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an excerpt from:
Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution, Writings 1927-1933 by Salvador Dalí 1. Irony In a fragment collected by Themistios, Heraclitus informs us that nature loves to conceal herself. Alberto Savinio believes that nature’s game of hide-and-seek with herself is a phenomenon of self-modesty. It is a question, we observe, of ethics, for this modesty is born of the relationship between man and nature. And he discovers therein the principal cause which engenders irony. Enriquet, a fisherman of Cadaqués, told me the same thing, in his own language, the day when, looking at one of my paintings representing the sea, he remarked: "They are the same. But the sea’s much better in the painting because you can count the waves." And irony might also begin here, in this preference, if Enriquet were able to pass from physics to metaphysics. Irony, I have already said, is nudity; it is the gymnast who hides behind the pain of Saint Sebastian. And it is also this pain because we are able to measure it. Patience There is a patience in Enriquet’s rowing style which teaches a wise method of inaction; but there is also that patience which is a form of passion: the humble patience found in the maturation of Vermeer of Delft’s paintings; it is the same sort of patience that we find in ripening fruit trees. There is yet another kind still: a form between inaction and passion, between Enriquet’s oar-stroke and Van der Meer’s brush-stroke and this is a form of elegance. I would like to talk about the patience in the exquisite agony of Saint Sebastian. Description of the figure of Saint Sebastian I realized that I was in Italy by the black and white marble paved staircase. I climbed up it. At the top, there was Saint Sebastian tied to the trunk of an old cherry-tree. His feet were propped on a broken capital. The more I looked at his figure, the stranger it appeared to me. All the same, it seemed to me that I had known it all my life and the aseptic morning light revealed its tiniest details to me with such clarity and purity that it was impossible for me to feel distress. The Saint’s head was formed out of two parts: one, made out of a substance similar to that of a jellyfish, supported by a very fine ring made of nickel; the other, by a half-face which reminded me of someone very well known; sticking out of this nickel circle, a scintillating white plaster of Paris support in the shape of the figure’s spine. All the arrows had their temperatures marked and each bore a small inscription engraved on the steel which read: Invitation to the coagulation of the blood. In certain parts of the body, veins appeared at the surface of the skin with their intense blues reminiscent of Patinir tempests, describing curves of a painful voluptuousness on the pink coral of the skin. Reaching the saint’s shoulders, one could see the traces of the directions of the breeze, imprinted like exposures on a sensitive plate. |
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