The Parodox and Pair o' Ducks Look to the Unknowable

[Katherine Brimberry]

Many years ago a good friend and I talked about paradox. He liked to call it Pair o' Ducks and made the funniest drawing about it. Wish I had it to share.

Today I ran across a great quote that kind of speaks to the choir here. I just wanted to share it.

The rejection of paradox and ambiguity is the characteristic of heretics in all ages. Heresy is one-dimensional, narrow, over-simplified, and boring. It is straight-line thinking, preferring a pseudo-clarity to the many sidedness of truth, tidiness to the mess and complexity of reality. Orthodoxy by contrast is rooted in the unknowable.

- Kenneth Leech, British theologian

Any pair o' ducks here?

[Kelly Foster]

In 1966, an architect named Robert Venturi published a book called 'Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture' that challenged the stifling, rigid legalism of modern architecture at the time. He even used a building shaped like a duck to make his point. Sadly, the strengths of his challenge (admiring complexity) got muddied with post-modern irony (contradiction) and heralded the beginning of a rather ugly phase of architectural production that fortunately ran its course in a couple of decades.

The difference between Venturi's post-modern embrace of paradox and the Kenneth Leech quote is that the post-modern one has a 'wink,wink, nudge, nudge' superiority to it, whereas paradox rooted in unknowability and human finitude is refreshingly humble. And so are ducks.