I arrive here by magic. Barcelona: the name jangles heavy in my throat, laden with expectation.
Awash in the sensual possibility of Gaudi, I scribble: don’t take convention for an answer. Write stories like Gaudi and poems like Gaga; disrupt and redefine and have boundless confidence. Hang chain from the ceiling to locate architectural stress points: stop hammering away at physics formulas.
Why shouldn’t every door handle be crafted lovingly for the human hand? Why shouldn’t every courtyard creep to the roof in a mosaic of undulating underwater blues? Seats contoured to the spine, rooms with adjustable folding partitions and stained glass different from every angle, windows of different sizes and orientations to best distribute the light of day: the Gaudi houses are truly made for human beings. They appeal to our senses, to our bodies and imaginations. They note our caprices and oblige them, rather than demanding that we sink subhuman to adjust to a shapeless, characterless box of concrete.
Why is this such a unique idea? Most people live and work in buildings. People, then, should be our primary concern when constructing buildings, no? All we do is slap up more concrete boxes, to minimize materials and maximize building profits. Why have we forgotten the wisdom in the hanok, the wigwam, the Spanish courtyard? There are too many of us, and comfort is expensive. Better a concrete box than a cardboard one, right?
It takes thought to design, effort to produce, and conscientious concern to maintain comfort. I understand that Gaudi’s details are expensive, but I don’t grasp why we all go so quietly along with the idea that everyday dignity and humanity are only promised to the wealthy.
Average people should be comfortable and happy in the spaces where they work and live. Artistic detail thrills us, color delights us, design inspires us. This is not frivolity chipping away at the bottom line: this is the difference between living like chattel and living like people.
The only limitations that exist are the ones we recognize. We are lulled into mediocrity by the conventions and habits we submit to. We can do better than concrete boxes - there must be an efficient way to deliver Gaudi-style concern for the physical and spiritual needs of humans outside the circumstance of extreme personal wealth.
Sensory joy overload in the Plaça de Gala i Salvador Dalí. Approaching the building alone is a thrill. The day is beyond beautiful. I lose track of the ruminations that pursued me here and plunge.
“In which I enter the courtyard and use the restroom before entering the museum properly.”
Accordion sweep and burst of pubescent cynicism from wooden stupefaction toga bust and crumble television. Native philosopher, borrowed hat. Welcome!
Empty your bowels! You wont need them! This is the realization of surrealism!
2
“In which the geodesic atrium is even more beautiful from the inside than it was from without, and I am shocked by the number of Russians on tours milling past each other like rival ant colonies.”
Fantastic orb, dismantling gyrations. Cube head and wringing: Gala, Gala, Gala. Overwhelmed. Deliberate disorientation. A fight.
3
“In which I peruse the fishmonger's room, deeply impressed by Dalí’s mastery of craft at such a young age as well as the museum’s style of displaying work from all periods of his life at once rather than in any order; also in which I feel desperate to produce more, to be as prolific and consistent in my imagery and style, to create a true body of fully realized work.”
The melancholy of youthful effort. A painting on both sides, I lens-spy glass delight. Ceaseless production. Texture, medium, constant inspiration. Utter absence of inhibition. His sister, his model always in those years.
Ocell putrefacto: rotting bird. Rot and rot and fade into sky. Rearrange your body. Deface your printed signature and tumble the horizon vertical.
Be afraid of nothing. Make no sense. Prop with cane and melt clock open wide (open eyes, open mouth.) Mercury and Argos in ‘81: no chronology. Storm of rot. Recline.
Woman animal symbol, one old, one new. Satirical composition and enigma in landscape. Portrait. Cigarette. Work in gold!
4
“In which I stand before Dalí’s tomb in the crypt below the museum and realize that for a year we were both alive at the same time; I consider how unbelievably dynamic the world was during the 85 years he was alive and am jealous.”
Salvador Dalí i Domenech, Marques de Dalí de Pubol. 1904. 1989. (We were on the earth at the same time!!!!!!!!) Pile of rocks. Golden peacock lingering.
5
“In which I start to feel a mystical fatedness to my fixation with the birds in Gerona and now Figueres; the mysterious enigma of the cloud of black birds swooping and darting with electron probability before a bell tower is not one that only compels me, but also compelled this famous native son.”
Nails like black birds! My birds! Sky and sky and scale. Metaphor of material? Mysterious transfiguration and label-lessness. Tie a red string to God, heaven, karma; to nothing. An airplane unravelling its veins.
Nails are birds and likewise. Be liberated.
6
“Untitled” or “This is precisely what you should teach your children.”
Meteor and tear me open! Wet car cobweb and pick the boy up, hold him to the broken glass. Impress him strange with genius snail and mannequin decay, perpetual rain in a taxi cab.
7
“In which I stalk the halls, laughing alone.”
DELIGHT. Curtain and brocade. Sing it, alligator, illuminate windmill diagram and filth. Acupuncture cock and balls and ass march roll. See and see and see. Fill holes.
8
“In which I realize that we are all living components of Dalí’s work, our spectatorship folded in as the most important layer of his planned absurdity.”
How preposterous we all are! Gilded premonitions in the window.
[I am having a religious experience: the trembling, the lightheadedness. Chaos in me.]
Lick! Maze and Roil! Why not a mechanical crucifixion, why not a joke?
9
“Untitled,” or “Everything in the universe conspires for you,” or “In which I feel myself as the reincarnation of Gala and/or madly desirous for a Gala of my own.”
Gala’s crazy eyebrows are why I should work here - exactly like mine when I over tweeze! The tiny horsemen, the many lovely multitudes for her, for her, for her.
Where is her work, though?
And why shouldn’t I do whatever I want? Weirdo! Take it all! Yes! I never want to leave this velvet womb. I will be reborn in Dalism, in absurdity and surreal possibility.
Lounge chair bucket medusa. Reproduction. Tie me to the ceiling, too.
11
“Untitled.”
What is the date? This is the best day of my lie. I want to weep.
12
“Mae West cum apartment cum I am an asshole too cum this is exactly what he wanted” or “In which I grow tired of waiting to look through the lens at the top of the steps and some of the magic seems lost.”
Peek inside, vegetation. Be selfish, couch lips. Hair Curtain. What’s inside a face but a jungle?
Spacial interpretation of Mae West cum apartment through the eye of a camel with real hair and rhinestones. A fireplace in each nostril.
Have patience on the queue (imagine his delight with our obedience.) Bathtub ceiling.
13
“Untitled.”
Do you ever get sick of being absurd?
Ant and bread and chocolate pleasant. Gold cast of an asshole, again I am the only one laughing.
14
“In which I feel I cannot stand the stink of undeoderized Russians any longer, but then I do with much amusement.”
You cannot be alone here or anywhere, you must be irritated by idiots until you realize you are also a fucking idiot.
Glitter and splack and hologram never forgetting pencil, technique. Control. Mirror and bang.
Context! In Situ! Nothing is accidental. Nothing has meaning. Perfectly crisp nonsense.
15
“In which I become completely preoccupied with my camera for too many minutes after accidentally pushing some button that ruined whatever setting was working so well before that,” or “In which I fail completely to appreciate the irony of my frustration in failing to capture the ineffability of a moment in pixels.”
Fuck a motherfucking camera goddamn it.
16
“Untitled.”
Fishbone parquet duomo disappointment. Don Quixote, paint her hair gray in stereoscopy!
17
“In which I connect this visit to every trip I’ve ever had, be it a physical journey or a trip on hallucinogenics: I follow the same narrative arcs from unbridled positivity, to some negative sticking point that I fixate upon until complete despair, to coming out of negativity just as the drugs start to wear off/ the journey approaches its end, to a peaceful recognition of retracing my steps back to the start even as I mourn the fleeting nature of my euphoria; it is like trying to look at two mirrors that face each other, or giving up on the time machine.”
I’m getting sad, this is exactly like both acid and travel. All adventures require mishaps. I’m taking myself out, is the magic lost? Did I buoy the stakes too high? Roll over the rubics cube and weep for grammar, for sentences.
So much to learn! Don’t go, don’t go! But the lessons are the same everywhere, absurdity is not contained within this place. The come down, the stickiness. The rapture mitigated by irritation, by lack of affection for fellow men (though I do want people in my pictures, to record spectacular reaction.)
There are so many ways to feel (so few?) So many things to obsess over (indulge in.)
Cuant Cau Cau - “When It Falls Down, It Falls Down.” [So nervous! So excited!] Cynical and innocent; playful and deadly paradox.
To look through the window is an unending prism of possibility. Black birds overhead! Sinks around the rim.
18
“In which I realize I’ve been here for five hours and really need to eat something.”
Everything in everything. The pathos of this visit. Add hunger! Oh? A body?! I have one! It has needs so base by now. Every day a wind-up toy, winding down.
19
“In which I linger, afraid to go, to let go of this thing, when I realize there are a few more rooms I haven’t seen.”
Knights and piles of shit; loud, hip Americans. Nothing disgusts me but other people. Sailor hat, long nails, stench. Gifts. Prints.
Esophagus recognition, unwind it backwards now. Trace it back.
Oh! Octopus shoulder and Piranesi prints in the impossible stairwells of a madhouse. Copied from a Rubens, copied from a Leonardo.
20
“In which I recognize more than ever the power in names.”
Preliminary study of Gala for the painting “One hundred virtual virgins reflected by as yet unspecified number of real mirrors by cybernetics (etant donnes)."
LHOOQ under the defaced postcard of Mona Lisa.
Dalí seen from the back painting Gala from the back eternalized by six virtual corneas provisionally reflected by six real mirrors.
A Dalinean Michaelangelo Slave.
21
“In which a room is filled with pro-Israel art I did not know existed.”
Barbed wire. A black curtain to keep out the light. Ink dance and adept. “Eliahu Golomb” (?) Aliyah 1968. I had no idea.
22
“In which I hear someone say, “I had no idea he was into rocks and things,” but mishear it as “I still have no idea what it means,” and interject with an unnecessary treatise on surrealism.”
Rock bodies. We are so terrifically ancient and textured, conglomerated. How can that baby suckle at a stone teat?
“So into rocks”: foot-in-mouth time. (What journey is without one?)
The dream of a rock in lichen. Breast and ass and howl of agony in stone.
23
“In which, working my way out, I notice a plethora of details I missed on the way in.”
Jade armor in motherboard and Georgia O’Keeffe bull skull.
The painting I had such a hard time capturing is called “The Poetry of America.” I laugh, relieved. It’s all a part of the trip. Eye of the peacock.
Comfort again in the airy atrium. You’ve never seen it all, death mask and the pope.
24
“In which it takes money to make money.”
None of these things are cheap to make (and then the jewels!) The perpetual motion machine that is success.
25
“In which I read about the museum on the way back to Barcelona and I ponder the degree to which I’ve already internalized Dalí’s maxims without even realizing it it.”
“Start building a house from the roof. Create by addition, not selection.”
Billy Jonas has a song called "The Bus” (lyrics)(listen) in which he shares a few anecdotes of fellow passengers he met while riding the bus across America. A father goes to bail his young daughter out of trouble, a young man heads off to boot camp to avoid gang violence, and a Native American woman teaches Billy how to kill rabbits with a stick (before cooking them with instant onion soup mix.)
The point of the song is the bond, the trust that arises amongst travelers in a single vessel, the breakdown of suspicion in favor of camaraderie and straight-up love. It’s a subversion of our natural fear of strangers, and an assurance that it isn’t so odd to let your guard down, to get close and be vulnerable because we’re all in this thing together
I wept over this in the sun on a beautiful day at sea, so happy to be on the boat with strangers, getting to know them, hoarding the small intimacies they shared with me.
We have so much to learn from each other. Each of our lives represents a perfect example of what it means to be a human being. I can only live from this one seat, from these feet and this brain and this set of predetermined and acquired circumstances. Whenever I talk to someone new, it feels like a bonus round of life, a tiny taste of what it’s like to be that person, to think their way and experience what they have. It gives me the most expansive thrill, that spontaneous moment of closeness when we break through our conceptualizations of each other as “other” or “foreign” and find common ground.
Of course this is Marina, too. Her words shake in me everyday. I reread and think about her and it feels something like studying scripture; enigmatic enough for multiple layers of analysis but prescriptive and instructive. Important. It feels good, painful like a workout or an overzealous massage, but good.
Good today at least. Mourning can be like the weather, capricious and unpredictable.
