#4: Unearthing "The Persistence of Memory"
In a nutshell, I feel like sh*t. Not “world-is-ending” sh*t, but “groaning-on-the-couch” sh*t. I’m much better than last week, that's for sure. I recently realized that my last semester at USC will eventually end. Senioritis is slowly kicking in. But, if I want the final one to count, I must slow down, unwind and stretch my time at USC.
Brown is a color that affects our mood rather than the other way around. Yes, it reminds one of dirt, cacao, and most childishly, excrement. It is dull and often ignored. There isn’t necessarily a “spark” or “pop” when it comes to brown. However, brown is considered the Earth’s color; it represents growth, fertility, and abundance. It’s the color of my eyes. I bet you blended all the paint colours and created brown paint as a kid. It’s the rich creamy color of chocolate; food, skin, foundation shade, you name it. Like many others, I interpret this color quite literally sometimes. Honestly, I felt like sh*t, so I decided to write about brown.
“The Persistence of Memory” (1931) by Salvador Dalí is the closest portrayal we have of infinity. Time knows no boundaries in this work. The world stopped and never carried on. British art historian Dawn Ades wrote, “the soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order.” Without a doubt, the Einsteinian influence of relativity is unmistakable, making Dalí ahead of the art history curve.
The viewer wakes up in an infinite, haunting dreamscape, where time visibly decays. Limp watches melt in the sizzling arid desert; a bronze pocket watch is covered with ants, feeding on it like it’s smothered in jam. Dalí’s usage of ants was a symbol of decay throughout his work. There’s an alien-like monster (which approximates Dalí’s own face) dying on the expansive earthy-brown terrain, wrapped by another melting watch acting like a blanket. Its tongue oozes out of its mouth. It's unsettling yet rarely organic. It's a Surrealist trompe l'oeil, regarding substance, not technique.
Surrealism highlights psychoanalysis, exploring a labyrinth of consciousness. “The Persistence of Memory” plunges the viewer into the past, present and future, coexisting in a dreamlike state, and functioning in synergy. Time is passing in Dalí’s world, but memory persists. Whether these are joyful or painful memories is undetermined. Considering that Dalí lived through the Spanish Civil War, facing totalitarianism, poverty, and brutality, it makes sense that he presents the passage of time as an unavoidable conveyor belt of emptiness, rooted in the involuntary nature of memory.
The year before painting “The Persistence of Memory,” Dalí formulated his “paranoiac-critical method,” deliberately inducing psychotic hallucinations to inspire his art. It sounds maddening, and I’m not advising you to flunk school and “Kerouac and Kesey” your lives. But it’s worth noting that he just knew how to “act mad.” In a period of chaos and upheaval, Dalí managed to slow down time for his own creative discovery. Ultimately, the use of brown is scaled across the painting to produce an uneasiness yet calming state of mind. To Dalí, it’s a meditation on the unconscious realm, feeling close to a dream, but inevitably coming to an end.
I’m trying to learn how to slow down time like Dalí. Not everything needs to be rushed: that paper will be done, that goal will be completed. As a famous (fictional) ‘90s sitcom star once said, “time’s arrow neither stands still nor reverses. It merely marches forward.” My week felt brown, as in, time moved slowly. But as a senior who claims they’re “sooooo over USC,” I know in the blink of an eye, I’ll soon say at the end of the semester, “where did all the time go?”
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