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

We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau. (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)

Book 1

I have found now's the most opportune moment (and reason) for reading bpNichol's The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2, an author and a work I have given scant praises to in the past, because I've seen the surest way to the heart is to begin not at absolute beginnings, endings but always in the middle. Where bp and his lives of the saints are always to be found, quietly upturning centres, tables and ancient reliquaries. I've found I cannot read bp anywhere else but at the most undefinable (maybe even the most unsayable) places imaginable.


It's easy with an accompanying but never overriding text like A Thousand Plateaus to begin anywhere I like since the lines (of verse) make up only segments, or the shaly boundaries, of a widening plateau: working from the middle, The Martyrology connects to everyone & everything, changes dimensions and territories (deterritorializes) almost without warning, and maps out a design that's permeable, flexible and always subject to change.


So bpNichol and a seminal poststructuralist text together; a poet and a reading strategy that makes of a long poem a "machinic assemblage" and of both poet and book, a wonderful rhizome. So I can start anywhere and move in any direction, at any speed, I like.  For Book I I will use segments of the opening chapter's Introduction (here sequentially arrayed for ease of reading into three subdivisions).

For Book II I will start and end with the first line of "Book of Common Prayer", randomly choosing any page from ATP from which to make bp's first line confront the terrible outside until, of course, he joins the next army of ants.


from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (shortened to ATP) Introduction: Rhizome (pages 1 to 7)

"A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds." (ATP, 3)

The smooth, and extenuating, reach of the line is the only real antidote we have to mangling 'subjective' intentions. The odd relapse, for example, into the search for a language's mystical aleph-beth can be excused on grounds of late 'romanticism'. Spirit is always a forced design on the silent materiality of writing.


What scribes & celtic Fathers of a book of Kells, for instance, have breathed into consonant-clusters may look alright to a conventional study of origins and even perhaps a Neolithic history of the Word (after Olson). It's only a body without organs (BwO) who is able to read because s/he quantifies" at the same time( deterritorializes) the sacrality in the text. The reader alone, left to reassemble a primary text and tables, and the book that's been bloodily reconfigured by the BwO without prejudice to an original flat design are one and the same. "Literature is an assemblage", after all. (ATP, 4)


So the Book of Kells (or Tanya or Nag Hammadi Library) and a sufficiently similar Martyrology (by canada's bpNichol),with the same assemblage of parts, tools and measurable speeds with which to say the unsayable; and iconography, too, genealogy & swirls,and a set of lineated narrative codes set at differing intensities and in the oddest sites—what are these if not the most differently arranged "matters" of an imaginable history. Why just end at a holy text? A history (after Gertrude Stein) that's been denaturalized only to give way to its properly deterritorialized form. A history that simply "is" & always waits to be reencountered someplace else.


And bp's a nomad with a penchant for off-centered stories, eliding pages and space, and his text "is nothing but a history/brief at best/an end of one thing/beginning of another" (Martyrology 1), a song for the "only son" for whom the sacerdotal text's been clearly unmade. Lonely nomadic heart without a single consonantal star-cluster to guide and inspire, for

(a long time ago i thot i knew how this poem would go, how the
figures of the saints would emerge. now it's covered over by
my urge to write you what lines i can. the sun is dying. i've
heard them say it will go nova before the year's end. i wanted
to send you this letter (this poem) but now it's too late to
say anything, too early to have anything to send.)

What doesn't emerge (because it can't) is a history or hagiography along celtic or patristic or parasitic lines, an early signifying stream seen from a shady lookout point: but at best a book of 'martyrs' who learn as they go ("mapping", "surveying"), unable to find their way by natural smarts or even the nova sun. Or the poem's dying heart for that matter.


from Introduction: Rhizome (pages 7 to 15)

"Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiritual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four..." (ATP, 5)

Creeping beneath the martyr's (the poet bp's) feet is a rhizomatic network not of One (plotted in perpetuity) but of secondary reflections in long, thin strands of nontradition, enveloped within a Spirit "palongawhoya" and a chronicle of a saint (from "from THE WRITINGS OF SAINT AND" ) whose name means pure "connection and heterogeneity"(ATP, 7) for the "fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, 'and...and...and...'" .(ATP, 25) A book of martyrs, beginning with and, that isn't afraid to acknowledge its indebtedness to movement, poetry and lateral strategy, since

flowers


sweet smells
dumb the lips

saint and
enshrined in organdy
flows out the chimney

no smoke blows

it is a landscape without hearing

a sea of cries

the lies are simply the listening
without replies (from "the martyrology of saint and")

Flowers, saints and landscape "form a rhizome". (ATP, 10) As and and palongawhoya make an irreparable break between themselves and, more importantly, between signs and things, poetry becomes an "assemblage of enunciations". (ATP, 7) The world crowds in and jostles for attention: the poet says "make the setting here/an ocean/moved in/becomes a lake/mountains flatten & the hills contract" (from "saint and"), and a clownish saint removes his makeup, not caring that "the sea/moves in upon the tents then stops". ("saint and")


Saint and sees the encroaching seas (the whole world of cries & lies) as a case of asymmetrical or aparallel viewing and, as a result, becomes the world, a becoming-world in which skies turn the same blue as saint and's falling hair; and as he (and we) "cross over" into "scenes from the lives of the saints" saint and becomes saint reat, ranglehold & orm. At some point the inevitable question arises: "what's a/poem like you doing in a/poem like this?" ("lives of the saints")


But a world, nonetheless. Or rather one of a thousand plateaus for every fake One: a cartography. (ATP, 13-15).The poet's canadian landscape's a map traced over with saintly flights that are real "fleshy aches", lonely nights ("saints"): all the becoming-saints one bp can take, poet, martyr and lonely blue skies forming a rhizome with many "entryways", like "dedicat[ing] a poem to a whim". ("saints") Right. Could you blame him for the anxiety & frustration that comes from riding a line of flight to everywhere: the good, the bad and the subjective, oedipal, lacanian analyses or whatnot, lyrical intensities all the way.

"i'm tired of fingering these old poems
stringing them into beads


saint reat & saint agnes
may you go down together from this nothingness

Nura Nal help me!
when will i see where emma peel has gone?

dick tracy's chasing
some murderer on the moon         & you're strung out in Naltor
a long way from home

all these myths confuse me

too many saints & heros

Shanghalla         take them away

may their heads be wrapped in threads

green

          blue

                      grey

He'd be tired after all these divagations and saints trying like saint orm to futilely address the wrongs of wasted years, friendships & maledicted prayers: "saint orm/you were the grey we passed thru" ("saints"), and the love bp always came back to. And would never have wasted breath on a "thot" stuck somewhere between here, laryngeal-deep, and the divinatory whorl of winds, leaves and sounds outside (from "saint reat and the four winds of the world"), as if it could be a speech-substitute & we could on that alone escape from the seas and treacherous winds.


from Introduction: Rhizome (15 to 25)

We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs." (ATP, 22)

Or rather bp makes us see the silliness of the fake binary logic of every ecclesial saint orm (and saint reat) whereby the hegemony of the mediator turns one into two, two into three etc. and finally into a filthy nature of "adventitious growths and rhizomes" (ATP, 15). Now who'er dies for god (orm, reat or whatnot) becomes

tumble tongue      fish face
sayer of dreams

comer in nightmares
screaming & babbling

slime nose & green lip

dribbler of phrases
symbols & spewing

blood cougher      swamp dweller      "loon",

among other things. It's here, in this messy flipside of the divine, that freud and freudenschade, the canadian artist as landscape & a sort of competing 'genesis' account (with clippings from a Yeatsian image "i read in a poem/years ago" ("saint reat")) all appear. Here's a sexuality not just of slimy "white flood of love" but of mud, leaves, winds and the ground under your feet.


And a saint read even looking tuber-like, in one picture with and in the other without arrows indicating lines of flight for once he's done descanting on the 'holy' he becomes an "assemblage" of parts from which he comes. A rhizome. Or at the very least a shroud torn into even strips, right for iconography but unsuitable for burial. And the most egregious is perhaps that counter-clockwise flight round the head (instead of heart), making him a little dizzy, making him a halo. Always a processual saint begun in the middle: as bp has to say, nearing the end of Part 1, "you were never the same/those cells were prisons/unyielding stone/took & broke them/freed form" ("saint reat")


It's always a "line from/his wrist to his thumb" a saint (now saint raits) shows to the impressionable young novitiate or, at least, one of a possible n quantity of directions to choose from. So that if you're looking for beginnings or endings to the saint's story, you find nothing instead, sadly:

saint reat this is all nothing

do you understand?

there are no myths we have not created
ripped whole from our lived long days

no legends that could not be lies

you were simply a man
suffered the pain of silence in your head

let your sounds lead you out of that dead time

were made a saint
for lack of any other way of praising you ("saint reat")