Dali's The Persistence of Memory

Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory is another one of my favorite works. There are many elements in this work which are typical to Dali: the ants coming out of the clock, the clocks themselves, and the ocean. Dali was a man obsessed by the eternal, and this painting is no exception to that rule. In my opinion, this work is a fantasy of the paranoid. The ants in this painting make an appearance in Dali and Bunuel's Un Chein Andalou, coming out of the hand of one of the characters. In my opinion, this is like the spreading of a disease across and from within the body, or, in this case, a clock. The fact that they have not spread very far means that it is only in the act of the sun setting, as opposed to the movement of the sun during the day that we see such action. This is clearly a sunset rather than rise for the creatures of the night are only beginning to let themselves be known. This fuzzy space of, "is it night or day?" is furthur used in the depiction of the ocean. A pool of water, elevated from the ocean like an infinity pool is an expression of the darkness's way of creating fuzzy space. One begins to wonder whether the ocean is overspilling its bounds, and the mind creates not only the extra portion of ocean, but the sides of this "pool" in a reaction to the doubt of its actual existence. This uncertainty is also expressed in the clock on the tree, where a branch, visually unsupported by anything directly underneath it, is strong enough to hold up a melting clock. These mind games are very interesting to me, as they seem to show us the blind spots of our consciousness.