I just began reading a book by Salvador Dali. Diary Of A Genius. Of course everyone likes Dali, and having one of his paintings hanging on your wall is as tacky as an image of Jesus with a boner, Elvis, the king sucking it off, pills falling out the side of his mouth, a little white under his nose. Is it powder, or a little spillage from the man on the cross. Its up for debate. Actually give me that statue, just give me those pills. To hear someone say Dali is their favorite painter is so obvious and ridiculous. Of course you like Dali, and Johnny depp, and the Beatles, and you jerked off to a victoria secret when you were young, and on and on and on.
But I’ve found Dali’s writing to be even more entertaining then his other work. So ripe with ego and strange sentences. Filled with obsession and paranoia, a dash of psychosis and ripe sexual hunger.
What follows is the prologue to the book, Diary Of A Genius, written by the man himself.
“There is a greater difference between one man and another then between two animals of different species.”
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Ever since the French Revolution there has been growing up a vicious, cretinising tendency to consider a genius as a human being more or less the same in every respect (apart from his work) as ordinary mortals. This is false. And if it is false when applied to me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order of our day, a true modern genius, it is even more false when applied to those who, like the almost divine Raphael, embodied the very genius of the renaissance.
This book will prove that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind. This unique book, then, is the first diary written by a genius. And it is more than that: it is written by the unique genius who has had the unique fortune to be married to the genius Gala, the unique mythological woman of our time.
Of course, all will not be said today. There will be blank pages in this diary, which covers the years 1952 to 1963 of my re-secret life. At my request, and in agreement with my publisher, certain years and certain days will remain unpublished for the time being. Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later in the next eight volumes of the first series of Diary Of A Genius – circumstances permitting; otherwise they will appear in a second series, by which time Europe will have restored her traditional monarchies. In the meantime, dear readers, I ask you to hold your breath and to learn all you can about the atom that is Dali.
Such are the unique and prodigious, but also wholly true, reasons why all that will now follow, from the first word to the last (and without my having to do anything about it), will inevitably be a work of genius, through and through, and for the sole reason that it is the faithful diary of your faithful and humble servant, Dali.
