`Sometime a Paradox'

Most of us, of course, embody paradox merely by being human, but I have met a man after whom a paradox has been named. Yakobson’s Paradox is the brainchild of Boris I. Yakobson, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice University. Except for knowing it has something to do carbon nanotubes, I don’t begin to understand it, but you can go here for a spirited debate on the matter.

Boris was born in the Soviet Union and is well-read and well educated -- Ph.D., Russian Academy of Sciences, 1982 – and he is urbane, ironic by nature and necessity, and qualified to savor paradox, physical or metaphysical. As I’ve been rereading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in the handsome New Cambridge Shakespeare edition, with an introduction by the late Anthony Hecht, I’ve been weighing whether paradox – seeming contradiction belying a subtler, more essential truth – lies at the heart of great art. In poetry, paradox is a benignly spring-loaded trap of logic. Tripped, it catches us in a dense mesh of meanings, and demands that we be active readers. Look at “Sonnet 66,” a veritable cluster-bomb of paradoxes:

“Tired with all these for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that to die, I leave my love alone.”

Some clarification: “Desert” means merit or worth. “Unhappily,” in the sense of sinfully or unfortunately. “Art,” as in learning or science. “Simple truth” is honesty or innocence, as opposed to “simplicity,” meaning ignorance or foolishness. The rhetorical device of anaphora – 10 consecutive lines beginning with “And” – hammers home the paradox in bravura fashion. I especially like “needy nothing,” meaning a worthless person, lacking in moral qualities – the opposite of “desert.”

The word “paradox” does not appear in the Sonnets, though Shakespeare used it three times in the plays, most famously in Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1, just after the big soliloquy:

Hamlet: “That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.”

Ophelia: “Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?”

Hamlet: “Ay truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.”

Ophelia: “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.”

Since first reading the play in junior high school, I have always found Price Hamlet insufferable – not for his reputed indecisiveness but for snottiness and casual cruelty. His treatment of Ophelia (who understands this: “you made me believe so”) and Polonious makes for uncomfortable reading. Zbigniew Herbert, in a poem he dedicated to Czeslaw Milosz, “Elegy of Fortinbras,” takes on Hamlet after he has gotten his comeuppance, in a meditation on history as paradox. Here is the conclusion:

“Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
Since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
A star named Hamlet We shall never meet
What I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

“It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince”

History condemned Yakobson’s countryman, Osip Mandelstam, to a life of ultimately murderous paradox, and paradox became the creative engine of his poetry. In May 1934, he was arrested for the first time, for a poem he had written about Stalin. Indiscreetly, he had recited it to several friends, one of whom reported him to the NKVD. The informer was soon arrested and died in a camp before Mandelstam. The poem in question juxtaposes the words of poets with the words of the dictator – the former unheard, the latter turned immediately into violent action. Here are the first three stanzas, as translated by Robert Tracy:

“We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us;
Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard,

“And when there are just enough people for half a dialogue –
Then they remember the Kremlin mountaineer.

“His fat fingers are slimy, like slugs,And his words are absolute, like grocers’ weights.”