo’s pocket serves as a shock-absorber for the brusk transition of birth by which one is cruelly expulsed from paradise.

The marsupial centauresses recently invented by Salvador Dali also have this meaning of the parachutes of birth–“parabirths”–for thanks to the “holes”
⁵
which the centauresses have in the middle of their stomachs their sons can at will enter and leave their own mother, their own paradise, so as to be able to become gradually habituated to the environmental reality, while consoling themselves in the most progressive manner for the memory, unconscious but incrusted in their soul,
of that wonderful pre-natal lost paradise, which only death can partly restore to them.

External danger
⁶
has the virtue of provoking and enhancing the phantasms and representations of our intra-uterine memories. When I was small I remember that at the approach of great summer storms we children would all run frantically with one accord and hide under the tables covered with cloths, or else we would hastily construct huts by means of chairs and blankets that were meant to hide and protect our games. What a joy it was then to hear the thunder and the rain outside! What a delightful memory of our games! All curled up in there, we especially liked to eat sweets, to drink warm sugar-water, all the while trying to make believe our life was then transpiring in another world. I had named that stormy weather game “Playing at making grottoes,” or else “Playing at Padre Patufet,” and this is the reason for the last appellation: Padre Patufet has been since olden times the most popular childhood hero of Catalonia; he was so small that one day he got lost in the country. An ox swallowed him to protect him. His parents looked for him everywhere, calling, “Patufet, Patufet! Where are you?” And they heard the voice of Patufet answering, “I am in the belly of the ox where it does not snow and it does not rain!”

It was in these artificial ox-belly-grottoes, constructed in the electric tension of stormy days that my Patufet imagination reproduced most of the images corresponding in an unequivocal way to my pre-natal memories. These memory-images that had so determining an influence on the rest of my life would always occur as a consequence of a curious game consisting of the following: I would get down on all fours and in such a way that my knees and hands would touch; I would then let my head droop with its own weight while swinging it in all directions like a pendulum, so as to make all my blood flow into it. I would prolong this exercise until a voluptuous dizziness resulted; then and without having to shut my eyes I would see emerging from the intense darkness (blacker than anything one can see in real darkness) phosphorescent circles in which would be formed the famous fried eggs (without the pan) already described in these pages. These eggs of fire would finally blend with a very soft and amorphous white paste; it seemed to be pulled in all directions, its extreme ductility adapting itself to all forms seemed to grow with my growing desire to see it ground, folded, refolded, curled up and pressed in the most contradictory directions. This appeared to me the
height of delight, and I should have liked everything
to be always like that!

The mechanical object was to become my worst enemy, and as for watches, they would have to be soft, or not be at all!

¹
While engaged in the translation of my book Mr. Chevalier has called my attention to another chapter of “intra-uterine” memories discovered by his friend Mr. Vladimir Pozner in Casanova’s
Memoirs.

²
Phosphene: a luminous sensation resulting from pressure on the eye when the eyelids are shut.

³
Leonarda da Vinci’s preoccupations in this regard (which became crystallized in the invention of his flying machines) are most instructive from the psychological point of view.

⁴
A symbol of erection by the contradiction which this phenomenon offers in relation to the laws of gravity: the bird a very frequent popular synonym for the penis, the winged phallus of antiquity–Pegasus, Jacob’s ladder, angels, Amor and Psyche, etc.

⁵
In my last exhibition a lady asked me, “Why those holes in the stomachs of your centauresses?” To which I answered, “It’s exactly the same as a parachute, but it’s less dangerous.” This, as might have been expected, was loudly greeted as a mystification, but I am convinced that the reader who has attentively read the preceding lines will judge my answer otherwise, while readily understanding that it was not so eccentric as it seemed.

⁶
The present war has furnished me several striking examples on this subject: during the air-raid alarms in Paris I would draw the curled-up and foetus-like attitudes that people would adopt in the shelters. There the external danger was further augmented by the intra-uterine evocations inherent in the darkness, the dimensions, etc. of the cellars. People would often go to sleep with ecstasies of happiness, and a secret illusion was constantly betrayed by smiles appropriate to a satisfaction absolutely unjustified by logic, if one did not admit the presence of secret activities characteristic of unconscious representations.

CHAPTER THREE

Birth of Salvador Dali

In the town of Figueras at eleven o’clock on the thirteenth day of the month of May, 1904, Don Salvador Dali y Cusi, native of Cadaques, province of Gerona, 41 years of age, married, a notary, residing in this town at 20 Calle de Monturiol, appeared before Senor Miguel Comas Quintana, the well-read municipal judge of this town, and his secretary, D. Francisco Sala y Sabria, in order to record the birth of a child in the civil register, and to this effect, being known to the aforementioned judge, he declared:

THAT the said child was born at his domicile at forty-five minutes after eight o’clock on the eleventh day of the present month of May, and that he will be given the names of Salvador Felipe y Jacinto; that he is the legitimate son of himself and of his wife, Doña Felipa Dome Domenech, aged thirty, native of Barcelona and residing at the address of the informant. His paternal grandparents are: Don Galo Dali Vinas, native of Cadaques, defunct, and Doña Teresa Cusi Marco, native of Rosas; and his maternal grand-parents: Doña Maria Ferres Sadurne and Don Anselmo Domenech Serra, natives of Barcelona.

The witnesses were: Don Jose Mercader, native of La Bisbal, in the province of Gerona, a tanner residing in this town, at 20 Calzada de Los Monjes, and Don Emilio Baig, native of this town, a musician, domiciled at 5 Calles de Perelada, both having attained the age of their majority.

Let all the bells ring! Let the toiling peasant straighten for a moment the ankylosed curve of his anonymous back, bowed to the soil like the trunk of an olive tree, twisted by the tramontana, and let his cheek, furrowed by deep and earth-filled wrinkles, rest in the hollow of his calloused hand in a noble attitude of momentary and meditative repose.

Look! Salvador Dali has just been born! No wind blows and the May sky is without a single cloud. The Mediterranean sea is motionless and on its back, smooth as a fish’s, one can see glistening the silver scales of not more than seven or eight sunbeams by careful count. So much the better! Salvador Dali would not have wanted more!

It is on mornings such as this that the Greeks and the Phoenicians must have disembarked in the bays of Rosas and of Ampurias, in order to come and prepare the bed of civilization and the clean, white and theatrical sheets of my birth, settling the whole in the very centre of this plain of Ampurdán, which is the most concrete and the most objective piece of landscape that exists in the world.

Let also the fisherman of Cape Creus slip his oars under his legs, keeping them motionless; and while they drip let him forcefully spit into the sea the bitter butt of a cigar a hundred times chewed over, while with the back of his sleeve he wipes that tear of honey which for several minutes has been forming in the corner of his eye, and let him then look in my direction!

And you, too, Narciso Monturiol, illustrious son of Figueras, inventor and builder of the first submarine, raise your gray and mist-filled eyes toward me. Look at me!

You see nothing? And all of you–do you see nothing either?

Only...

In a house on Calle de Monturiol a new-born babe is being watched closely and with infinite love by his parents, provoking a slight and unaccustomed domestic disorder.

Wretches that you all are! Remember well what I am about to tell you: It will not be so the day I die!

CHAPTER FOUR

False Childhood Memories