Re-reading Journal d'un génie - Dalí

Inspired by the art film "Little Ashes" and the many reproductions of works by the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, I purchased from Jumava the re-issued Latvian-language edition of "The Diary of a Genius" and spent a couple of weeks under its spell. It is a public diary in which Dalí describes several days from his life during the period from 1952 to 1963, answering several questions that interested the public - what is the creative process of a genius? What is Surrealism and what was Dalí's relationship with the Surrealist community? How did Dalí's paranoiac-critical method manifest itself? Like most of his works, he also dedicates this diary to his genius, his wife and muse Gala.

A diary - whether written secretly and never accessible to outside eyes, or deliberately put on display - reveals deep character traits, experienced gains and losses, thirsts and pains, love and hatred, everyday life and especially festive, significant events. Below are several excerpts from this genius's diary that subjectively seemed engaging and compelling.

Photo: Jean Dieuzaide

• I have never been able to be a mediocre pupil. At times I seemed closed to any kind of education, displaying the dullest mind on the face of the earth; at other times I would throw myself into studying with patience and such eagerness to learn that it unnerved everyone around me.

• The only difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad.

• Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary" supplied me on every page with legal arguments that incontestably testified to the non-existence of God. When I first opened Nietzsche's book, I was profoundly shocked. In black and white he boldly proclaimed: "God is dead!" I had just been learning that God does not exist, and then someone announces His end! The first suspicions began to stir in me.

• I considered Hitler to be the most authentic masochist of all time, possessed by the obsessive idea of provoking a war in order then to lose it heroically.

• Surrealism - that is me!

• I have always been dazzled by gold, in whatever form it takes. The simplest way to reject any submission to gold is to acquire it for oneself.

• Mistakes are almost always sacred in their nature. Never try to correct them. Do the opposite: rationalise them, understand them to the full. Then you will be able to sublimate them.

• Swallowing takes place in order to completely and absolutely identify with the beloved being.

• It is solely due to the uniqueness of my personality that some fine day people will be forced to take an interest in my works as well. This is far more effective than groping through an artist's body of work in search of his personality.

• To achieve victory, appearances are of crucial importance. Very rarely in my life have I descended to civilian dress. I am always attired in the Dalí uniform.

• To eat beans and bread every day costs very dearly. To earn it one must work incessantly and without ceasing. Conversely, if you accustom yourself to living on caviar and champagne, it costs nothing at all.

• Have no fear of perfection. You will never reach it.

• I believe the sweetest freedom a man can have on the face of the earth is the possibility to live, if he so wishes, without feeling the need to work.

• If you refuse to study anatomy, drawing, the art of perspective, the mathematical laws of aesthetics and colour theory, then I will allow myself to say what that indicates - it is laziness, not genius.

• When there is least time, what pleasure it is to do nothing!

• Time without space is unimaginable.

• September will begin in September.

• The only thing of which there will never be too much in the world is excess.

• Angels have everything "on the outside". They are perceived only by their "exterior".

• The best balls are the ones talked about more than attended. An egg in a frying pan without the pan, a ball without Dalí - that is Dalí.

• I am in a state of permanent intellectual erection, and all support my desires.

• Criticism is a noble thing. It is worthy of geniuses alone.

• It would not be a bad idea to pay a little attention to abstract painting. The more abstract it becomes, the closer its monetary value draws to abstraction.

• It is difficult to hold the world's attention in suspense for longer than half an hour. I have managed it for twenty years, and what is more - every single day.

• Never, never, never, never has excessive money, excessive publicity, success or fame made me wish to commit suicide... quite the contrary, I relish this uproar.

• What is fashion? - That which goes out of fashion!

• Painting is the beloved image that enters you through your eyes and flows out through the tip of a brush - just the same as love!