Salvador Dali’s own words characterize him best: “‘Basically, I am a swine.’” This was said to his girlfriend in later years when “Dali describes sitting in his car, watching Gala [his wife, 10 years his senior, and still his wife at the time of the girlfriend] change a tyre in the pouring rain.” (35) We all know that one must separate the art from the artist, but Dali did his narcissistic best to prevent people from even trying. He enjoyed, without the least twinge of conscious, being a megalomaniac. He was so detached from reality that the surrealism of his art may not have been a stretch.

From page 42: “Dali’s understanding of a ‘surreal’ reality was like a constantly gathering force. He first identified it as something natural, like the Great Rocks that laid bare fantastic forms, and then later he attached Freud’s unconscious world to his theory. In his account of painting ‘The Persistence of Memory’ [with its iconic melting clocks] he describes having a vision. In the 1930s Dali developed the idea of a paranoiac-critical method: to unlock the marvelous, he now argued that one had to be in a frenzied state. He likened himself to a madman who hallucinates and uncovers multiple realities, commenting that ‘the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.’”

And page 68: “In later years he was inspired by modern science, and in particular atomic theory. To quote him: ‘Today the external world - that of physics - has transcended that of psychology. Today my father is Dr. Heisenberg.’ Reflecting Werner Heisenberg’s pioneering work in atomic theory, the ‘Exploding Raphaelesque Head' vaporizes matter into spiral particles. Later Dali identified the spiral form as the ‘rhinoceros horn’.”

Cowardly, traitorous, decadently amoral Trickster sociopath that he was, the man did have an eerie ability to speak from the id-most part of the unconscious. He said, “‘Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.’” (5)