1. A cannibal is having a woman’s shoe in his teeth. The shoe also has teeth on its sole, instead of cleats. The cannibal is holding the shoe in his hand gently, as if it were the tastiest food he had ever eaten.
2. What is the purpose of spikes on a shoe? Spike shoes tend to be lighter than other types of running shoes, and the lighter weight means you can pick up your feet faster without as much fatigue. [1]
3. Can one eat a shoe? The usual sorts of leather that are used to make shoes are actually perfectly edible, if not exactly palatable- the only problem is that to be water resistant and durable, the leather is generally tanned, which often makes it indigestible, if not outright toxic. [2]
4. Therefore the person in the painting could indeed be eating a woman’s shoe. However here the shoe does not exist. It’s just the image of a shoe in a painting. But the teeth on its sole suggest that it could be as real as the teeth we have for chewing.
5. How does our brain perceive the taste of the food we are eating? When we have a meal in front of us, the same meal is projected into our mind, like the shoe in the painting looks like the mouth of the cannibal- full of teeth.
6. By imagining that we are eating we may feel better even if we don’t fill up our hunger. The object (the food) which is found outside (on a table) needs to coincide with our thought (the image of the same food in our mind) so that we have a perfect much through the senses.
7. But the appetite of the cannibal here is different. He is not interested in eating the product (the shoe) itself, but in tasting the flesh of a woman’s foot.
8. Thus the object (the shoe) acquires a metaphorical meaning and transforms itself from an item of everyday use to a symbol (the female feet).
9. Usually we become so much attached to the objects we use (e.g. our favorite shoes) that we often forget their practical purpose. Although a pair of shoes is just the means to an end (e.g. walking), we tend to show them off, thus turning them into fetishes (objects of worship).
10. At that stage the imaginary pair of shoes (the fetish) becomes as real as the true object (the pair of shoes we wear). This must be happening to the cannibal in the picture, who seems to have indulged so much into his own phantasy.
11. How one may escape from one’s own overactive imagination and fetishistic passions? What if the illusion is indeed the crude way we perceive hard reality, our own mental incompetence to see the alternative connections?
12. As the artist puts it himself, “It is because of the lack of contact with reality, and of what can be considered irrational in their existence, that the simulacra (representations) so easily take the form of reality, while the latter, in turn, adapts itself to the violence of the representations, which the materialistic thought foolishly confuses with the violence of reality.
13. The paranoiac mechanism which creates the picture with the multiple images offers to our understanding the key to the origin and essence of the simulacra, whose spirit dominates over the folds where the multiple occurrences of reality are hidden.
14. There would be no possibility of comparing two things if they could not exist without any conscious or unconscious relationship between them. If such a comparison became tangible, it would clearly serve as a picture of our notion about what is considered useless.” [3]
15. The world is composed of objects and their relationships. Our own thought is a process or function which identifies the objects and finds their connection. If we treat things differently then we also start to think differently. A paranoiac thought, although may seem absurd in the beginning, may help us find alternative, and, in some cases, more important relationships between the objects, so that by changing the way we think we change the world around us in reality.
16. This is the way we can transform an object like Snow White’s shoe, which we may be so carefully hiding in the closet of our dreams, from a powerful mythical symbol into an item of everyday use.
[2]: [https://www.thedailymeal.com/eat/these-people-actually-ate-shoe]
[3]: Excerpt from ‘The rotting donkey,’ article by Salvador Dali.
8/15/2018
Painting: Cannibalism of the Objects, Salvador Dali
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