Ah, that mustache. Just thinking of that ridiculous, yet terrifyingly precise mustache—upturned toward the heavens like two sharp antennae—makes me feel strangely restless, as if caught in a peculiar fever. The world might whisper that it was madness, or perhaps the vanity of a world-class charlatan, but isn’t that a rather heartless way of looking at things?
Salvador Dalí. There is a strange vibration in the name itself, something that prickles the tip of the tongue. He was born under the glaring, relentless sun of Spain, yet within his heart, he surely kept a loneliness as cold and deep as the midnight ocean. If he hadn’t, he could never have painted clocks melting as pathetically as Camembert cheese.
You all know that painting of the limp watches, often called “Persistence” or “Memory.” Do not dismiss it as a mere prank. Time is, by its very nature, something that melts in such an unsightly, miserable, yet sweet fashion. This notion of time ticking away with rigid regularity is nothing more than a cramped little rule invented by bureaucracies and schools. When our souls are captured by the sudden loneliness of twilight, or when we are chasing the shadow of a beloved, time hangs slovenly from chair backs and tree branches. Dalí had the audacity—the troublesome, courageous audacity—to expose this truth that everyone suspected but dared not utter.
He never hesitated to call himself a genius. To a timid soul like me, that level of brazenness is dazzling enough to send a chill down my spine. But think about it. What a grueling penance it must be to firmly believe “I am wonderful” in this world. Most people live by peeking at others’ faces, wearing masks of humility, and slowly whittling themselves away. Yet he took that mask and reshaped it into a flamboyant, monstrous disguise, walking down the main street with his head held high. I suspect it wasn’t vanity, but a desperate, earnest prayer.
In Dalí’s landscapes, there are always elephants with spindly legs that look ready to snap, or lumps of flesh supported by crutches. To see these and think only “eerie” is the mark of an amateur. Isn’t that the very shape of human “pride”? We all stand on thin, precarious legs, desperately supporting the heavy weight of our self-consciousness. We are fragile things that would collapse into an unsightly heap without something to lean on. He drew that fragility in colors so vivid they were almost cruel.
And we must not forget Gala, his beloved. He worshipped her, painted her as a Madonna, and clung to her as his lifeline. To be so obsessed with one woman, and to scream that obsession through art—it surpasses the comical and reaches a kind of religious nobility. Every man, somewhere in his heart, seeks a single god who will grant him absolute affirmation. Dalí found his, and spent his life playing at her feet and fighting by her side. One can only bow in respect to such thoroughness.
Dalí’s paintings are precise. They are so excessively precise that they become unreal. Dreams rendered more accurately than photographs. There is a paradoxical aesthetic at work here: that if you push a lie to its absolute limit, it becomes a truth. He reportedly said, “I do not take drugs. I am drugs.” Is there any other statement so insufferable, yet so profoundly correct? When staring at his work, it is our own reality that begins to feel like a blurry, half-hearted illusion.
Perhaps we should learn a bit more from Dalí. To take our weaknesses, our distorted desires, and our strange obsessions, and to polish them without hiding, thrusting them out toward the world. That isn’t selfishness; it might be one of the most sincere ways to live. Instead of rounding off our edges to fit the world, why not keep our thorns and paint them gold? If we could live like that, this grey daily life might look a little more colorful.
Dalí’s mustache still points to the sky today. It is a loud mockery of our earth-bound routines, and simultaneously, a desperate compass needle pointing toward an invisible height. In that place where the hands of the melting clock have stopped, he is surely still grinning, watching our bewildered faces. Thinking of that makes me feel strangely cheerful, as if even my own miserable failures and petty worries have become, in their own way, a splendid piece of art.