Maniac Eyeball by Salvador Dalí Read Free Book Online Page A

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