Dallying with Dali

My friend, Carol, and I sent to the Salvadore Dali museum today in St. Petersburg, Florida. Dali had a sharp mind and an interest in many things: God, religion, sex, psychology, art, sexual dysfunction, science, politics, Freud… did I say sex? He was a rather eccentric figure, and the museum gift shop plays this up. One of their selections is a Dali mug with a picture of him with wild eyes looking like he’s trying to scare you as in some B horror movie. The quote in the mug is, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.”

But he was either mad or on the brink of being so. Certainly, he was demented and twisted mentally. In former times when I would see a painting of Dali’s, it would seem surreal, but whimsical – melting clocks, distorted figures – reality bent in a fun way. But when I saw many of his works in a museum, it becomes apparent that his vision of reality is beyond surreal. It is twisted at much of its core and demented near to insanity. Most of his work is rather disturbing and obsessive. While several of his subjects include religious imagery either as central or peripheral to the piece, they are anomalies to the rest of his life and the vision that he depicts. Maybe not anomalies, but Christianity does not appear to have been incorporated into his life in any way that redeems or heals or makes sense of the twisted mess that was his genius mind.