Salvador Dali’s The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (II)

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952-54), Salvador Dali, Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida

Consciousness-Analogue

Sea-shells, clocks and the fish-bone

All appear transient in the book of records

The memory breaks new ground, forgives the past

Illumines the inner space with golden waters from the sea

The cycles end when a new thing is born

Rest all are drowned in the meaningless squabble

The horror! The horror! Andre Breton, not dead

He found a dolphin- ride to the sea-coast

Nothing but imagination plays the harp

To transfigure the world into the music of the Soul

So long as we live, and breathe and walk

The world will be the immortal space of the stars.

– Joy Roy Choudhury

Note: “The horror! the horror!”- last words of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness

Andre Breton, not dead -is a lively play upon use of T.S. Eliot’s “Mistah Kurtz, he dead” (From The Heart of  Darkness) as an epigraph to the original manuscript of the poem The Hollow Men (1925)

Posted by artcritique on September 15, 2010

https://artcritique.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/salvador-dalis-the-disintegration-of-the-persistence-of-memory-ii/