cheech

...Never, never, never, never has the excess of money, of publicity, of success, or of popularity made me feel, even for a quarter of a second, like committing suicide; on the contrary, I love it all. Not long ago, a friend who could not understand why all this hubbub does not make me suffer, asked me, tentatively:
So you feel no suffering of any kind because of so much success?
No!
And, beseechingly: No even a very mild sort of neurosis? (His expression said: out of charity.)
No! I answered categorically.
Then, as he was excessively rich, I added: I can prove to you that I am willing to accept $50,000 right away, without batting an eyelash.
Everybody, especially in America, wants to know the secret method of this success. It is the paranoia-critical method that I invented thirty years ago, and I have subsequently practiced it with success, though at the present moment I do not yet know what it consists of. In a general way, it is the most rigorous systemization of the most delirious phenomena and materials, in order to render my most obsessively dangerous ideas tangibly creative. This method functions only on condition of possessing a soft motor of divine origin, a living nucleus, a Gala- and there is only one.
So, as a sample, Im going to treat the readers of my diary to the story of one single day- the one on the last eve of my last departure from New York- lived according to the most famous paranoia-critical method.
At the break of day, I dream that I am the author of several white turds, very clean and extremely agreeable to produce. When I wake up, I say to Gala:
Today there is going to be gold!
For this dream, according to Freud, indicated without euphemism my relationship to the hen with the golden eggs and the legendary ass who, when his tail was pulled, would shit gold coins, without mentioning Danaes divine diarrhea of semiliquid gold. As far as myself was concerned, I had felt for a week that I was becoming the crucible of an alchemist, and I had planned at midnight- on my last night in New York before my departure- to assemble a group of friends in the Champagne Room of El Morocco, including the four most beautiful models in town. The city was already resplendent, like the announcement of a possible Parsifal. That possible Parsifal, which I had promised myself to bring to perfection in the course of events of the day, prodigiously stimulated all my capacities for action, and my power, which was going to be supreme that day, would solve all problems in an expeditious fashion, making them click their heels in the Prussian manner.
At half past eleven, I left the hotel with two precise goals: to have a photograph of the irrational type made by Philippe Halsman, and before lunch to try and sell my painting Saint James of Compostella, Patron of Spain to the American millionaire and Maecenas, Huntington Hartford. By pure chance, the elevator stopped at the second floor, where I was acclaimed by a crowd of journalists who were waiting for me. I had completely forgotten that there was going to be a press conference in the course of which I was to present my design for a new perfume bottle. I was photographed at the moment I was given the check, which I folded and put in the pocket of my waistcoat, slightly irritated because I had no other solution except to draw out of hand the bottle stipulated in the contract, which I had not thought of since I signed the letter. Without hesitation, I collected a burnt-out flashbulb from a photographer. It was ice-blue. I exhibited it like a precious object between my thumb and forefinger.
Here is my idea.
It is not a drawing!
Its much better! Here is your model all ready for you! It only needs to be scrupulously copied!
I press the bulb down carefully on the table; it cracks imperceptibly and flattens out enough to stand up. I point out the socket, which will be its gold stopper. The ecstatic perfume manufacturer cries out:
Its as obvious as Columbuss egg, but you have to think of it! Now what, cher maitre, is the name of this unique perfume that is meant for the nouvelle vague?
Dalis answer is one word:
Flash!
Flash! Flash! Flash! everybody calls out, Flash!
They catch me at the door to ask me:
What is fashion?
What becomes unfashionable!
They entreat me to one last Dalinian idea on what women should wear.
As I leave, I answer:
Breasts on their backs!
Why?
Because breasts contain white milk which is capable of creating an angelic effect.
Are you alluding to the immaculate skin of an angel?
I am alluding to womens shoulder blades. If two fountains of milk are made to spout, thereby lengthening their shoulder blades, and if a stroboscopic photograph is made of the result, you will have exactly the angels wings of droplets similar to what Memling painted.
Armed with this angelic idea, I set out to see Philippe Halsman, with the firm decision to recreate photographically the wings made of droplets that had just surprised and fascinated me.
But Halsman is not equipped for a stroboscopic photograph, and I decide on the spot to photograph the capillary history of Marxism. To this purpose, I have six discs of white paper attached to my moustache, instead of my droplets. In each of the discs Halsman superimposes successively the portraits of: Karl Marx, with leonine beard and hair; Engels, with the same pilose attributes considerably diminished; Lenin, half bald, with a slender moustache and goatee; Stalin with thick hair limited to a moustache; Malenkov, clean-shaven. As I had a final paper disc left, I reserved it prophetically for Khruschev, who has a bald pate. Today Halsman is pulling out what little hair he has left, especially after returning from Russia, where that photo has been one of the most acclaimed of his book, Dalis Moustache.
I went to Huntington Hartford, carrying in one hand the last, faceless paper disc and in the other the reproduction of my Saint James that I had come to show him. I had hardly entered the elevator when I remembered that Prince Ali Khan lives on the floor above Huntington Hartford, and because of my congenital and indomitable snobbery, after a moments hesitation, I gave the elevator boy the reproduction of Saint James as a gift in homage to the prince. Immediately I felt cheated because I was entering Huntington Hartfords apartment not only empty-handed, but with an empty paper disc, doubly ridiculous because it hangs from a thread. I was beginning to savor the absurdity of the situation, telling myself that it would turn out very well. Yes, my paranoia-critical method would use this delirious event at once in order to turn it into the most rewarding incident of the day. The capital of Karl Marx was already making itself heard in the future Dalinian egg of Christopher Columbus.
Huntington Hartford immediately asked if I had brought the color reproduction of the Saint James. I said no. He then asked if it would be possible to go to the gallery to unpack the big painting. At that very moment, I decided, without knowing why, that the Saint James must be sold in Canada.
It would be better if I do another painting for you: The Discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus.
It was like a magic word, and it was one! Because then the future museum of Huntington Hartfords was to be erected in Columbus Circle, opposite the only monument in New York that represents Christopher Columbus, a coincidence that we discovered several months later. As I am writing this, my friend Dr. Colin, who is present, stops me and asks if I have noticed that the elevator in the building where the prince lives was manufactured by Dunn & Co. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of Lady Dunn earlier consciously or unconsciously as the buyer of the Saint James and it so happens that she subsequently did buy it.
I am still thankful to Philippe Halsman for refusing to put the portrait of Khruschev in the last paper disc. I think I have a right to call it My Columbus Circle now, because without it I would perhaps never have painted the cosmic dream of Christopher Columbus. As it is, the latest geographical maps discovered by Soviet historians have just proved exactly the thesis developed in my painting, thus making this work particularly appropriate to an exhibition in Russia. This very day a friend, Sol Hurok, is leaving with a reproduction of this canvas in order to propose a cultural exchange to the Soviet government that will unite me with two great compatriots: Victoria de los Angeles and Andres Segovia.
I arrived five minutes early for lunch with Gala. I have not time to sit down. A phone call from Palm beach, Mr. Winston guest is on the line and requests me to paint The Virgin of Guadalupe as well as paint the portrait of his twelve-year-old son Alexander, who I had noticed wore his hair crew-cut like a baby chicken. When I want to go and sit down again I am called to a neighboring table where I am asked if I would agree to make an enameled egg in the tradition of Faberge. The egg is meant to contain a pearl.
But I did not know whether I was hungry or whether I was feeling unwell; the sensation could just as well originate in a mild urge to vomit as in the ever-present erotic emotion that became more precise each time, at the thought of the Parsifal that awaited me at midnight. My lunch consisted of nothing but a soft-boiled egg and some biscuits. Here again, it should be noted that the paranoia-critical method must operate efficaciously through my paranoid- visceral biochemistry to add the necessary albumen for the hatching of all the invisible and imaginary eggs that I carried all afternoon over my head, these eggs which are so similar to the one of Euclidian perfection that Piero della Francesca suspended over the head of the Virgin. That egg to me became the sword of Damocles, which only the teledispatched growls of the infinitely tender little lion (I am speaking of Gala) prevented, each time, from falling and splitting my skull.
In the twilight of the Champagne Room, the erotic satellite of midnight already shone, my Parsifal, the thought of which drove me to become ever and more virtuous every second. After ascending in the elevator of princes and millionaires, I felt obliged by pure virtue to descend into the basement of gypsies. Exhausted, I was going to pay a visit to the little gypsy dancer, la Tchunga, who was going to dance for the Spanish refugees in Greenwich Village.
At that moment the flashbulbs of the photographers who wanted to snap us together stuck me as terribly nauseating for the first time in my life, and I felt that the moment had come to swallow them in order to get rid of them viscerally. I asked a friend to take me back to the hotel. Still with the phosphenes of the fried eggs without a frying pan behind my closed, jaded eyes, I vomited copiously, and almost simultaneously had the most abundant stool ever produced in my life. This reminds me of that diplomatic and Buridanic problem told me by Jose Maria Sert about somebody who suffered from such bad breath and who burped so fetidly that he found himself tactfully advised: It might be better if you made that one a fart.
I went to bed soaked with cold sweat that was like the dew of the alchemist, and one of the rarest and most intelligent smiles that Gala has ever seen appearing on my lips awakened in her gaze a question to which she could guess the answer for perhaps the first time in our life. I told her: I have just experienced the simultaneous and very pleasant experience of being both strong enough to break banks, yet being engaged in losing a fortune.
For without the scruples of Gala, whose purity has been patiently refined thousands of times over, and with her fierce habit of respecting the established prices, I could easily and without fraud have greatly amplified the already gilded result of my famous paranoia-critical method. So it was one more the paroxysmal virtue of the alchemists egg, as was believed in the Middle Ages, which permits the transmutation of the mind and of precious metals.
My doctor, Dr. Carballeiro, who immediately came to see me, explained that it was only what is called twenty-four hour flu. I shall be able to leave for Europe tomorrow, when I have just enough fever to realize my most secret, most precious Cledanist dream, the one that I have been pursuing all the while without realizing it beyond all the irrational and imaginative matter of the day, in order to achieve the triumph of my asceticism and of my complete and immaculate fidelity to Gala. I send an emissary to my guests to explain that I could not join them and called the Champagne Room to make sure that they were royally treated (though with certain restrictions) and this is how my midnight Parsifal, without eggs and without frying pan, took place while Gala and Dali slept the sleep of the just.
The next day, while I began my voyage back to Europe on the United States I asked myself this: I should like to know who today is capable in a single day (a day already contained in the space-time of the excremental egg of my matinal dream) of successfully transmuting into precious creativity all the shapeless and raw time of my delirious material? Who, with the lightning stroke of a single egg, could have attached to his unique moustache the entire past and future history of Marxism? Who could have found the number 77,758,469,312, a magic figure capable of distracting form its possible path all abstract painting and modern art in general? Who could have succeeded in thrusting my biggest painting, The Cosmic Dream of Christopher Columbus, into a marble museum three years before this museum was constructed? Who, I repeat, in one single afternoon, could have amassed, with Galas erotic jasmines, so much perfect purity of whitest eggs, surpassing all that had been or was still to come, and to mix this with Dalis most peccable ideas? Who, in fact, could live so much and agonize so much, abstain from eating so much and from vomiting so much and from next to nothing transmute so much? May anybody who can do better cast the first stone at me! Dali is already kneeling to receive it full in the chest, because it can be none other but the philosophers stone.
Now let us pass from the anecdote to the hierarchies of the category around the living nucleus of Gala, that soft motor which makes my paranoia-critical method function, by turning into spiritual gold one of the most ammoniacal and demented days of my life in New York. You will see how this same Galarinian nucleus operates when it is transposed to the supremely animist domain of the Homeric spaces of Port Lligat.
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Diary of a Genius (September 1, 1958), Salvador Dali