Maniac Eyeball by Salvador Dalí Read Free Book Online

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