Michael Salcman
At the Century Bar

In a room with a ceiling half-timbered by the ebony ribbons of Mondrian ribs, John la Forge's portrait of the young Henry James subtends the far-off corner of the bar. He's seen in profile, shoulders draped in New York gray, lips opened part-way, lips and cheeks monoxide red with youth or death, all things to him the same, resolvable in words. He presumes to speak.

Across the way a young Irishman limned by Sargent hardly seems inclined to listen. John O'Meara hangs on the near wall, a Greek statue, his tie knotted tight, having seen little of the present, nor ever past it, not ready for the perturbations of James, the molecular disturbances in the air of future life. These prophets of a type have nothing to say to one another but dwell in the piety of their neighbors, dozing clubmen, a painted cow, Kensett's soundless stream: the Master who knows and the would-be epigone who thinks he does, one who yet hopes of love and he who has written just enough to give up the dream I'm stirring in my drink.

The Best We’ve Ever Had

After a weeklong cruise from Barcelona and an intermediate stop in Marrakech, we landed at the Four Seasons Hotel Ritz in Lisbon. There we encountered a lovely bidet. This was not surprising; such fixtures-more rightly a type of sink rather than a species of toilet-are almost universally installed in the southern European countries of Italy, Spain and Portugal. They are only a little less widespread in France, where they were probably invented by furniture makers in the late seventeenth century. They are almost never seen in Northern climes. The name comes from a French word for pony; in Old French bider means "to trot;" and the etymology of the term may come from the notion that one "rides" or straddles the object in question like riding a small horse. This history inevitably inspires a plethora of romantic associations from the most elevated affairs of state at the French court to the most basic practices of ordinary prostitution.

The specimen we encountered was made out of white porcelain and sat opposite the usual matching throne in a small room with a marble floor. As if designed by Picasso, the bowl had two mid-length bulges ergonomically and sculpturally shaped for a feminine bottom, a single spigot like a nose and two faucets like eyes polished to a high sheen. The unique installation included a small stainless steel towel rack to my right with two folded face cloths and a small steel shelf on the left with two cakes of up-scale soap, one still wrapped in paper, the other prepared for use. The entire ensemble resembled a smiling face and was most inviting even to a person such as myself equipped with male parts.

I know for a fact that my companion had never used one after sex or after anything else. I do not know if its shining presence had any effect on the occurrence of unusually strenuous activities later in the evening. The next morning, I happily felt a certain tension in my abs and real discomfort sitting up. I surreptitiously returned to the head and found some telltale moisture in the bowl as well as a single square of paper and confirmed my suspicions with a gentle question, asked and answered over cappuccino and buttered bread.

Eleven Reflections on Pablo Ruiz Picasso

I. Every child is an artist.
We beat it out of them as soon as we can, use geometry like a truncheon, reality like a poison. Pablo's father, a professor at the Art Academy saw him draw like an angel at twelve and instantly gave up his paints to the devil he loved.

II. Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.
At his feet not just the splintered rules of art but many friends and every wife and lover broken like crockery. In the cafés they spoke of Einstein changing the shape of reality, and of Picasso like Saturn, who ate his own children.

III. I do not seek, I find.
This is way too Zen-like to be by a satyr who stole anything worth stealing.

IV. She does not look like her portrait now, but she will.
Gertrude hated it at first, almost everything massively brown: her almond face a mask with heavy-lidded eyes like Iberian sculpture, her body hulking mounds of mountainous rock. This is all she got after ninety sittings, her face wiped out with a rag and painted from memory. Stein went from it's not me to it is I . the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me; and metaphor passed into reality.

V. Braque c'est ma femme.
His crude answer to the question was just his usual power play, the Spaniard as husband and Braque the gallant wife who famously claimed they were like two mountain climbers roped together climbing the high kingdom of pictures step by step. Who will ever know what they really felt working in that old soap factory their frozen hands reaching for the same lamp?

VI. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
Or else it's the rope in the dungeon that lets us escape.

VII. After Matisse died he left me his odalisques.
Not just graceful Algerian women but pride of place. When news of his rival's death reached him in the South the first words out of his mouth were honest beyond belief: Now there is only one.

VIII. Everything you can imagine is real.
All the absinthe in the world at Deux Magots failed to kill him. The one true surrealist, a man above and beyond reality never made an abstract painting. He could not give them up: the female breast, the buttocks, the thigh. He could not imagine a world without them. Neither can I.

IX. Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.
A wise and ancient child who loved questions. Eighty years of inventions born in pre-historic Périgord caves. No wines. Garbage in, garbage out.

X. The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.
Always in the flow, Picasso paid for meals with signed napkins knowing they would never be cashed. Like him I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them: mussels in wine, pommes frites.

XI. Good artists copy, great artists steal.
Even a jay uses a tool like words in a stranger's nest. Eliot said it best in "The Sacred Wood": immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make something better. I must reflect on your example, taking blue and rose from Lautrec. If it's the last thing I do, I will steal from you.

_ _

Michael Salcman, a physician and teacher of art history, is the former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and former president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. His poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, and Poet Lore. He is editor of Poetry in Medicine, an anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness and healing (Persea Books, 2015), and the author of four chapbooks and three collections, including A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press.

>> Back to Issue 21, 2018