The persistence of memory
For the first time, i knew about Salvador Dali’s painting when I was in grade 6. I remember doing a project for an art subject about two paintings: "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali and "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci. Salvador Dali’s painting, "The Persistence of Memory," has never left my mind since then. Many people have given scientific as well as philosophical descriptions of the painting. It’s fun to get lost and have our interpretation based on this.
It is based on surrealism with a pinch of realism. Salvador Dali was influenced by psychoanalysis founded by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis theory suggests that all human beings have unconscious thoughts, memories, emotions, desires, and childhood experiences that shape most of our behavior. When Salvador Dali was asked if his paintings are out of a dream, he replied they're "hypnagogic images," which are vivid, irrational, and lilliputian images that come to our minds before sleep. He captures those images in a photographic style with no meaning or explanation. Sometimes, after 20 years, some scientific people give different interpretations, but every picture remains a complete mystery.
We can give our own perception depending on our beliefs and life stages. From a philosophical viewpoint, I see it as a passage of time with fading memories, but some core memories persist throughout our lives, shaping our nature and who we are as a person. In a way, we can say past, present, and future coexist within us. Though "The Persistence of Memory" is surrealism art, he included some real parts like rocky background from the painter’s childhood memories.
However, from a scientific viewpoint, it is interpreted by most people with the theory of the relativity of space and time.
Every time I look at those melting watches, one hanging on a dead branch, another watch covered with ants, while one lies over unknown strange matter, it gives me strange feelings like it connects two worlds where one has significance of time while the other doesn’t. Maybe one world is from the real, while the other is from a dream, and in the dream, time is diluted. Bringing both of them together creates a bizarre world. While describing it, I am having goosebumps. It’s fun sometimes to think that way because too much realism bores us.
