A deleuzian reading of bpNichol's long poem The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2

There is in being
something particularly tempting for man
and this something is none other than
                                          CACA
                                  (Antonin Artaud)

Book 2 of The Martyrology (cont'd)


from "Book of Common Prayer": "saint of no-names" and page 26 from Chapter 2, "1914: One or Several Wolves?" (A Thousand Plateaus)

"saint of no-names "
_____________________

(2) The snow-track is a rhizome.
        The line, book & bp's pic are plateaus.
      Saint reat is a BwO

A good postructuralist pictures the text and the accompanying visuals as the saint's pure white snow("of no-names"), and somewhere in between who'er holds it dangling by its shiny spine. It's not a metaphor nor an answer: a beginning to an end of incendiary speech. But where & what is a saint? Analogously perhaps, what is speech? A poem?How well do we know anything or anyone? You begin to single out a single name (line) from the one tablet or barren snowy field, in which the prints first appear, (as per primacy of snow!) and press the assemblage (or the closed book) of the many competing saint-names (and, reat, orm, etc.) firmly between thumb and forefinger It's how we've strayed so soon from home and page that now gives our saint 'reat' and 'and' and 'orm' their own form, distinguishable as snow-tracks. And the same could be said of the original faint "saint of no-names" or one-name or two if it were instead not just a tablet, painting, text but even a photo-graph, a poet's on the cover (hypehated to distinguish the snow from the prints or bp's eyes from a mind's clear white!). Or if any saint do come, called god-man, who don't give a damn for the panting processes of words, fields & whatnot even as he rises from a snowy grave, with poet still at his table. The poet who finds unbearable the politics lying hid in snow or tablet-image is the same bp who won't face the noisy world alone. A lot of difference to him a martyr's name makes these days! The saint of no-names, tracked in bp's own cold textual snow, makes mendicant tracks look errant or menacing. The poet's (or saint's ) chosen to be outside & read the name of 'saint' like a covert sign-system: indoors, at his breakfast table, is noplace for the saint to be. As he confronts the silent sigilla in the snow, and reads a tree of meaning with taproots, branches, et al,—the one dropped in front of the poet's house by surprise— he ventures outside with care or vanity. Muse or technonarcissist, the poet's now one or the other. And bp's saint's proper name is what, "mister or saint reat" ? We do read him in the snow but only the part with the single-file line of prints surrounded by a plane of 'white' (as meaning "this way bp comes alone" ) or the clouds or blue skies passing over him, separately or together. My god the snow-track's a rhizome to which you can't append the name canada or god, or whatnot as if you can't see a text (that's soon to turn blue) or snow in the prints. Has he been outside at all? Traces lead nowhere but to an imaginary Tree for bp is certain about a few names at least: the god-man or martyrs his book purports to be who reside in a nameless land, practically indistinguishable from the sky & earth. Snow-track is a rhizome, or the clear emptiness of poet-mind or sky-blue of saint reat's falling hair.