Art historians spent decades reading Salvador Dalí's melting clocks as a meditation on Einstein's relativity. When the scientist Ilya Prigogine asked him directly, Dalí said he was watching a wheel of Camembert melt in the sun. This episode uses the 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory as a lens on Dalí's mind, starting with the paranoiac-critical method he developed in 1930 to induce hallucinations while keeping his conscious mind as a detached observer.

We examine the fleshy sleeping creature at the center of the canvas, a self-portrait modeled on a figure from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, and the ant-covered orange pocket watch that traces back to two childhood traumas involving a decomposing lizard and a wounded bat. We also place the Cap de Creus rocks and the shadow of Mount Pani in their Catalan setting, discuss  ...