“I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.” – Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali was a Spanish surrealist painter. Surrealism, in general, can make you think you are on drugs. This painting does an amazing number on one’s mind. This is his immortal work, “La persistencia de la memoria” or “The Persistence of Memory.” He painted this work in 1931, at the age of 27. By 1920, Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity gained widespread acceptance in the physics community. I will explain the connection between relativity and this painting later in the post.
There are several timepieces in this picture. We are used to clocks and watches being firm and solid. Clocks that melt, droop, and fold in on themselves contradict everyday experience.
Melting clocks may represent the collapse of pre-modern notions of time in the face of the Theory of Special Relativity. Part of the theory is that as a person’s velocity approaches the speed of light, time appears to slow down from the perspective of a stationary observer. The idea that time might depend on one’s frame of reference shocked the world in the 1930s, though now the theory has almost become boring as to be commonplace.
There are ants crawling on a copper pocket watch in the lower left-hand corner. These might represent death and decay. Of course, we are not used to watches decaying. Dali flips the normal expectation of time as eternal by depicting his clocks decaying.
In the middle of the painting rests a rounded gray figure looking somewhat like a dolphin. Some critics have pointed out that the figure resembles Dali’s face in profile. Others see features that look like long eyelashes which might symbolize female sexuality. If it is Dali himself, he might be musing on his own place in history, whether he will achieve lasting fame through his work or fade into obscurity. If the figure is feminine, Dali might be saying that sexuality changes with time.
On the left side of the picture, there are two rectangular platforms. They have hard, well-defined edges. In contrast, a cliff on the right side has rough, jagged edges. In between is a seascape. The sea and the cliff lend the painting a rigidity, a permanence that grounds the otherwise dreamlike imagery. In the upper left is a thin, barren tree. This tree adds to the sense of flexibility of time as one clock flops down from a branch like a pancake. Dali, as a surrealist, focused on dreams and hallucinations. This painting combines images that are unreal with images that are familiar much like a dream which juxtaposes the ordinary and the strange.
A simple explanation of this painting would be that Dali dreamt of drooping clocks in a desert and painted that dream. Dali was often inspired by his dreams. He even had an ingenious way of capturing dreams. He placed a metal plate on the floor of his bedroom and put a key in his hand when he went to sleep. When sleep overtook him, his hand would relax, the key would hit the plate and the sound would wake him up. Yet Surrealism is about more than taking snapshots of dreams. Surrealism suggests that reality itself is a dream. Time, for Dali, was not a concrete aspect of the universe, but rather an abstract, subjective quality that depends on the mind of the observer.
