Writer’s & Company (CBC) 9 May 1999; Park Honan discussing his biography Shakespeare: A Life
Eleanor Wachtel You say the Sonnets is the extant that they are autobiographical approach his identity uneasily, as if he were taking the lid off a jar of worms. What do you mean by that? What is revealed in the Sonnets?
Park Honan You know, the Sonnets you could say are divided into two groups, the first – there are over a hundred in the first group – are about a poet who is in love with, or anyway enamoured of, a beautiful young man, probably slightly above him in rank, and when I say ‘in love with’ I don’t necessarily mean a homosexual relationship, I think this is a homo social culture, many a sonnet had been written in praise of Gwyneth Paltrow, as it were, the blue eyed and long blond haired woman, you know, and this is getting rather tiresome. Shakespeare is exploring love, and so he’s having a man praise another man, and this is a very good kind of love. We don’t know that they’re in bed together, the poet loved the young man.
In the later Sonnets, there are fewer in this set, we have a different kind of love, which is a very sensual kind, the poet now is having an affair probably with a married woman, who herself has affairs with various other people, a so called Dark Lady, and is absolutely enslaved and driven mad with this relationship. He wants to detach himself, he cannot, he goes in for more, the disease that agonizes him, he calls the lady at one moment, you know, ‘a bay where all men ride,’ she’s whorish with her cosmetics, but he’s enslaved by sex. So that these two kinds of love, in between as it were, while talking about these, or giving us pictures of these two love affairs as it were, Shakespeare portrays his poet, his speaker, and I think it’s impossible to get away from the idea that Shakespeare is drawing on himself, again and again.
Who is this, what is this poet like? Well, he’s a person who is easily hurt, who cannot get used to the betrayal of a friend, to losing a friend. It’s a person who has a good deal of self doubt about himself, who feels that he’s being inefficient and losing time, that he’s not very interesting himself. That he exists to praise. Also he’s depressed and confused as soon as he gets entangled very closely in a relationship, and I think this probably is true of Shakespeare and you could support it in other ways, that he’s an observer, he’s keeping himself remote from society outside of the actors society, he’d by and large in London although he has some outside friends, chiefly among the immigrant class in London – but basically he is an observer who loves, or feels while observing.
When he becomes too close to someone else, he begins to get terrible doubts about himself, terrible feelings of inadequacy. I think all in all we’re getting a very delicately done and complex picture of a Shakespeare in the Sonnet speaker, in both of these situations. He may be drawing on a number of aspects of his relationships, he undoubtedly has had some experiences of adultery, he seems to know a great deal about it. He’s also horrified by it.
I just must add though about the sonnets: that in the sonnet vogue, the vogue of writing sonnets in the 1590s, you know, you made up characters and made them seem real – none of the poets really are putting real persons into these poems. So you know all the characters I just mentioned, the Dark Lady, the beautiful young man, even the poet himself are conglomerates, you know, they’re made from different sources.
But I still am saying that the voice in the sonnet is so unusual that he’s giving us a picture of this not very socially confident, observing, self-doubting, almost masochistic Shakespeare.
On Monday, 11 January 1999, I fell out of my chair in Temporal Arts Class as a performance. No one believed that I did this on purpose. I repeated the act in February, and still, no one believed it was intentional, or that it was performance art.
This note was taped to the front of The Book of Marks for the Ardeches show:
The Book of Marks [In Progress]
(A poem of data)
This book could be seen as four different things:
1. As a manifestation of an insane obsession;
2. As absurd text;
3. As a book written by aliens with alien text and alien design, or
4. As a book symbolic of the human Quest for Knowledge. This book contains information in sectors, each swiggle and doodle symbolic of “what we know”. Nature is chaos – a backdrop without definition. The grid with all it’s regularity and simplicity is the product of the human mind, and is imposed upon nature in the form of classification. Through our science of classification we create a sense of order out of nature, against its blank white (a mixture of all the colours) backdrop. The book is a linear time based medium, encapsulating a beginning, a middle, and an end. Thus, every drawn in square could symbolize something we know and every blank square could symbolize something we have yet to learn.
Notice how the beginning of the book is full.
Notice how the end of the book is empty.
Notice the holes.
Notice that the book is in progress.
Ardeches
The phrase ‘information overload,’ has become cliché. What we are dealing with is a new type of mysticism, a technological mysticism. The diagram thus becomes a very important symbol. It is a religious aesthetic, a way of offering mystical understanding of data. The data is so abstract, yet so vitally important, so tangible and yet ephemeral that is has obtained the aura of a god. The diagram thus becomes a way to approach this god. This a result of the triumph of positivism, manifested through the scientific-method, which has led to so much information being produced that a mystical understanding, instead of becoming quaint, primitive, and obsolete is actually required in order to see how the parts become whole.
I have been interested in how parts become whole, how meaning is carried by lines in the form of text and drawing in general, and the subsequent, relationship between Meaning vs. Meaninglessness. I am enthralled by the construction of completely absurd things. This is because of a loss of faith in old god-forms, and recognition of our existence that is made meaningful through action. Our existence seems absurd, but we do exist.
Ardeches references the psychological source of art and religion. The title is meant to suggest a metaphor for this contemporary art show in a chamber which is accessed through a hall and a descent down steps, by alluding to the 30 000 year old Chauvet cave, found in 1994 in the Ardeche region of France. Its cave paintings are the world’s oldest known art. There, the painted animals represent the gods of the day. Here, the painted celebrities and diagrams represent the gods of today. The books contrast the television, both mediums of communicating information that have transformed human consciousness.
We recognize that we build structures around the experience of awe. The mind is an anti-entropy machine. It takes a chaotic environment and begins by assigning patterns, at first loose, which possibly become more fixed. The mind is limited by its patterns, that is, its beliefs. It forms an architecture Ð a worldview, based upon initial patterns, which become more and more embedded and fixed with the weight of the new structures above. If these initial patterns are unstable and are revealed to be such by the additional conceptions, then they will be replaced. A cycle occurs and a worldview, a sense of self, and a conception (an idea), is formed.
“Contrary to what we might believe, the experience of ghosts is not tied to a bygone historical period, like the landscape of Scottish manors, ect.., but on the contrary, is accentuated, accelerated by modern technologies like film, television, the telephone. These technologies inhabit, as it were, a phantom structure…When the very first perception of an image is linked to a structure of reproduction, then we are dealing with the realm of phantoms.” -Jacques Derrida: The Ghost Dance. An interview with Jacques Derrida by Mark Lewis and Andreas Payne, trans. Jean-Luc Svoboda, in: Mark Wigely: The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt, Cambridge Mass 1993, p.163.
“The walls of caves were our first screens, a reality virtual as any we’ve derived. The printed page was our first automated medium, replication guaranteed, word without end. Now the word, the printed word, is an interface of quite astonishing depth and complexity – so complex that whole years of training are required before an operator can access anything like the full bandwith of any written language. (Skilled readers, accessing text, alter their inner states at will. This is why dictators still seek to control presses.)” -William Gibson 11/01/96, Forward for Ray Gun, Out of Control, 1997.