On the Dali Museum

FIGUERES - Just came out of the Dali Museum and am on the way back to Barcelona now.

What an EXCELLENT museum!

My head spun for a while after I came out because Dali is so unfathomably crazy.

No, not crazy in a derogatory way, but in the sense of unfathomable wildness or fantasy. How does he think of these ideas? How is it possible to live aside a person as wild as him? (Recall that he has a wife.) I reached the pinnacle of such sentiments when I was in the Mae West room looking at the converging mirror in mid-air. How, I question myself, can anyone think of as wild creations as these?

As I walked on, I thought to myself that every single person should have a Dali experience, just so to understand the spectrum of the human imagination. With nostril fireplace, lips sofa, corncob hair, mirrors reflecting illusion after illusion, intertemporal paintings, Dali has ensured that the reality-illusion duality is blurred to a maximum. One is left gasping as one walks through the various rooms. It was a substantial collection of his works (I am sorely reminded of the cheaterbug Picasso Museum in Barcelona) that was presented in a manner that reflected Dali's fauvist quintessence. I spent a lot of time in the courtyard and room 3 because there was so much to see once you look at the details. Yet the number of details was not overwhelming the way Sagrada Familia was. It was just sufficient to occupy the mind, to incite thoughts and contemplation.

What Dali works did I like?

(I am tempted to look through the photos I have taken, but I recall the words of my literature and photography class professor - that by recording, snapping away, one renders the memory of the experience to only what one has photographed. Having the intention to write a piece on the obsession of recording, I should not let myself fall into the same trap.)

I should think that the piece I liked most was Gala Looking at the Sea. I liked the colours and the somewhat Cubist feel of it. I also liked Othello Dreaming of Venice - I intend for this to be front cover of my future Venice album. There were other pieces I enjoyed, although not liked per se. The satirical interpretation of Matisse's La Danse was funny. So was The Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking the Violoncello. I like how his titles are so humorously long. Like the one - 6 Reflections of Something that Looks Like 3 Chinese Pretending to be Lenin When Looked 2 Metres Away, and Like the Crown of a Lion When Viewed 6 Metres Away. Is this too prescriptive? I don't think so. I like to know what the artist intended for while allowing myself room for interpretation. I don't fully buy the Derrida idea that the author can have intentions or meanings that even he himself may not know about. (This would mean that the work attains a life of its own once commenced? If so, then like the conception of life, we have to ask: at what point does it attain its own soul?)

The silhouette of the Pyrennes is now faintly in the horizon. As the Catalunya Express charges forward, the arcs of blue in the train cabin morphs into waves and swirls into the blueness of the Pyrennes at twilight. The journey is coming to an end. The orange-vermillion of the setting sun asks me -

Are you ready for reality?

At this point, I feel like Gail Wynand - I could go either way. I could continue travelling for another 2 weeks, 2 months?

Or I am equally at peace going back to the humdrum of my city state.

More photos of glorious Spain »here.