Faces: Gilles Deleuze

A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch (Deleuze & Guattari)

Schizophrenia is disaster in life and success in poetry (Harold Bloom)

I can say without exaggeration that were it not for Gilles Deleuze I wouldn't be writing this now. Not that he's meant a life or death difference to me personally: or perhaps it's the case that (to realign indebtedness more clearly to the man & some uniquely collaborative origins) the writing vocation would've been lost entirely on me. The crease in the picture is a little telling: perhaps even emblematic. It's probably why I've kept it.

Actually, 'liberatory' is the word I ought to use to show the pure (& thrilling) aleatoriness of my first dove flight after reading Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Nothing seemed beyond reproach afterwards and everything that was to me erstwhile literarily dull, by which I mean weighted down with spotty academicisms, was subject to exciting new laws of intensities, new refractions & the vital regroupings that go with them. Poetries and genres seemed to dissolve into slipstreams. The language of poetry came— after the fall (so to speak)— soaring to the lyrically accessible spheres where composition developed by "lawns of excluded middles" (Waldrop) & singularities, averse to 'molar' crowds, that could be skimmed off the poet's perceptual field almost with Alice-in-Wonderland ease. In the words of Deleuze commentator Constantin V. Boundas (in "Gilles deleuze and the Problem of Freedom"), it's "the excess of the virtual over the actual" that releases free creativity. It's what I needed.

Yes, I said 'lyrical'! It's why my favourite modern work (or the one to which I believe a true lyricism is beholden the most these days) is John Berryman's The Dream Songs, and my favourite sonneteer, Ted Berrigan. And because they happen to be deleuzian spirits, they're also both American and not Canadian, coincidentally, and not Canadian because my country's still a place where, again, "skirting the surface" (The Logic of Sense) is seen as unpatriotic. Moralizing tendencies in Art abound everywhere here. After Deleuze, the poem didn't become the fashionable (Language) slyboots but rather an egregiously manifold 'body without organs' (bwo), a living index to any one of life's most intense schizzes: a living palette, installation visible only to the artist, a dream poetry worth dying for. None of which is to say, at the same time, that poetry turns into the unnatural and artificial medium for grotesqueries deleuzians worldwide had originally hoped for.

A world & a heart can, after all, be willed into being as easily as pastiche & readymades: being without organs invites deep tampering. Berryman, again, is not to lyricism what Duchamp is to the avant-garde: for one thing Deleuze & Berryman were jumpers whereas the middle class eagerly ate up Duchamp's artistic creations. I can envisage in them both a suicide pact and make that the lyrical heart. Logically and materially the work's (or the bwo's) still a creature of impetus coralled easily into a 'holey' space of competing forms & materials. It's the handling that matters. In short, Deleuze defines that uniquely defining arrest quality of a work, a quality which only the transplanted heart can give, as the immanent lyric (or avant-garde or Sadean or Mallarméan) in us all. Again and again, Canada's still a landscape for emotional & aesthetic cripples because it's forgotten how to walk like a true poetry body: beset with the tendency to think that Art's never immanent but interchangeable & so can be easily replaced by its francophone neighbour.

The crease in the Deleuze pic is emblematic, after all: & I've saved it since a crease pleases more than a skull fracture, and the figure in it looks like a framed portrait. One for Francis Bacon. A somehow even soft and reassuring granfatherly rest competes with a death mask image, the impish with the ghoulish, as if the man were saying anything, like Art, can be as freely transgressible as this receptacle for spontaneity named a bwo, & all that's needed is a constant infusion of fresh heart before the hardening sets in: something to lure aging spirits into creativity, even long after their prime. Cracked spirits like me.