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forms of resurrection and in that case prefer not to die. At present there are at least ten methods for prolonging life virtually indefinitely, with periods of sleep that would add that much spice to the re-awakenings. I will choose with the greatest efficiency, when the time comes. This attitude is a part of the game I play with death. I have my genius as an alibi for attempting to prolong the days as long as the fulfillment of my oeuvre demands.
    But in truth, all that I love deeply and viscerally is the inside of my body. My entire ethic consists of getting maximum pleasure through waiting, using resistance to extend desire by heightening it to the paroxysm, not only with all that might stand in its way, but especially by my own deter mination not to take what belongs to me, not to possess what is mine. And what is mine more than my death?
    I confess, I believe myself invulnerable; I want to endure to the highest limit so as to provoke divine death in its very essence. By way of becoming as great as it is, of emulating it in dimension and quality. It is my glorious goddess, governing spirit of us all. It is sacred and absolute beauty. I know that this life is but the realm of the incomplete, but I shall make of the long and infinite succession of days that constitute my life a superb completion, carrying pride to the point of its fusion with God. I would like to write a poem to it, that would say: O Death, my beautiful divinity, Thou hast found Thy High Priest, Thy rival, and Thou servest me as I adore Thee. We work together to formulate an equation of the absolute such as has never had its equal. Each day I am increasingly the Great Archangel of the House of the Dead.
    To get back to my intra-uterine life, it ended on the eleventh day of May in 1904, at forty-five minutes past the hour of eight, as I was born from the legitimate belly of Dona Felipa Dome Domenech. My mother was thirty. And the birth certificate that my father, Don Salvador Dalí i Cusí, made out two days later gives details of the genealogy of both my parents’ families. On father’s side, Don Galo Dalí Vinas, native of Cadaqués, deceased, and Dona Teresa Cusí Warcos, native of Rosas. On mother’s side, Don Ancelmo Domenech Serra and Dona Maria Ferres Sadurne, natives of Barcelona.
    Witnesses: Don Jose Mercader, native of La Bisbal, province of Gerona, tanner by trade, residing in this city, and Don Emilio Baig, native of Figueras, musician by profession, residing in this city, both being of age. My father, who was born at Cadaqués, was then forty-one, and known as the “money doctor”, being the notario of Figueras, living at 20 Calle Monturiol.
    I was given the Christian names of Salvador, Felipe, and Jacinto. And I am sure that all the glorious departed, all those whose souls enrich the mystical noösphere in which we swim, that cybernetic humus of spirituality, rejoiced on the occasion of my appearance on earth, since it constituted the greatest challenge the genius of man had ever issued to death.
    In the long succession of centuries that saw so many illustrious men born, how many ever attained my quality of concerted cosmic delirium? What I can say is that I, Dalí, feed my desires with the élan vital of all dead geniuses. I carry them all forward. I am the sun that shines on all the planets lost in the night of ages.
     
    “DEATH IS THE THING THAT FRIGHTENS ME THE MOST, AND RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH, THAT GREAT SPANISH THEME, THE ONE MOST DIFFICULT FOR ME TO ACCEPT – FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF LIFE.”
     
    [1] It is a well-known fact that Vincent Van Gogh’s birth was also preceded by the death of a brother named Vincent. As a schoolboy, the future artist each morning was obliged to go by a cemetery in which he saw his own name on a tombstone.
     

Chapter Two: How To Get Rid Of One's Father
     
    To the manchild I was, my father was a giant of strength, violence, authority, and imperious loves love. Moses plus Jupiter.
    The love he