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…Federiquito, in your book [Gypsy Ballads], which I’ve carried off to read in the mineral places around here, I have seen you, the little beastling that you are, an erotic beastling with your sex and the little eyes of your body, and your hair, and your fear of death and your desire to
let the gentleman know when you die, and your mysterious spirit, made from foolish little enigmas in strict horoscopic correspondence, and the strict horoscopic correspondence between your thumb and your dick, with the moisture of the lakes of salvia of certain species of
hairy planets. I love you for what your book reveals you to be, which is just the opposite of the reality the putrified of this world have made up about you – the dusky gypsy with black hair, childish heart, etc. etc., that whole decorative, non-existent
Nestorian Lorca who could only have been invented by artistic swine who are far from little fish and bears and from the soft, hard, and liquid silhouettes that surround us.
I love and admire you. You, a beast with your little fingernail – you who sometimes surrender more than half of your body to death, or death comes up your arm, from fingernails to shoulder, in a sterile effort. I have drunk death from your shoulder at those moments when you were absent from your own great arms, which were nothing but two slipcovers with flounces from the useless, unconscious tapestries at the Residencia. I admire the
Flounder- Tongue I see in your book, the fat flounder who will someday be unafraid to shit on the Salinases of this world and will abandon rhyme and all the other stuff that swine associate with art, and who will do things that are more fun and revolting and curly and poetic than any poet has ever done.
Goodbye, I believe in your inspiration, in your sweat, in your astronomical fatality.
This winter I invite you to leap with me into the void. I’ve already been there for days, and have never had such security, and I now know something about
Statuary and about real clarity, far from any aesthetic.
-- letter from Salvador Dali to Federico Garcia Lorca, September 1928
self-portrait of Richard
Gerstl
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