iRWA × Dalí
What Would Dalí Do · ¿Qué haría Dalí?
WWDD · What Would Dalí Do?

What would Dalí do?¿Qué haría Dalí?

“A madman and I are identical, but there is only one slight difference: I am not mad.”
— Salvador Dalí

Bring him a decision, a doubt or a dilemma. He answers in his own voice, from his own words — the fragments below on birth, clocks, the brother, the mother, gold and angels.

0 / 500
20 Questions · 20 preguntas

Twenty things to ask him. Click one.

In his own words · En sus propias palabras

The fragments. Los fragmentos.

Intrauterine paradiseParaíso intrauterino

  1. 01I intend to begin the book of my secret life at its true starting point — that of my intrauterine life.
  2. 02Dedication: "To my dear professor on the day of his birth. 27/IX-96." Dalí was born in 1904.
  3. 03Indeed, if people ask me what it was like "in there", I shall answer immediately: "It was divine, it was paradise."
  4. 04The intrauterine paradise had the colour of hell — that is to say, red, orange, yellow, and bluish, the colour of flames, of fire; above all, it was soft, immobile, warm, symmetrical, double, viscous, and sticky.
  5. 05The eggs I used to see before being born were immense, phosphorescent, and highly detailed in every fold of their slightly bluish whites; they achieved the iridescence and intensity of mother-of-pearl fires… with an opalised light.
  6. 06…the phosphenes or phosphorescing circles in the centre of which the famous fried eggs were formed.
  7. 07…These eggs of fire eventually melted into a very soft, amorphous white paste… a white of semen and egg white.
  8. 08This seemed to me the absolute height of delight, and I should have liked everything to remain like this forever!
  9. 09…a viscosity of semen and phosphorescent egg white in which I float like an angel stripped of his grace.
  10. 10…thus I would rediscover the precious images of my embryo, and even today, at will — though without the magic of those moments — I can immerse myself once more into that world of angels which is the aura of the divine…
  11. 11I am a congenital madman, and the arguably decisive period of my madness is located precisely 1.5 months before my birth, which is to say, within the womb of my intrauterine paradise.
  12. 12These image-memories which exerted such a decisive influence over the rest of my life.
  13. 13But it is evident that other worlds exist, yet they are right here — they are at the centre of the dome of the Theatre-Museum.
  14. 14…I felt the utmost delight, and I should have liked everything to remain like this forever. The mechanical object was bound to become my enemy, and as for clocks and watches, they would have to be soft, or not exist at all!
  15. 15When I was very young, I composed a painting about angels.
  16. 16Dalí habitually asserts regarding these phosphenes that "they are reminiscences of my intrauterine paradise, lost on the day of my birth."
  17. 17By thus playing at being an embryo of genius, I brought the genius to life; by provoking the conditions of his birth, I created the cause.
  18. 18I learned to live by filling, with my self-love, the void of an affection that was denied to me. Thus did I conquer death for the first time: through pride and narcissism.
  19. 19The deep structure of my personality is always binary: I am two-headed and double. There are two Dalís.
  20. 20Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man.
  21. 21I believe in the existence of angels.

Numbers, dates and clocksNúmeros, fechas y relojes

  1. 22The place where I was born is Figueres. The date is unknown because my birth certificate was burnt during the revolutions, and since I always do things by rule of thumb, I named an era for my birth and my father said it was not true. Ultimately, we have been unable to verify it, and no one knows exactly when Dalí was born.
  2. 23I believe I am seventy-something years old. (In an interview conducted in 1969!)
  3. 24Speaking of The Battle of Tetuan: …the accidental results provoked by the relations of combinatory art with mathematical formulas.
  4. 25The painting Daybreak, painted in circa 1930, was dated and dedicated in 1923.
  5. 26Clocks: The painting Portrait of the Briggs Family, clearly dated 1954, was actually painted in 1964.

VideosVídeos

  1. 28Dalí at the moment of emerging from the egg.
  2. 29It is now, for the first time, that Dalí is born from an egg without any kind of trauma… (emerging with Gala from an egg).

The brotherEl hermano

  1. 30I was born double, with a brother too many, whom I had to kill in order to occupy my own place, to obtain my own right to my own death.
  2. 31I have lived with death ever since I first knew I was breathing.
  3. 32In order to distinguish myself from my dead brother, I had to commit all these eccentricities to constantly assert that I was not the other brother — that I was Dalí, the living Dalí. Gala liberated me from my crime and cured me of my madness.
  4. 33In other words, I was viable. My brother was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too absolutely. How often a matter endowed with too absolute an impulse is utterly annihilated!
  5. 34My brother died at the age of seven, three years before my birth.
  6. 35I decided to resemble my dead brother as though I were his mirror.
  7. 37…by killing my brother, I win my own immortality.
  8. 38I murder my brother regularly.
  9. 39I am Pollux, the immortal brother, and he is Castor, the mortal one.
  10. 40I was born double with a brother too many whom I had to kill… buried in the middle of my soul, and whose indelible stamp I already bore like a wound, it never ends.
  11. 41I have felt that continuous presence of my dead brother as a trauma.
  12. 42Every day, with my own hands, with kicks and strokes of dandyism, I murder the image of my brother. Even today I have had flowers taken to his grave in the cemetery. He is my dark God, for we are he and I. Pollux and Castor. I, Pollux, the immortal brother; he, the mortal brother.
  13. 43I lived my entire childhood in the terror of thinking that I was my brother and that I was actually dead. I believed myself dead before knowing myself to be alive.

The motherLa madre

  1. 44With my teeth clenched from so much weeping, I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death with the swords of light that would one day shine brutally around my glorious name.
  2. 45My mother was distraught to the very depths of her being… His disappearance (his brother's) was a terrible blow from which she never recovered… In my mother's womb, I could already feel her anguish. My fetus bathed in a hellish placenta, and this anguish has never left me.
  3. 46I lived death before living life.
  4. 47This excess of love was a narcissistic wound inflicted upon me by my father from the day of my birth, and which I already sensed whilst in my mother's womb.

Gold and alchemyOro y alquimia

  1. 48Gold possesses a mystical value. In the Middle Ages, all mystics, including our own Ramon Llull, wanted to transmute matter into gold… the only way to spiritualise vile matter is by purifying it, transforming it into a precious substance…
  2. 49All art is born of alchemy and the overcoming of death.
  3. 50My entire life is an alchemy that transmutes everything into gold.
  4. 51…by making an object of alchemy out of my life.
  5. 52Like him (Ramon Llull), I believe in the transmutation of bodies.
  6. 53At my station in Perpignan, I occupy myself with reading about all the sciences, such as, for instance, the Mutus Liber of the alchemists, prefaced by the following words: "Therefore, this is the most beautiful book ever published on this subject, according to the experts, for in it are things that were never spoken. One needs only to be a true Child of Art to be able to understand it."
  7. 54All my knowledge, all my fragments of information, down to the last excrement, must rise cybernetically back towards God, passing through the polymorphous perverse stage of the newborn I once was, and of the DIVINE ALBINO towards whom, against the current, all my biology quietly flows — the reverse of the famous and agonizing "Ruins of Jumièges".

OthersOtros

  1. 55I am afraid of death. …I tremble like a leaf at the mere thought of it. I am terrified whenever I travel by aeroplane, by boat…
  2. 56I do not think it possible for Dalí to die. I do not believe in death. If I believed in it, I should start trembling like a leaf.
  3. 57Just you wait until I rise from the dead…
  4. 58Paranoiac-critical method: "I invented it thirty years ago and I have practised it successfully ever since, even though to this day I do not quite know what it consists of exactly, but it serves to make a lot of money."
  5. 59Why do you say that a parachute is a "parabirth"?
  6. 60I am inclined to believe in the existence of angels.
  7. 61It is evident that other worlds exist, of that there is no doubt; but as I have stated on many occasions, those other worlds are found within our own, they reside on Earth and, precisely, at the centre of the dome of the Dalí Museum, where the entire unsuspected and mind-boggling new world of surrealism is contained.

Fragments from Salvador Dalí's own writings and interviews, in translation. Numbering follows the Foundation's source file.