He was staring at cheese. Not at the cliffs of Port Lligat, not at the bruised horizon, not at any grand theater of the unconscious - just a plate of Camembert going soft in a warm kitchen. And then, sideways, the way the most honest thoughts arrive, the idea slipped in. What if the clocks went the same way?
Look at the painting long enough and you stop seeing surrealism. You start seeing memory. The shore holds its shape - amber stone, still water, a sky caught between gold and the particular blue of a room that no longer feels like yours. Everything is orderly, geological, patient. And then the clocks. One draped over a dead branch, its face sliding downward like a man falling asleep mid-sentence. Another folding over the edge of a table, oozing toward the ground with no urgency and no resistance. A third resting on the back of a soft, fleshy creature lying in the sand - sleeping or dissolving, it is impossible to say - clinging to it the way a year of grief clings, indistinguishable finally from the body itself. The only closed watch, the only one still hard and certain, is covered in ants. Something alive wants in. Or wants to finish what softness has started.
The air smells like warm stone and overripe fruit. Nothing moves. Everything is mid-becoming.
We spend most of our lives pretending that time is a ruler, straight and rigid, when every honest memory we carry tells us it is more like water - pooling in some places, rushing through others, evaporating before we can cup it in our hands.
You already know this. Not from paintings, but from standing at a kitchen sink and feeling the full weight of every year you have stood at kitchen sinks. From a phone call that lasted four minutes and reorganized the next decade. From a Tuesday afternoon when the light hit a wall a certain way and you were suddenly six and sixty at once, and the clock on the wall kept moving as if nothing had shifted.
Dalí did not invent this feeling. He simply refused to look away from it. He let the cheese go soft and followed the thought wherever it led, into a landscape where the instruments of measurement are the only things that cannot hold their shape. The world stands firm. The clocks surrender.
There is something close to permission in that. Permission to distrust the schedule. Permission to honor the moments that take up no time at all and yet occupy more space inside you than entire seasons. The version of time you carry - uneven, shot through with the faces of people who are gone, pulled toward futures that haven’t happened yet - is not a distortion. It is the most accurate record you have.
