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

     All the beloved lie
In the perpetual savagery of graves.
                           (James Wright)

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 "

_____________________

(6) The heart is a rhizome
     Stars, dragons & tables are possible plateaus.
     Saint reat is a BwO

bp and reat sit like ghosts at the poet's table still unwell, alone:
     can't return again to listen, can you?

makar of shiny-spined fable of "wails", heart linked to stars, and
     between dragons & you next nova sun

even as it breaks down, stars saints and friends in mid-November,
     "our energy lives on"

a line at a time souls like bp's look across a magic valley and
     won't quit in face of lies—

without noisy dreams the impulse to go on is ah! lovely and long,
     prince of flows

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

poetry had shown you the way to go
a question only of returning
a pointless path to follow they said it leads but to death
                                              (bpNichol, The Martyrology)

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 "

_____________________

(5) Polestar is a rhizome
        Fields, ponds & bp's wet road are possible plateaus.
     bp is a BwO

As ghostly text or evening bars poet from his table, grief always
    sits between him & his dear saint reat:


unwell, alone, he can't sit under all this cloud-town worship for
     "we must return again to human voice & listen"


says makar of shiny-spined fable of "wails", now his lame heart
     linked to the stars outdoors,


somewhere between fields and dragons that end only to begin
     a new star-crisis, & reat his only saint


"our energy lives on", says bp, even as it all breaks down, stars
     saints and friends all around him


Perhaps poetry's a speech a line at a time or poem long as souls
     —that look across the valley—


stumble, &take things for "mirage or magic' &who'd never give up
     on poets lost (maybe 'mongst the stars!)


Stick to it! live lives thumbed thru often, folksy and old And go
     on a prince of flows


O! without noise of saint's dead nights & dreams, the impulse to go
     is ah! lovely and long,


good Ontario road under his feet bp grounded wakes from sleep,
     elated, and standing alone!

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


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 "

_____________________

(4) Valley road is a rhizome
      Cloud-town, Kalowna, & poet's table are possible plateaus.
      Dave is a BwO

Now picture a trace, after all, of a text or ghostly evening
     with a poet at a poet's table,
     and somewhere between grief & his dear saint reat
    one bp
 who's more adept at telling repast from the vanisht fable, magical
     makar of bound shiny-spined "wails of the saints", and
     links desire to outdoors for
bp's a heart-producing machine, a metaphor and kind of aimless
     crisis: that begins (as all hearts do) &ends with
     flows for nowhere but fields or snows

But above all a saint's vision or poet's or mine to intertwine with,
     a text of divination in my lap thumbed thru so
     often it's folksy & damp as dew

Perhaps poetry's like speech known only by its incipient heart
     a line at a time singly ript, singly a long poem
     told as the many tragic souls,
     —in cloudy valley they look across—

who stumble, & mistake things for "mirage or magic' in the act of
     flight Story after story of how dave, barb have dared
     to give bp, 'reat' and 'and' and 'orm' blessed
     forms of their own,
and an errant migratory flight through a private spring valley A
     faint "saint of no-names" is one, two or more retold
     lives And a tablet, painting or clean graven
     lines on the road
for as skies wash over eyes and lips it's easy to tell a saint's soppy
     no-mind, frail &uneasy, from a hot stare, or
     saint-hood and it's big O become

one bp who looks to flighty saint rand, wanting no more than
     to be left by his side, father & son,
     and go as a prince of flows
for"what flows between confuses you" O! & if any saint from over
     the road, orm-named with pupil, damn the panting
     processes of fields or whatnot, he'll suffer
     like bp for straying out of a snowy cloud (you bet!), like
     poet and saint

Nothing easy about a billowy town he's from or saint's wedged fall,
     'cept it's him who won't face the noise
     without saint's sad eyes,
 barely with us, too many dead nights, too often lifted from
     his dreams  And as he's free of tiresome repasts & prayers
     he returns on impulse if at all, lovely &
     productive

Lot of good depressed martyrs have done him! no-names are now
     more lovable than cloud-town saints, eyes fear-rimmed,
     tracking through Kalowna in '64

Elated, and waiting in rain, a line of good Kalowna road under his
     boots, (that Terry might have run down)—
     desires of every lashing martyr—
bp's a war machine! Risen errant or menacing soul who's chosen
     the snow outdoors & read 'saint'- like a covert sign-
     system for fettered hearts dying to go!

And he assumes a new accord with stars risen up over the eyes ,
     —gone the wandering cloud-men, et al—
     scraping roots, fascicles, & care and caresses, of saints and his
     dear dear barb,

&missing the simple image, equally unpoet-like, of name-less saint's
     proper name "mister or saint and, reat or rike" or what ?
     or prints as meaning "this way bp comes
     to Kalowna in '64",

like bashful canadian saint god! the etched road's a rhizome that's
     been outside all the time Append a name to bp's heart
     (valleys, sky and earth or something)


The road is a sky-blue rhizome, or saint's fallen smile

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

oh fuck it's raining

stick my hand into the sea

that's poetry (bpNichol, The Martyrology, 2)

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 "
_____________________

(3) The reader is a rhizome.
      Canada-council, clouds & valleys are plateaus.
      Saint orm is a BwO

Now what's it a picture or space of, after all: of a text or the accompanying visuals barely distinguishable from the saint's pure white ("of and, reat, orm and his pupil"), or somewhere in between of bp, the reader ?As who's more adept at telling them apart than who'er holds a bound "tales of the saints", shiny-spined, reprinted with help from canada-council bp's heart's a machine desiring the outdoors Not a metaphor but a kind of war machine grafted for pity's sake onto aimless saints: that begins (as all anarchy does) & ends with prints, and flows as essentially errant migration into the fields, over the snows But above all a saint's or poet's or my own that intertwines with a text of origins told in folk tales Perhaps  poetry like speech is not known 'cept by its own abandoned war heart A  name (line) from one site or subject to the next is a single expanse of plane where first appear the white (as per primacy of page) and the assemblage (or the closed book) of the many migratory saints also traceable somewhere between the cloud and the winter valley they trip thru Story after story of how we've strayed so soon from home now gives our saint 'reat' and 'and' and 'orm' and 'rike' their own form, distinguishable as an errant migratory flight through the spring valley And the original faint "saint of no-names" or one-name or two, variously recounted, is no longer a tablet, painting, text or even a graven image, a poet's visible on the road As skies wash over eyes and lips it's hard to tell a saint's aura, circular & frail, from a sun's hot stare, saint's head and a big O become irreparably one! O! if any saint do come, called saint orm with pupil, who won't damn the panting processes of worlds, fields & whatnot he'll suffer as he strays out of a billowy heaven (you bet!), like poet and saint did Nothing remarkable about signs lying low or saint's winged descent, nothing terribly imagistic, mysterious either for it's the same bp who won't face the noisy world without a saint's sorrowful eyes Absent suddenlyfrom tiresome repasts & prayers inside, returning to the earth on an impulse if at all, lonely, unproductive A lot of difference to him a martyr's retarding name makes when he's depressed The saint of no-names is now no more resolvable into textual space than saints from cloud-town into mendicant steps tracking thru Kelowna in '64 bp's heart's a war machine! Errant or menacing Suddenly risen from his table, the poet's who's chosen to go outdoors & read the name of 'saint' like a covert sign-system: for indoors is noplace for him to be As stars rise up over his eyes, he assumes a new accord with roots, fascicles, et al,—gone the wandering cloud-mind & its misery— he ventures outside with care and caresses, looking for saints and his dear dear barb Muse and technonarcissist, who miss the simple image, equally unpoet-like don't venture out. And bp's name-less saint's proper name is what, "mister or saint and, reat or rike" ? We won't read him as before if you look there and skip a line of prints & the wider massy 'white' (as meaning "this way bp comes to Kelowna in '64" ), with the clouds or blue skies following, separately or together, like bashful canadian saints My god the bp-reader's a rhizome to which you can append any desire after your heart We've been outside all the time Traces lead nowhere but to imaginary spirit valleys practically indistinguishable from the sky & earth bp-reader is a rhizome, or the clear emptiness of poet-mind or sky-blue of saint's fallen smile

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.

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

I poured myself out thro' my tips. What's left?
I slipt. I slipt. What's right? Whose centre's where?
                                   (John Berryman, The Dream Songs)

Some procedural matters, first:

(a) pick randomly any line from bpNichol's The Martyrology;
(b) select randomly any page from Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (ATP) to be used as a palimpsest (or pentimento);
(d) write a poetic 'paratext' (of any reasonable word length, & in any determinate style) for the ATP page;
(c) in the paratext make something a 'rhizome' (and call it by name);
(d) create 'lines of flight' into at least three recognizable 'plateaus', calling them by name, too;
(e) identify anything/one into a 'body without organs' (BwO), provided nothing else be excluded by that sole decision; and
(f) rewrite the passage at least TEN times til it begins to metamorphose into a 'desiring-machine', interrupted and connecting at the same time.


Book 2 of The Martyrology



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 "
_____________________

(1) Snow is a rhizome.
        Snowy field, poet's table and diptych are possible plateaus.
      The name-less saint is a BwO

Snow, snow everywhere! Like a good poststructuralist diptych with text and visuals the saint's name's lost in a pure white space ("of no-names"), stuck somewhere in the folding between two panels. It's not a metaphor: just a place to look (as in the book). But what saint? What names? Whose prints are those? You do distinguish a single name in the one (tablet) from the assemblage (or the folded Iconography) of the many held both together by string or scribed in wax. It's how we've strayed so soon from the page that matters. And it's the same way for the saint of no-names even if it were instead a tablet, painting, text we wanted, or even names of the dead. Or if any saint, call him the god-man, gave a damn for the same panting processes of words, clouds & whatnot, he rises first from his bed. The poet who finds unbearable the politics represented in snow or tablet-image won't face the day alone. A world of difference to him a name makes. The saint of no-names, embedded in bp's own cold text, makes sinewy mendicant tracks look singular or cluttered. The poet's (or saint's ) two choices is to be either outside & read the name of 'saint' like a covert sign-system or indoors, at his breakfast table, ready to feel the saintly come to him for once. Confront the silent sigilla in the snow, and create a tree of meaning with bloodroots, branches, et al, dropped in front of the poet's house or surprise the outdoors with fresh invention! Muse or technonarcissist, the poet's one or the other but bp's neither: he's still inside. And bp's saint's proper name is what, "mister or saint reat" ? We do read him in the snow, the part with the single-file line of prints surrounded by a plane of 'white' (as meaning "this way bp comes alone" )or the messier hodge-podge of saint's and bp's prints together that's always surrounding it? My god the snow's a rhizome to which you can't append the name canada or god, or whatnot as if you didn't see the ruse of the text inscribed in snow (where it intersects with poet) or snow in the prints, or even look for the answer futilely in prayers at the breakfast table. Has he been outside at all? Traces lead nowhere but to an imaginary Tree for bp is uncertain not just about names: the god-man or martyrs his book purports to be reside in a nameless land, practically indistinguishable from the sky & earth. Snow is a rhizome, or the clear emptiness of poet-mind or sky-blue of saint reat's falling hair.

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")