Maniac Eyeball

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Book: Read Maniac Eyeball for Free Online
Authors: Salvador Dalí
Tags: Art/Surrealism/Autobiography
more small objects left at home, much to my parents’ amazement. My mother was surprised when Butxaques’ mother came to see her and brought back a soup tureen I had given him. This was the beginning of our cooling off, and finally our break. My presents had to stop, and Butxaques wanted no more of me. He even committed a sacrilege: he grabbed my monkey, made fun of me, and threw it out into the street. To me, he became the infamous traitor. I hated him even in my dreams.
    It often happened that I could not tell the real from the imaginary, and I might have let myself be carried away by the rush of delirium with no feeling at all for reality. This fact was perhaps the only sign that I was in a special state. But the delirium I experienced was such that nothing in me rebelled against the temptation: on the contrary, I constantly increased the opportunities for it so as to run my waking dreams as I wished.
    My intention was, while remaining awake, incessantly to increase my desires by all my imaginative possibilities. But I was not vet aware that with my genius I would invent the paranoiac-critical method, and at the time I mainly had the happy surprise of discovering the fantastic secret strengths of my body and mind that began to awaken. It was during my childhood that all the archetypes of my personality, my work, and my ideas were born. The inventory of these psychological materials is therefore essential. And since at the same time I was coming to realize my uniqueness and my genius, understanding of this period is a veritable formula for becoming Dalí.
     
    Few Examples Of “Delirium” In Life
    It is a little before Christmas, the year I am eight, and I am in the dining room with my uncle. At the end of the table are laid champagne bottles, rare and precious wine for the family ceremony to come. I am at the other end, gazing at them. My uncle, in an armchair, is reading his newspaper. Suddenly the maid, going through the room, exits with a loud slamming of the door. One of the bottles is shaken up and begins to roll. I watch calmly as it rolls past me; at the end of the table, it falls to the floor with great noise and a wondrous ejaculation. My uncle, at this point, looks up from his paper and at me.
    Meanwhile, another bottle, under the same impetus, also starts to roll. He can see I will do nothing to stop it and rushes to catch it. My father comes in, and my uncle says to him, in bewilderment: “Your son is not like other people.” Then he explains how I reacted to the situation. But to me this recital constituted a divine liturgy: the bottle starting to go, rolling along, crashing into a geyser, what a series of wonderful steps! How explain that to these people?
    Of course, chance was not always good enough to furnish me such diversions. I had to fill in with my own caprices. I have told how I scratched my infant-nurse right down to the bone with a pin, because she refused to get me a sugar-onion, when the candyshop was closed; how I pissed in bed or shit in bureau drawers. My days were thus made up of demonstrations of my irrational will, which was instinctively to become my system of life and thought. Sometimes adults paid no attention, but most often my caprices goaded them to amazement, stupefaction, and anger. My father one day told me to go and buy him some bread for a sandwich, specifying that he did not want me to bring bread stuffed with a French-style omelet, the baker’s specialty. When I got back, he saw the bread stained with egg yolk, and demanded, “What did you do with the omelet?” “I threw it away,” I told him, “because you told me you didn’t want it.” Naturally, he flew into a rage and I seemed even stranger in his eyes, but he made no greater effort to understand me.
    At the same period, on vacation at the Pichots’, friends of the family’s, I decided to take a corn bath. I took off my trousers and poured a sack of kernels out on me, to form a big pile on my belly and

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