The Truth in Paradox

 “One may not like [aristocratic] courts (I don’t much like them myself), but at a certain stage it is only in a court that a man may do something extravagant for its own sake, because he wants to, because it seems to him worth doing. And it is sometimes through such wilful, superfluous actions of individuals that men discover their powers.”
 
That is Lord Clark, reflecting on the relative social narrowness of the early Italian Renaissance. The parenthesis does not appear at all in his script. It’s very much an aside. Yet there is something here of vital importance to understanding – well, nearly everything, perhaps even He who goes beyond thingness.
 
It is that the ability to hold matters in tension, to embrace paradoxes without abandoning claims of objective truth, is central to being an integrated human being, to engaging with matters of truth, and to building worthwhile civilisations.
 
Paradox does not mean contradiction. A paradox is a demonstration of the limits of our understanding. To take a famous and simple example, “This sentence is false” is a paradox – because it creates an irresolvable conundrum. We cannot conclude the sentence is actually false, for that would mean it were true – but if it were true, it would be false, and so forth. Nor can we escape down the deconstructionist’s escape slide and declare that the sentence is possible because language is meaningless – because we are using language to understand the sentence, and to communicate to others that language is meaningless!
 
Paradox demonstrates constraint. It demonstrates the grandeur of reality – uncontainable, irreconcilable when drunk neat by mere humans. That is at the heart of Clark’s act of honesty – that one may resent hierarchy, but hierarchy, wealth, and even excess can all serve the human spirit. Clark’s aside was no pretence. He was a lifelong socialist of the old English breed, much more Morris than Mao. He was made a member of the House of Lords – and sat with the Labour peers. His contemporary political beliefs were egalitarian – and yet his artistic and civilisational beliefs were much more complex. Civilisation must be disseminated – but often originates with self-selecting elites. Social cooperation and obedience is necessary for the development and survival of civilisation, but individual Heroes (for Clark, this group included Bernard, Michaelangelo, Luther, Mozart, and Turner – amongst others) defy social expectations to push the whole body onwards, usually for a mixture of good and ill. No-one, to Clark, better represented harmony (that most social and humane grace) than Raphael, yet this very harmony ended up corrupting the civilisation it enriched, by its emphasis on the perfect human figure. Luther purged Europe of suffocating stasis and consuming cant, yet unleashed waves of sectarian violence.
 
Paradox is not simply a logical or mathematical category. It is really the only way in which we can grapple with the mystery of other humans – why does the Dark Lady smile one moment, and turn away the next? Why was Father so heroic, generous, wise – and yet cold? It is a sign of the times that these sound like banalities. Even the “Save The Statues” campaigns tend to defend controversial monuments on the basis that it was a different time, and preservation is a historical necessity – but really, what ought to be derided is the desire to simplify to “good” or “evil” a being so numinous and paradoxical as a human.
 
Orson Scott Card’s most famous character, Ender, ends up as the “Speaker for the Dead”, who speaks honestly at a funeral, as a sort of priest-eulogist. No false praise; no hysterical condemnation. Just an honest seeking of the mosaic truth of the other self, transfigured now by death into memory. This is the embrace of paradox.
 
Paradox is not, I repeat, a surrender of moral values. It is not an announcement that black is white (Now, have I outed myself as a racist? Is my statue to be toppled?). It is not a declaration that up may as well be down. An acceptance of paradox is, in truth, an acceptance of the opposite – that good and evil exist, and beauty and ugliness exist. What’s more, beauty and beauty exist, in the stern eccentricity of Virginia Woolf and the forlorn classicism of Greta Garbo (to take two examples, again, of Lord Clark’s). How to reconcile beauty to beauty? How to reconcile Athens and Jerusalem? More than a mere man might compass.
 
Yet every such pair of poles conceals some deeper synthesis, perhaps imaginable if never, in this life, attainable. Two converging roads – sometimes separated by waste tracts, sometimes made of quite different materials – but converging, ever converging, on a still point in the hazy distance of this turning world.
 
The great assaults on truth in our age do not come from the paradoxically honest, but the monologically deceitful. To declare that one’s body is not one’s truth – that one’s gender is up for construction – is not the embrace of paradox, but its denial and atomisation. The marvellous, sobering, heartbreaking relationships our body can have with our sense of self are tensions – but like the tautness of refined musculature (a fitting analogy). A form of tension here is to be preferred to slackness or ease. Embrace the body; embrace the soul; find synthesis somewhere beyond yourself, sometime beyond now.  Do not collapse the tension.
 
Love all men totally, yet love your close neighbours exceptionally, and your family exclusively. How is such a set of loves possible? Surely it is impossible – yet every truly benevolent man or woman has accomplished it, at least in part, in fits and starts. Somehow the most singular, irreplicable of loves – that erotic love that transcends itself in marriage – is a fitting partner on the village green to the love of country, and is completed (Somehow! Beyond its own immediate essence!) by the bearing and sharing of children, and for all its consuming fire can never destroy the need for the comradeship of men for men or women for women. Are not, in fact, men and women the ultimate embodied paradox? Why this difference, why this alien flesh? And yet – and yet!
 
The truth waits beyond ourselves, in the wood beyond the limit of our sight. Paradox is the path.