Liberate your imagination

“We must not let the paths of desire become overgrown” – Andre Breton, 1937

A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of finally getting to visit the Dali museum in St Petersburg, Florida. In between visiting family and watching Tampa Bay get their ass kicked, I managed to get a few hours to explore what the museum had to offer. I was excited but nervous too, would only a few hours give justice to the world’s most comprehensive collection of Dali’s art work? But it was a memorable visit, looking at the vast collection of his paintings, watercolors, drawings, photographs and sculptures.

There were a couple of eye-opening facts that intrigued me, firstly, that Dali was influenced by the impressionist movement and in fact a lot of his earlier works are in that style (he was still developing his famous “paranoid critical transformation” method then).

Secondly, Dali was involved briefly with filmography and he even did a brief dream segment for Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Interestingly, he had, at one time, denounced film as an art form.

Anyways, Dali was always stretching the boundaries of surrealism. Even when desire was identified and accepted as a major aspect of surrealist art and writings, not everyone in the movement was willing to confront & explore the most basic of desires, eroticism & the darker side of sexuality. Not Dali. He was openly defiant and his art showed open perverseness and vice. He was not afraid to venture into the darkest regions of his mind.

“I feel absolutely no embarrassment in making public desires generally considered as the most shameful, which means I have never done so to the limit despite my very strong tendency towards exhibitionism. I have secret desires that even I do not know about as I am constantly discovering new ones. I think that secret desires represent the true future and, what is more, that the true spiritual culture can only be a culture of desires. No desire is blameworthy; the only fault lies in repressing them”. - Salvador Dali, 1932

What importance do you give to your desires? Do you have secret desires that are sinful, immoral, vile or filthy? Do you struggle against them, repress them? Or do you satisfy those desires in your imagination or, in real life?

Ponder.