Dali Lectures In A Diving Suit Poem by Paul Hartal

The stunning and eccentric Surrealist artist Salvador Dali
was never short of bizarre shenanigans
for promoting himself.
One spring day in 1936 he decided
to perform an outlandish prank.
He carried it out
at the International Surrealist Show,
which was held in London from 11 June
to 4 July,1936, at the New Burlington Galleries.
Some fifty artists, the leading surrealists of the era,
participated in the exhibition, among them Hans Arp,
Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Rene Magritte,
Joan Miro, Francis Picabia and Pablo Picasso.

The resourceful and mustachioed Dali
came up with the freaky idea
to deliver a lecture at the exhibition
in a heavy deep sea diving suit.
When the owner of the diving suit store
asked the artist, where he planned on diving?
Dali replied: ' Into the subconcious
of the human mind.'

It was a nice day and Dali began to deliver
his intriguing and astonishing lecture
on 'authentic, paranoid phantoms'
to his motley and prying audience
when something went wrong.

Suddenly he could not breathe.
Salvador Dali was suffocating because
he had no oxigen in the diving suit.
The artist waved his hands asking for help
but the people at the lecture mistook it
as a slapstick comedy, believing that it was
part of the show, a surrealist stunt
to amuse and entertain.
The audience laughed
As Dali was asphyxiating.
He almost died locked in that heavy diving suit.
Eventually, with great effort,
Dali managed to unscrew the scuba helmet
and luckily he could breathe again.
He died half century later in 1989, aged 84.