Saint Sebastian
By
Salvador Dalí
Irony Heraclitus, in a passage quoted by Themistius, informs us that Nature enjoys hiding itself. Alberto Savinio thinks that this concealment is an expression of self-modesty. It is an ethical matter—he informs us—for this modesty is born out of the relationship between Nature and Man. And he finds in this the prime cause from which springs irony. Enriquet, the Cadaqués fisherman, one day told me these same things in his own idiom when, looking at one of my paintings that represented the sea, he said: “You’ve captured it exactly. But it’s better in the painting, because there you can count the waves.” In such a preference irony could also begin, if Enriquet were able to move from physics to metaphysics. |
As I have said, irony is nudity, the gymnast who hides behind Saint Sebastian’s pain. And because it can be recounted, it is also this pain.
Patience
In Enriquet’s rowing a patience is present that is a wise form of inaction; but there is also a patience that is a form of passion, the humble patience in the late paintings of Vermeer of Delft, which exhibit the same patience as that of fruit trees ripening.
And there is yet another form: a form between inaction and passion, between Enriquet’s rowing and the painting of Van de Meer, which is a form of elegance. I refer to the patience and exquisite death agonies of Saint Sebastian.
Patience
In Enriquet’s rowing a patience is present that is a wise form of inaction; but there is also a patience that is a form of passion, the humble patience in the late paintings of Vermeer of Delft, which exhibit the same patience as that of fruit trees ripening.
And there is yet another form: a form between inaction and passion, between Enriquet’s rowing and the painting of Van de Meer, which is a form of elegance. I refer to the patience and exquisite death agonies of Saint Sebastian.
Description of the Figure of Saint Sebastian
I realized I was in Italy because the stairs I climbed were black-and-white marble flagstones. At the top was Saint Sebastian, tied to the trunk of an old cherry tree. His feet rested on a broken capital. As I more closely observed his face, the older he appeared. Still, I had the impression that I had known him all my life, and the aseptic morning light revealed the most minor details with such clarity and purity that it was impossible for me to be anxious. |
The saint’s head was divided into two parts: one side was composed of a substance similar to that of a jellyfish and was sustained by an exceedingly delicate nickel circle; the other, which took up half a face, reminded me of a well known person; from the latter circle emerged a very white plaster support that seemed to be the figure’s dorsal column. The arrows all bore an indication of their temperature and a tiny inscription engraved on steel read: Invitation to the Coagulation of the Blood. The veins appeared on various parts of the body’s surface with their deep, Patinir-storm blue, and traced curves of a painful voluptuousness on the pink coral skin.
When they reached the saint’s shoulders, the movements of the breeze were imprinted as if on a photographic plate.
Trade Winds and Counter-Trade Winds
The tenuous winds stopped short upon touching his knees. The martyr’s halo appeared to be composed of rock crystal, in whose hardened whiskey a rough and bleeding starfish bloomed.
On the sand, strewn with shells and mica, precise instruments belonging to an unknown physics projected their explicative shadows, offering their crystals and aluminum to the disinfected light. A few letters sketched by Giorgio Morandi indicated: Distilled Devices.
When they reached the saint’s shoulders, the movements of the breeze were imprinted as if on a photographic plate.
Trade Winds and Counter-Trade Winds
The tenuous winds stopped short upon touching his knees. The martyr’s halo appeared to be composed of rock crystal, in whose hardened whiskey a rough and bleeding starfish bloomed.
On the sand, strewn with shells and mica, precise instruments belonging to an unknown physics projected their explicative shadows, offering their crystals and aluminum to the disinfected light. A few letters sketched by Giorgio Morandi indicated: Distilled Devices.
The Sea Breeze
Every minute wafted the smell of the sea, constructed and anatomical like bits of a crab. I inhaled. Nothing was mysterious anymore. Saint Sebastian’s pain was only a pretext for an aesthetics of objectivity. I inhaled again, and this time I closed my eyes, not out of mysticism, not to perceive more clearly my inner I--as we might platonically say--but for the simple sensuousness of my eyelids’ physiology. Later I slowly read the names of the devices, and their terse indications; each annotation was a departure point for an entire series of intellectual delectations, and a new scale of precisions for normalities thus far unknown. |
Heliometer for Deaf Mutes
One of the devices was called Heliometer for Deaf Mutes. The name was already an indication of its connection with astronomy, but its composition, above all showed this. It was an instrument of high physical poetry created by distances and by relationships between these distances; these relationships were geometrically expressed is some of the parts, and arithmetically in others; in the center, a simple device measured the saint’s death agonies. The mechanism consisted of a small dial of graduated plaster, in the center of which a red blood clot, pressed between two crystals, acted as a barometer sensitive to each new wound.
In the heliometer’s upper part was Saint Sebastian’s magnifying glass.
This was at the same time concave, convex and flat. Words engraved on the platinum frame of its clean, precise crystals read: Invitation to Astronomy; and beneath, in raised letters, as if in relief: Holy Objectivity. On a numbered crystal rod more could be read: Measurement of the Apparent Distances Between Pure Aesthetic Values, and off on one side, on an extremely fragile test tube, was this subtle proclamation: Apparent Distances and Arithmetical Measurements Between Pure Sensual Values. The test tube was half full of seawater.
Saint Sebastian’s heliometer neither had music not voice and in some places was blind. This device’s blind spots corresponded to its sensitive algebra, and to those that intended to make concrete that which is most insubstantial and miraculous.
Invitation to Astronomy
I place my eye on the lens, the product of a slow distillation both numerical and intuitive.
Each water drop, a number. Each blood drop, a geometry.
I started to look. To begin with, my eyelids’ caress against the wise surface. Then I saw a series of clear sights, perceived in such a necessary arrangement of measurements and proportions that each detail was revealed to me like a simple and eurythmic architectural organism.
On the white packet-boat’s deck a girl without breasts was teaching the sailors, imbued by the south wind, to do the Black Bottom dance. Aboard these ships, the Charleston and blues dancers each morning found Venus in the bottom of their gin cocktails, at the hour of their pre-aperitifs.
This was all exactly opposite of vagueness; everything could be clearly observed, with the clarity of a magnifying glass. When my eyes fixed on any detail, this detail grew larger like a movie close-up, and acquired its sharpest plastic quality.
I see the girl playing polo in the nickel-plated headlight of the Isotta Fraschini. I direct my curiosity only to her eye, and this takes up the entire visual area. This one eye, enlarged suddenly, and now the sole spectacle, contains the total depth and total surface of a sea in which all poetic suggestions navigate and all plastic possibilities are stabilized; each eyelash is a new direction and a new quiet interlude; the oily and sweet mascara forms, in its microscopic enlargement, precise spheres through which can be seen the Virgin of Lourdes and Giorgio de Chirico’s painting Evangelical Still-Life (1926).
Upon reading the tender letters written on the cookie
Superiéur
Petit Beurre
Biscuit
my eyes whelled up with tears.
An arrow mark, and beneath: Address Chirico; Toward the Limit of a Metaphysics.
The thin blood line is a dumb and sufficient plan of the underground. I don’t want to continue until I attain the life of the radiant leucocyte. The red ramifications become a small stain, rapidly passing through all their decreasing phases. I see the eye in its original dimension in the depths of the headlight’s concave mirror, a unique organism, which in its reflection precise fish swim in their watery, lachrymal medium.
Before I continued to watch, I paused once more to study the details of the saint. Saint Sebastian, stripped of symbolism, was a fact in his unique and simple presence. It is possible solely with such objectivity to notice calmly a system of stars. I resumed my heliometric gazing. I was completely aware that I was in motion within Movietone Fox’s anti-artistic and astronomical orbit.
The spectacles follow one another, simple facts engendering new lyrical states.
The girl in the bar plays “Dinah” on her little gramophone, while she prepares gin for the drivers: inventors of subtle mixtures of games of chance and black superstition in their engines’ mathematics.
At Portland Racetrack, the racing blue Bugattis, observed from the airplane, achieve the dreamlike movement of hydroids spiraling down to the bottom of the fishtank, parachutes open.
Josephine Baker’s rhythm in slow motion coincides with the purest and slowest growth of a flower produced by the cinematographic accelerator.
Cinematographic breeze once more. White gloves and black keys of Tom Mix, pure as the final amorous embraces of fish; crystals and stars of Marcoussis.
Adolph Menjou, in an anti-transcendental atmosphere, affords us a new dinner jacket dimensionality and ingenuity (now only cynically acceptable).
Buster Keaton--Here’s true poetry, Paul Valéry!--post-machine-age avenues, Florida, Le Corbusier, Los Angeles. The Pulchritude and eurythmics of the standardized implement, aseptic, anti-artistic variety shows, concrete, humble, animated, exuberant, comforting clarities, to oppose a sublime, deliquescent, bitter, putrescent art...
Laboratory, clinic.
The white clinic, surrounding the pure chromolithography of a lung, becomes silent.
Within the panes of the glass case the chloroformed scalpel sleeps like a Sleeping Beauty in the woods of nickels and enamel, where embraces are impossible.
The American magazines offer our eyes Girls, Girls, Girls, and under the Antibes sun, Man Ray captures a magnolia’s clear portrait, better for our flesh than the Futurists’ tactile creations.
At the Grand Hotel, shoes in a glass case.
Tailors’ dressmaker forms. Forms silent in the electric splendor of the shop windows, with their neutral mechanical sensualities and disturbing articulations. Living forms, sweetly stupid, who strut with the alternative and senseless rhythm of hips and shoulders, and bear in their arteries their costumes’ new, reinvented physiologies.
Putrefaction
The opposite side of Saint Sebastian’s magnifying glass corresponded to putrefaction. Everything, seen through it, was anguish, darkness, and even tenderness--tenderness because of the exquisite absence of spirit and naturalness.
Preceded by I’m not sure which of Dante’s lines, I saw the entire world of the putrescent philistines: the lachrymose and transcendental artists, greatly distanced from all clarity, cultivators of all germs, ignorant of the precision of the double, graduated decimeter; the family who purchases “objets d’art” to place on top of the piano; the municipal worker; the associate member; the psychology professor... I didn’t want to go on. The delicate mustache of a ticket seller moved me. In my heart I felt all its exquisite, Franciscan and intensely delicate poetry. Despite my urge to shed tears, my lips smiled. I stretched out on the sand. The waves rolled into the shore with the quiet hum of Henri Rousseau’s Bohémienne endormie.
- translated from the Catalan by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
“Sant Sebastià” was published in L’Amic de les Arts, Vol II, No. 16, 31 July 1927
It was not among Dalí’s publications in book form.
One of the devices was called Heliometer for Deaf Mutes. The name was already an indication of its connection with astronomy, but its composition, above all showed this. It was an instrument of high physical poetry created by distances and by relationships between these distances; these relationships were geometrically expressed is some of the parts, and arithmetically in others; in the center, a simple device measured the saint’s death agonies. The mechanism consisted of a small dial of graduated plaster, in the center of which a red blood clot, pressed between two crystals, acted as a barometer sensitive to each new wound.
In the heliometer’s upper part was Saint Sebastian’s magnifying glass.
This was at the same time concave, convex and flat. Words engraved on the platinum frame of its clean, precise crystals read: Invitation to Astronomy; and beneath, in raised letters, as if in relief: Holy Objectivity. On a numbered crystal rod more could be read: Measurement of the Apparent Distances Between Pure Aesthetic Values, and off on one side, on an extremely fragile test tube, was this subtle proclamation: Apparent Distances and Arithmetical Measurements Between Pure Sensual Values. The test tube was half full of seawater.
Saint Sebastian’s heliometer neither had music not voice and in some places was blind. This device’s blind spots corresponded to its sensitive algebra, and to those that intended to make concrete that which is most insubstantial and miraculous.
Invitation to Astronomy
I place my eye on the lens, the product of a slow distillation both numerical and intuitive.
Each water drop, a number. Each blood drop, a geometry.
I started to look. To begin with, my eyelids’ caress against the wise surface. Then I saw a series of clear sights, perceived in such a necessary arrangement of measurements and proportions that each detail was revealed to me like a simple and eurythmic architectural organism.
On the white packet-boat’s deck a girl without breasts was teaching the sailors, imbued by the south wind, to do the Black Bottom dance. Aboard these ships, the Charleston and blues dancers each morning found Venus in the bottom of their gin cocktails, at the hour of their pre-aperitifs.
This was all exactly opposite of vagueness; everything could be clearly observed, with the clarity of a magnifying glass. When my eyes fixed on any detail, this detail grew larger like a movie close-up, and acquired its sharpest plastic quality.
I see the girl playing polo in the nickel-plated headlight of the Isotta Fraschini. I direct my curiosity only to her eye, and this takes up the entire visual area. This one eye, enlarged suddenly, and now the sole spectacle, contains the total depth and total surface of a sea in which all poetic suggestions navigate and all plastic possibilities are stabilized; each eyelash is a new direction and a new quiet interlude; the oily and sweet mascara forms, in its microscopic enlargement, precise spheres through which can be seen the Virgin of Lourdes and Giorgio de Chirico’s painting Evangelical Still-Life (1926).
Upon reading the tender letters written on the cookie
Superiéur
Petit Beurre
Biscuit
my eyes whelled up with tears.
An arrow mark, and beneath: Address Chirico; Toward the Limit of a Metaphysics.
The thin blood line is a dumb and sufficient plan of the underground. I don’t want to continue until I attain the life of the radiant leucocyte. The red ramifications become a small stain, rapidly passing through all their decreasing phases. I see the eye in its original dimension in the depths of the headlight’s concave mirror, a unique organism, which in its reflection precise fish swim in their watery, lachrymal medium.
Before I continued to watch, I paused once more to study the details of the saint. Saint Sebastian, stripped of symbolism, was a fact in his unique and simple presence. It is possible solely with such objectivity to notice calmly a system of stars. I resumed my heliometric gazing. I was completely aware that I was in motion within Movietone Fox’s anti-artistic and astronomical orbit.
The spectacles follow one another, simple facts engendering new lyrical states.
The girl in the bar plays “Dinah” on her little gramophone, while she prepares gin for the drivers: inventors of subtle mixtures of games of chance and black superstition in their engines’ mathematics.
At Portland Racetrack, the racing blue Bugattis, observed from the airplane, achieve the dreamlike movement of hydroids spiraling down to the bottom of the fishtank, parachutes open.
Josephine Baker’s rhythm in slow motion coincides with the purest and slowest growth of a flower produced by the cinematographic accelerator.
Cinematographic breeze once more. White gloves and black keys of Tom Mix, pure as the final amorous embraces of fish; crystals and stars of Marcoussis.
Adolph Menjou, in an anti-transcendental atmosphere, affords us a new dinner jacket dimensionality and ingenuity (now only cynically acceptable).
Buster Keaton--Here’s true poetry, Paul Valéry!--post-machine-age avenues, Florida, Le Corbusier, Los Angeles. The Pulchritude and eurythmics of the standardized implement, aseptic, anti-artistic variety shows, concrete, humble, animated, exuberant, comforting clarities, to oppose a sublime, deliquescent, bitter, putrescent art...
Laboratory, clinic.
The white clinic, surrounding the pure chromolithography of a lung, becomes silent.
Within the panes of the glass case the chloroformed scalpel sleeps like a Sleeping Beauty in the woods of nickels and enamel, where embraces are impossible.
The American magazines offer our eyes Girls, Girls, Girls, and under the Antibes sun, Man Ray captures a magnolia’s clear portrait, better for our flesh than the Futurists’ tactile creations.
At the Grand Hotel, shoes in a glass case.
Tailors’ dressmaker forms. Forms silent in the electric splendor of the shop windows, with their neutral mechanical sensualities and disturbing articulations. Living forms, sweetly stupid, who strut with the alternative and senseless rhythm of hips and shoulders, and bear in their arteries their costumes’ new, reinvented physiologies.
Putrefaction
The opposite side of Saint Sebastian’s magnifying glass corresponded to putrefaction. Everything, seen through it, was anguish, darkness, and even tenderness--tenderness because of the exquisite absence of spirit and naturalness.
Preceded by I’m not sure which of Dante’s lines, I saw the entire world of the putrescent philistines: the lachrymose and transcendental artists, greatly distanced from all clarity, cultivators of all germs, ignorant of the precision of the double, graduated decimeter; the family who purchases “objets d’art” to place on top of the piano; the municipal worker; the associate member; the psychology professor... I didn’t want to go on. The delicate mustache of a ticket seller moved me. In my heart I felt all its exquisite, Franciscan and intensely delicate poetry. Despite my urge to shed tears, my lips smiled. I stretched out on the sand. The waves rolled into the shore with the quiet hum of Henri Rousseau’s Bohémienne endormie.
- translated from the Catalan by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
“Sant Sebastià” was published in L’Amic de les Arts, Vol II, No. 16, 31 July 1927
It was not among Dalí’s publications in book form.