SEX, AGE, DEATH, PRIVACY

...I wonder too about the ease with which we can be fed images...

...The photographer who takes gory pictures of accidents or murders for cheap tabloids is a world away from the photographer who took the picture few of us will forget, the picture of Vietnamese children running down a road in terror and pain as napalm burned out their backs...

...I'm afraid that a lot of people have learned how to respond to emotional crises from soap operas, and I hate to think that love-making is something most people will learn from the movies...

...Gramp records the slow end of a man's life, his descent into death through years of senility...

...Some activities and some relationships matter more than others...

...But this is only part of the problem-the easy part, because it is obviously a case of us versus them...

...There is a similar grisly presence of mind in the photographer who is able to capture a suicide in mid-leap...

...A few years ago I saw a photograph of a father carrying his child's tiny coffin...

...There has been a lot of talk about the erosion of privacy in our time, usually in connection with government wiretaps and data banks...

...Now whenever a person shows any hesitation over books about lovemaking the charge of puritanism comes up, and the person so charged falls all over himself to deny it...

...There is a point to such a worry: in some nonliterate cultures there are still story-tellers who remember whole epics, line for line, and story-telling itself is a rich way of remembering and passing things on...

...It is good to have a book like Gramp, and it was important to have that photograph of the burning children-but it is also a sign of our decadence that we needed either...

...The vanishing of the idea that privacy is a nearly sacred thing has come about with the possibility of recording events directly on film or tape...

...The two photographs on the back of the book are almost unbearably moving: one shows a vigorous man holding a child, the other shows that child, grown now, holding the man who once held him, now diapered and helpless...

...As soon as I try to imagine what might fall into that category I can think of exceptions...

...The deeper problem is the gradual disintegration of the belief that some things are too important for public inspection...

...They have to do with privacy at its depths...

...A number of books have appeared by now which illustrate the blurring of whatever borders once existed between the public and the private...

...To define privacy as an absence of snooping or prying, the right to draw a line beyond which others may not come without permission, is too limited...

...It is not the photographs in Show Me which are objectionable (they are frequently very good, in fact) but the insensitive attitude which the book recommends, its thoughtlessness...

...Maybe we are at a similar stage...

...Another recent book, Yoga for New Parents (Ferris Urbanowski with Balaram, Harper's Magazine Press, $6.95), is for the most part pleasant reading...

...There may be an advantage to having a common way of seeing things, but at the same time our perceptions are narrowed, just as we won and lost something when writing was introduced...

...It is as if writing were introduced at exactly the same moment as movable type...

...It has been pointed out that movies and television have formed the way we imagine things -we imagine crowd scenes, for example, seen from above, as the camera sees them and as we seldom do...

...Gramp is impressive...

...Show Me brings a sappy open-mindedness to sex instruction, quite explicitly recommending an end to privacy: parents, the book says, should never close the bedroom door but instead ought to welcome the kids during lovemaking...

...Writing was a new technology which made some good things possible (including our knowledge of Socrates...

...The documentary made people wonder about privacy, and about the accuracy of such an explicit approach to such an intimate subject...

...Public exposure of everything has been advocated as a way of introducing loving intimacy into every relationship, but it ordinarily has the counter-productive effect of making every relationship as phony as an insurance salesman's solicitude...

...That picture woke many Americans up to the evil of that war by making abstractions about war impossible...

...The deeper privacy has to do with the way we shape our world...

...Still, there are reasons for worry which are quite independent of the fact that we are not yet used to the technologies involved in the production of books like Show Me and Gramp...

...His face was running with tears, and I wondered how someone could see in that tragedy "a good shot" and do the cold thing necessary to record it...

...Being alone together is equated with being stingy, and the possible appropriateness of privacy isn't worth serious consideration...

...But someone had to make a decision to take all these pictures of a confused old man, of his diaper changes and his loneliness...

...The trend hits a new pitch of silliness in a book called Show Me: A Picture Book of Sex for Children and Parents (Will McBride and Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt, St...

...What about gore, or extreme agony...

...It is certain that neo-Victorian attitudes won't help us...

...Is there anything which should never be shown...

...There is also the problem of satiation: it seems to take more and more to move us at all...

...Choosing to make love in private is not necessarily a puritanical reticence...

...That picture should have been taken...

...Is being disturbed about this simple puritanism...

...A pregnant woman and her husband are photographed naked together in bed, and the caption reads, "Sex is a whole new trip...

...Similarly, a book like Gramp is good to have, precisely because of our way of avoiding the subjects of death and age...

...It forces us to confront the forbidden subjects of age and death, and nothing is left out of the tapes and photographs which record the last three years of Frank Tugend's life, a time during which he was defiant, incontinent and senile...

...Martin, $12.95...

...It would be a mistake, for example, to see Show Me as a kind of pornography...

...As he lay dead on his bed someone had to decide, "Let's get the camera...

...At a less dramatic level the same problem can be seen at a lot of weddings, where the photographer stops the action at every vital point so that the bride and groom can have a photographic record of an event which was never allowed to happen, precisely because of the attempt to record it...

...but something good died with its introduction...

...It isn't the nudity or sex I object to, it's the bad photography . . .") I won't bother to do that, but will point out instead that my disturbance here is precisely the one I feel about Gramp (Mark and Dan Jury, Grossman, $5.95), a haunting book which raises the question of privacy more intensely than any book I have seen...

...We are flooded with pictures of everything, and the people who control the floodgates are politicians and salesmen...

...It's something else to be kicked from inside while you're making love...

...Where we are able to be truly private we have the space to experience, interpret and shape our lives in ways which public living and public obligations do not allow Grief, sex, friendship, any sort of ordinarily intimate and private thing which becomes too public is also likely to become stylized...

...Socrates disliked the use of writing, a new technology which could serve as a crutch and weaken the mind's power...

...but one photograph raised the question of privacy for me...

...It is rather a sign of how important lovemaking is...

...It's a little like the problem in physics: observation introduces a new element into an experiment, and the very fact that it is being observed can change the results, or at least it can call them into question...

...Some of the book's final photographs were taken within minutes of his death...

...But we have to question this discomfort...