Sunday Dalí: The Ghost of the Evening, 1930. Oil on canvas, 46 x 54 cm. San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California.

There is a clear reference between the figure in the upper right of this painting and the structure in The Enigma of Desire, which was painted in the previous year. In The Enigma of Desire the crevices are filled with the french words for “my mother”. In this painting they are filled with iconography from other Dalí works, namely the ant which symbolizes death.

Although his nuclear-mystical period is years off in the future, we can clearly see the references to the rhinoceros horn and the spiral shape it representes in the foreground structure containing the scissors. The scissors, consequently, symbolize the fear of castration, or more broadly, the fear of impotence. There is also a clear horn shape int eh background that comes at the tail end of an atomized animal.