[A]s soon as I see the word I used (or avoided, for even avoiding it is a way of using it) I know that I have a fictional character in front of me.
— Sven Lindquist, Exterminate All the Brutes, 104
In early August 1972 something caused Barrie to write to his parents a description of the emotional difficulties that had precipitated his sudden departure for Toronto eight years before. He also appears to have chastised them for their lack of interest in his work at Therafields, and said that in his life choices he had had to be himself. Quite possibly he was moved by an accumulation of developments — his Governor General’s Award, his mother’s subsequent letter that she and his father were proud of his accomplishment and wished they could have afforded to attend the ceremony, his recent appointment to the Canada Council multimedia jury, the positive reception that was being given The Martyrology, Book I and Book II, and perhaps the understanding of the limitations of family that he was beginning to envision while writing The Martyrology, Book 3, particularly in the parts he originally had drafted in the spring of 1971 as “Plains Poems.”
. . . i need a sense of continuity
i have no family anymore as you would call it
no blood kin i can feel close to
only a brother i do not talk to
why?
we is first of all a blood relation
later a station you pay homage
carry your cross of loss thru life
midwife to your own grief
friends are what save you
He had also spent much of 1971 and early 1972 working on his never to be completed “autobiographies” “bpNichol by John Cannyside” and “Autobiography of Phillip Workman” — the latter with its numerous passages based on his confused feelings toward his mother. And in some of the “Plains Poems”–derived passages of The Martyrology, Book 3 he was focussing yet again on the troubled 1963–64 Oedipal scene on Comox Street:
listening to the rain
remember a time on comox
andy dave barb & me
that form of we
place vancouver
time 1963
[. . .]
there is no way to encompass everything
we need to encompass as much as we can
the pain is the recognition the work outlives us
we die before we’s completion
whatever that is
these memories of vancouver an older time
are memories of a we that never worked
existed in a timelessness which is not memory
[. . .]
earlier today
woke up from sleep
a frog in my room
caught it
carried it outside
it pissed in my hand
terror of me
let it free in the rain and mud
Possibly Barrie hoped by writing frankly to his mother and father that he might end at least the “standing still” between them. Or at the very least that he might be able to let them go free.
On August 15, 1972, his mother replied, in the routine everything-is-normal language that had been characteristic of all her letters. Of course she had always believed that Barrie’s childhood was normal, and that his adolescent and adult life decisions had had little to do with anyone except himself. She told him that they had noticed nothing unusual in his emotions when he was leaving for Toronto back in 1964, and joked that perhaps her not noticing had something to do with the “generation gap.” The jest implied that Barrie’s problem might well have been a culturally systemic one rather than a personal crisis that had arisen from the specifics of his family.
In her next paragraph she seemed to argue that perhaps there had been no problem, that maybe he’d been mistaken about himself. Or perhaps their lack of communication had been his fault for seeming like such a regular lad. She wrote that he had always been a cheerful boy, easy to get along with, seemingly without a care in the world. They had known that he was going through the time of “growing up,” a time that is usually tough on the young, but everyone goes through that so they hadn’t thought much about it. And because he’d really been a jolly and level-headed boy, she suggested, they hadn’t noticed any problems. And he hadn’t mentioned any — why didn’t he talk to them back then, she wondered, pointing out that his mom and dad hadn’t been monsters. But even though that was all long ago, she continued, if somehow they were to blame, they were now sorry. As for rarely mentioning his Therafields work, she told him that he had always been evasive whenever she had asked about it. She wrote that much like he had to be himself, she and his father had to be themselves, and that it was difficult for them to accept the way that he dressed and the way that he lived. Moreover she doubted that these ways were really “him” — that they didn’t correspond to the person that she believed him to be. She added that it was even harder for his dad to accept the way he lived — that in his work at the CN offices how one dressed and how neat one appeared had been important. He hoped that Barrie’s long hair was at least clean and tidy. Writing these remarks seems to have reminded her how rigidly she and his dad needed to keep to their views. She then wrote that although they still loved him, “we” were “us” — underlining both pronouns. She signed off by telling Barrie that she was confident that her letter had pretty well cleared things up, and that they were “proud” of both his poetry and his work and were sending “lots of love.”
Barrie’s letter that she is responding to has vanished, but the enormity of what it may have asked of her is evident in the terms by which she tries to dismiss or normalize it — telling him that he had always seemed a good regular boy, that everyone has to face growing up, that his problems, if he had any, happened long ago, and that they still loved him. One could say that Barrie has been unrealistic in asking, but he had most likely been writing at that moment much more as a son than as a novice psychotherapist. His mother’s response is probably as warm and understanding as one could expect considering how truly baffled she has been by the life he has chosen, and how “evasive” he may very well have been about this life and the troubles that brought him to it.1 But Barrie must nevertheless have been at least emotionally disappointed to receive it. He would have to continue to carry his “cross of loss.”
However, his letter had somewhat diminished the gap between them, and brought his parents’ knowledge of him closer to his own knowledge of himself. He visited them and his sister Deanna the following February, and recorded part of the visit in his notebook. On February 17, 1973, he and Deanna, their parents, and their Aunt Addie (the wife of his father’s brother Walter) had talked about the 1950 Red River Flood, and he had learned some details that he considered “important.” Earlier that spring, he was told, he had had his tonsils removed, and had felt, with some anger, that in the process he had been lied to. When the flood had begun, both his mother and father had been unable to conceal their fear. When, after evacuation and a brief happy stay with his mother’s sister in Saskatoon, his mother had taken Deanna, Don, and him to the home of her brother Bill in Regina, trouble had been almost immediate. Bill had falsely accused Barrie of breaking a window. Bill’s wife Ethel had treated Avis as if she were “scum.” Barrie had hated both Ethel and Bill because she was aloof and easily angered and he repeatedly defended her. He was also unhappy that his mother had brought them there to be treated like low-class cousins. When his mother had moved them to her mother’s home in Calgary he had promptly caught chicken pox and then they had all had to rush back to Winnipeg because of a possible strike by railway workers. While his parents were preoccupied with their Winnipeg lives, he had started his first year of school. In their repaired and redecorated Wildwood Park home he had become so depressed that he had quietly painted the wall beside his crib with black watercolours. Deanna had belatedly noticed and called their mother but by this time he was sleeping and he was awoken by his mother angrily spanking him. In his notebook Barrie recorded all these new recollections in terse abbreviated phrases, as if worried that he might forget something if he didn’t hurry on to write them all. He observed that his mother seemed still to feel guilty about the spanking. He wrote also that he suspected that he may have mentally “fused” his mother with her haughty sister-in-law.
This is the only passage in all of Barrie’s notebooks and letters that records a moment in which he has been able to talk to his parents frankly about difficult childhood happenings. Whether there had been other such moments in the past, or whether this moment owed something to a change he had managed through his letter, or to the presence of his aunt Addie and the family dynamics her presence released, is probably unknowable. But the brief intense discussion had clearly released vital news from the past for Barrie, and showed him his family not only taking his pain seriously but also able to reveal their own feelings of fear and inadequacy during his childhood years. The family scene sketched is much different from the defensive “all was normal” portrayal of his mother’s letter. It may have required all the skills and insights Barrie had learned in house groups, standard groups, and learning groups for him and the others to pass safely through the conversation’s various revelations.
Internally dated “late february 73,” the penultimate passage of The Martyrology, Book 3, titled “last take,” followed this scene by only a week or two. Barrie was still in British Columbia, now driving with “dave” — David Phillips — on Vancouver’s north shore near the mountains that give their names to the harbour’s Lions Gate. Punning on the proverb that has March coming “in like a lion” and going “out like a lamb,” Barrie wrote of birth and of time’s inexorability — an inexorability that he sees as also the incest prohibition — the door “you are not permitted to open again.” The birth image had led him to imagine “the lion’s mouth” as a woman’s sex:
time
the lion’s month before us the lamb’s born in
the door
you are not permitted to open again
enter thru the lion’s mouth the man’s root gets planted in
not to be consumed
as tho the use of lips weren’t speech
a doorway into the woman’s soul intelligence comes out of
SCREAMING
a complete thot
born from the dialogue between you
This fast-moving passage in which, as “intelligence,” a child is born out of “woman’s soul” produces almost immediately in the succeeding lines Barrie’s own “birth” out of a series of women, the last of which is Lea Hindley-Smith. The key puns that enable this movement are “lips” and “dialogue,” the latter of which begins as sexual dialogue and ends as both the Freudian dialogue of psychotherapy and the words of poetry the multiply-born Barrie can speak. Implicitly his mother’s labia are partly uttering the words we are reading.
or what comes forth from my mouth
born from the woman in me
handed down thru my grandma ma and lea
is what marks me most a man
that i am finally this we
this one & simple thing
my father Leo
my mother Cancer
she births herself
the twin mouths of women
w’s omen
It is notable that Barrie here equated his grandma, ma, and Lea in their roles in helping him toward manhood. He did not compare them.
Barrie’s quest in these first three books of The Martyrology to find a “we” — a quest that is suddenly completed here in “i am finally this we” — may very well have passed through his frank self-revealing letter of the previous August and the family “dialogue” that he had recently experienced. Though focussed mostly on his mother, this process had not excluded his father — who I surmise has been at least a small part of the “father” whom The Martyrology poet has been recurrently addressing. Barrie continued the passage:
our words are spun within the signs our fathers left
the sibilance of s
the cross of t
there are finally no words for your father
too many letters multiplying the signs
you are the one
the unifying
no signifier when we cannot grasp the signified
He had evidently been recalling Lacan’s theory of the phallus as the sign that guarantees symbolic meaning and enables language, but that also testifies to the “lack” or absence of the signified; he possibly was also recalling Julia Kristeva’s theories of a female “semiotic” and male “symbolic,” for he went on to consider that his saints have been conceptually “in between / the world of men / women.”
The passage — and effectively Book 3 itself — ended with him realizing that visually the word “me” becomes “we” if the ‘m’ is turned upside down. He drew an image of this inversion and then wrote:
the emblems were there when i began
seven years to understand
the first letter / level of
martyrdom
It was seven years since he began writing Scraptures and “discovered” the saints. “M” is the first letter of the word “martyrdom” and must itself be “martyred,” given up, surrendered, if the “me” is to become “we.”
The overall “last take” passage is a graphic example of the non-arrogance Barrie had aspired to achieve nine years before when inventing his poet-persona “bpNichol” and deciding to focus on writing ideopomes so as to reduce the temptation of self-expression and to force himself to look for meanings not within himself but within the words he was working with. Before that time Barrie might have written a poem about driving with “dave” through the North Shore mountains, and found meaning in the scenery they encountered or conversations they had. In “last take” Barrie — through bpNichol — finds meaning instead in the words he has used in the poem, in the alternate meanings they carry and propose. “last take” is visibly a bpNichol poem that speaks to the Barrie who wrote to his mother, visited his parents, went driving with dave, and began a seven-year quest when he had bpNichol start writing and publishing Scraptures. The wavering “i” of “last take” is doubly both bp and Barrie — much like the “father” that The Martyrology would keep addressing would continue to be simultaneously the Glen Nichol who still wants Barrie to get a haircut, the father-deity who speaks the world into being in the first lines of Genesis or in the myth of Palongawhoya, and the Lacanian phallus that allows language’s “symbolic order.”
It had taken a while for bpNichol — the poet of language and image and reader of their meanings — to become dominant in The Martyrology the way he had been in Barrie’s visual and conceptual poems. Much of Book I and Book II seem to have been produced by Barrie Nichol and the various pains and traumas he was taking to Lea. Of course Barrie is still here in Book 3, not only travelling through British Columbia but also watching and guiding bpNichol. It was Barrie who decided that he — bpNichol — would write a “Coda” to Book 3, the “Mid-Initial Sequence” on the “P” that is much more visible in the word “bpNichol” than it is in “Barrie.” The sequence is a tour de force of reading language — starting with reading that “P” for the meanings it may carry, as in the section “bushes”:
dawn
the r rises
brushes drawn
the w hole scene
into which the world
disappears
d is a p
pear shaped
dear H
a p edges
into the sea
sun
the unnenviable s
This section — like all those in the sequence — is a kind of expanded version of the language readings of Still Water. It’s a bpNichol, ideopoet, cosmic chef passage.
Watching his irrepressible client-persona pun throughout here on how ABCD contains all of human time, the BC before Christ’s birth and the AD of the present, with D for death (or the Last Judgement and the re-emergence of the Devil) marking its future end, Barrie seems to have realized for the first time in his seven-year poem that bpNichol, and the letters of his initials, would live much longer than him.
whatever dies
the secrets do not die with you
the lore we all seek (l or e)
choices are not disinterested
d is in t
it is the old story HE lived thru
HIS death & suffering
33 years into HIS time
22 letters left to pass thru
what birth will herald the change
Christ himself dies 33 years into his time — “AD” — leaving 22 letters more — E to Z, one of which is the P of bpNichol. Barrie, or bp, continues these readings in the next section, with the richly ambiguous thought of “conceiving himself a writer.”
11 years since i first conceived myself a writer
took up the task to earn that name
& now i see
i (n) am e
The “name” he has earned is both writer and of course the mid-initial name, “bpNichol, writer.” The poem’s “i” continues to signify doubly, or perhaps triply as Barrie, bp, and alphabet symbol.
can i speak in the midst of suffering
address the cross we wear too carelessly
t i’ m e
part of the movement out of this dark time
we are all trapped in a D we do not recognize
i will never wear the H
never see HIS face
“We” are trapped in the D of AD and of the death its end signifies. None of us will reach H, or I and S, which all occur after D even though the language now goes there and HE — H and E — promises to be.
bp concluded the sequence with a palindrome that Barrie woke up hearing — the scene appears to argue that the palindrome was not something Barrie as possible “maker” of poems had made but one that was said to him.
‘dogma i am god’
it is all that’s said
woke up this morning
these words in my head
a palindrome
linked with an image
of friends two poets i knew
disagreed were not speaking with each other
d is a greed
a gluttony of shape
swallowing the era which it ends
“d is a greed” is of course a reading of “disagreed” — one that returns Barrie and reader to the “arrogance” that he had hoped to escape in 1964 by taking up visual poetry. This “greed” is inherent in the way in which the devouring D — the end of AD — surrounds the palindrome at both its beginning and end, effectively containing it; none of the letters in between can get outside of the two Ds.
is it the D of devil then
the apocalypse the bible prophesied
ends the age we live in
Barrie/bp asks, and then decides the palindrome must be heresy, a temptation, perhaps, that his sleep had permitted or overheard.
‘dogma i am god’
heresy
hearsay
in the worst sense
false pride
who thinks to bestride the world
because he feels crushed by it.
Barrie has made a surprising return to his thoughts about poetry eight years before when he had realized that he found “repugnant” poetry in which poets appear to seek special status because of pain they have suffered — claiming to be important and “sensitive” because they have been “crushed” by the world. That return, and the apocalyptic concerns that accompany it, mark this “Coda” as an emphatic and seemingly conclusive ending to Book 3. Barrie has achieved much of what he has been aiming for in terms of both personal answers and writing solutions. He has brought The Martyrology further from the style and poetics of his “regular” poems of the 1960s and extremely close to the poetics of his visual and conceptual ones. The last sections of Book 3 are as much developments from Still Water and sections of Love: a Book of Remembrances as they are ones from “Journeying and the Returns” or Monotones.
The concerns that emerge from this ending might prompt a reader to ask — as some already have — whether Barrie was religious. He’s probably not at this moment in any sectarian or even narrowly Western or Eastern or Aboriginal understandings of that word. But he believes that language, human existence, and our world’s existence, have come into being against great odds. He would not object to the word “miracle.” He knows that Christ lived for 33 years. And he knows that there are 22 letters that follow D.
Barrie would also believe that The Martyrology had now come to an end, and not begin work on a fourth book for more than a year and a half. He would intensify his work on his prose autobiographies and on preparing the less personal Love: a Book of Remembrances for publication. In June 1973, after an evening session with some house group clients, he would write in his notebook a somewhat confused reflection on about his writing identity — on his self-definition as “bpNichol: writer.” To some extent these thoughts appear to have been raised by the Oedipal desires he has encountered once again in trying to write his “autobiographies,” and perhaps also by his having recently come, for a brief moment, closer than ever before to his mother. He wrote that his current writing problems seemed associated with what he had initially wanted from writing — those Freudian secondary gains — definitions of himself as “bpNichol” and “writer.” But secondary gains, he noted, are not what writing should be done for. He wrote that he felt suspended between being upset and not being upset, and also between his work as a psychotherapist and some out-of-date understanding of himself. But he felt afraid of who he might discover himself to be, because he knew he was no longer the person he had once believed himself to be, but could see no new self-understanding that felt right for him. He noted that he was finding it a struggle even to think simultaneously about his work in therapy and in writing, and also experiencing a strong desire to repress his awareness that he was having such a struggle.
These may seem like strange thoughts to be having after his powerful writing at the end of The Martyrology, Book 3 — that “Barrie” could be tempted to belittle or repress the “bpNichol” self-definition that had unveiled so many openings before him and filled so much of his own emptiness with sparkling alphabetic activity — but of course poetry was not therapy, much like the public bpNichol was not merely Barrie. The poem itself may very well have stirred hopes that were at this moment too large for him to accept or feel worthy of.