Dali is Everything But Without Gala Is Nothing

(All images/ artwork by Detroit Richards using AI, all prompts/ images belong to The Paltry Sum. No reproduction without permission, 2024)

Dali is everything…said Dali to himself. He is his mother, his father, his child and his own lover. He is the conductor of winds who turns himself into his own g_d on the mountains of Catalan, conducting the winds and taming the oceans. Dali is scared. Dali is sick. Dali is hurt. Galinka sighs, and steels herself, ready to recreate the ego of the man into the drive of the artist, muttering to herself, how as surely as the sun rises in the sky, Dali needs to be coddled in the apple of her eye.

Dali is alone. There are many people around him. They all want a piece of him on canvas or on a napkin. A smear of the genius. It doesn’t matter if it is shit. Dali can make more shit. Dali says Dali is a genius, even his excrement is gilded. Dali for once, is serious. He believes in himself as long as Gala believes in him. He cannot function without her ego. They are a symbiotic being. She is the fuel, the nurturer, the fertile soil in which to plant ideas and talk show hosts. He is a bullfighter and his talent is the bull which he has to learn to ride or tame or slay before it gores him through and through. Hemmingway would understand, at least until he was given a fish in a shoe, or a hat full of corn cobs or a blinking hologram of the old man floating in his boat in a little puddle of water, without even a fish on the hook.

Dali is tilting at windmills. Dali is courtly, not a king, but an emperor, a sun king, almost divine, nearly beautific. Bring on the dwarfs! Haul on the bowline and unload those giraffes! You see, everyone does everything exactly the same way. There is nothing new any more. Ta da? Da da! Dali is sadly human. Dali decays. Dali delays the end because Dali lives on the edge. Dali is melting and Dali does not find it amusing. Dali is the apple, not just the eye. He recreates Gala in perpetuity, granting her eternity, and yet she craves more. He makes her a new world with new physics and new rules of impossibility, and improbable creatures. He puts it together in a new way. It makes sense, which means Dali has succeeded in making the impossible merely improbable, yet beautiful. In this way Dali is a demi-g_d and a semi-successful one at that. The eye blinks at Dali. Dali stares back wide eyed and inquisitive. The apple blinks too and the world bites at it.

How when it is just you and the bull, when you are pierced by the arrow and the plucker of roses in the foothills of mundanity, how is it impossible to pay any attention to the planted television men and their dull stories and full-of-themselves smiles, when they are the hollow ones, the empty men who have driven any soul with feeling into a fit of self pity? Their world is black and white and makes Dali grey. He is mixed up. He is the original mixed up kid. But in the normal world all he has to play with is black and white and grey is no fun at all. Nothing ever happened with grey. Grey is an arrow through the jaw of Dali. Shades of grey is not where he can find his Gala. She is a technicolor riot.

Hotels are like stages: revolving doors, revolting whores to the harsh mistress of luxury. Dali must paint. Dali must sign, Dali sighs. There is reinvention in renewal, in denial, in the legs, but not the necks of giraffes and in the raggedy claws of monstrous legged fish, shell stolen from Beelzebub’s inventory of discarded objet d’art, curlicues and Fibonacci spirals, no finished edges, simply eternal turns and curves that lead back on themselves. Escher himself saw staircases in the shells of lobsters, knowing knots of other impossible staircase climbers. Great minds think alike, so perhaps Dali is not great, because no one thinks like Dali! Perhaps Dali is just the best of a rotten lot? Perhaps that is all we have got in the dark ages, the dull times when we are spoon-fed by damned imbeciles too disinterested in the business of living art to feed themselves?

Automatons creating art feeding off an twisting curving eternity sign, all snakes eating their tails, ouroboros’s to the last slithering one of them, apart from Gala and her apple which she held, keeping Dali safe in the eye of the beholder of talent. Gala defiant. Gala bent but not broken. Gala at rest. Gala at play. Gala in a fearsome mood. Gala indulgent. How could it ever be enough for a woman as grotesquely beauteous to be merely the muse, the woman with the whip and the dripping pots of paint? It was not enough, not unless the artist was Dali. Dali was enough for her in the castle of her regrets and the passion of her sacrifice. When the grey world is painted in color, it brings everything to life and people throw roses at the feet of the artist. When the grey world is painted in the colors that Dali can see the suits line up in the desert of culture to throw money at Dali in exchange for a little color and Gala loves this. Gala loves Dali, so Dali paints more improbable color onto the grey world. Dali has got his own mind by its horns!

Hummingbirds and butterflies, oranges and sunflowers explode from the brush of the artist and the genius that some call insanity becomes something beautiful, something valuable instead of dying in a ditch by the side of the road with a copy of Don Quixote in his back pocket. Gala has made an artist out of a madman. Gala has taken the madness within herself and become Gala. They have created their own legend out of color and thought. Ta da! No. Da Da.

Think for a moment about the muse with the pain on her face painted in Rembrandt’s oils. Think of how she sacrificed her artistic life for that of Dali. Think of the apple she passed to him that contained entire worlds. Think of the beauty she passed to him and the brush in his hand, and how she turned his life of misery into a possibility.

Gala has windmills of her own. Gala has her needs and her desires and a headful of flowers that need to be exorcized on the streets of Figueres, those Catalonian dreams that broke the fever in Dali’s brain. All the pretty horses line up for Gala and prance under a bird-view sky.

Did Gala ever pick up a brush? Did Gala ever sit in a secret room of paintings in her castle, not letting Dali ever come in to see her struggles and the grace of her brushstrokes? Did she sit and make herself and Dali stand in front of a window, by the sea? Were there terracotta pots for water and enameled samovars for tea? When Dali came to visit, did the help rush around removing all signs and scents of her art and craft from the castle? Did the linseed betray her? Did the stain of opera red and cadmium scarlet hide beneath her violet nail polish? Did she write poetry that no one ever read? Did she burn letters at her fireplace and make like Marie Antoinette and bake cakes and rustic loaves in her kitchen? We will never know. Gala is mystery. Gala exists beyond any notion of trifecta sins. Gala is her own master. The muse is Gala.

Dali looks into the mirror. There is no apple only Gala. Her head is beneath a magnificent hat. She is the only woman who can wear the hat and not let the hat wear her. It is a hat that only a truly rich woman could wear unironically. If any woman with a net worth under at least seventy five million dollars tried to wear that hat they would spontaneously combust. It is extravagant. It is very ‘Gala’. Her eyes have started to mirror Dali’s. They have the ability to stare out of this world and into one at least a dozen lightyears away. She sees flying clocks and birds who never land, but instead sleep upside down in the air. Dali observes her through a magnifying glass. He sees no imperfections, only boredom. He is humiliated and he loves it. His ocelot is on the leash. His balloon is made of silver foil and tied to the wrist of the blonde kid with the big ideas. Dali is ready to draw some conclusions. The room must be silent. Dali is at work.

Do not make the mistake that Gala did. Do not presume that Dali is interested in the benefits of capitalism as much as the rags of tomorrow’s parties and the decadence of the age of darkness. Money is a means not a goal to Dali. He is not motivated by paying for the hotel. The hotel pays for itself as far as Dali is concerned. He orders another giraffe and a thousand fat ants for Antonious, the ant eater that he observes at all times. If you lose track of the anteater, the anteater might lose track of you, and that will never do. He wanted a platypus but no one would lend him one. He wanted to shake its hand and feel its poison. Poison is interesting to Dali. Poison might be a door to another painting.

Instead fire was all around. If he had just got the platypus he might have been able to hold the egg of creation in his hand. Instead he was sent to explore beauty in pain. There are many roses and many windows which could be doors. The birds fly like arrows. Gala is gone. There is nothing of interest to him here.

There is hope. A spoon comes towards Dali. His wounds have developed into new ideas. The spoon holds the egg of the universe towards the apple of Gala’s eye. It is Gala’s hand. Another small g_d reaches out for him, but Dali is bigger. Dali is a cornucopia. Dali is a tree of life. There are waves and cherubim and the sky is raining the fruit of his labors down on him. There is interest here. There is Gala. There is no time so there is no future and there is no grey, just a canvas of water and the possibility of new land. Dali is forever. Dali is everything, but he is nothing without Gala.

To Gala