God Can't Be Shocked

Some people criticize John Updike, saying he objectified women, portraying them as mere sex objects and so on.I never saw it that way, even though I read Rabbit Run the summer of my 13^th year and felt my world split open upon reading the sex scenes. 'Grownups do this?' I asked myself stunned. This is what they're up to when they’re not buttering our toast or rotating the tires on the family car?'My big sister Nan had tried to clue me in on the particulars of sex; by the time she was ten she had sent away for a thousand pamphlets on the subject. And certainly her information was better than what the boy down the street said happens after you get married: He said they then take you into a secret room and tie you together by your underpants.What Updike described was much more specific. And once you got used to reading the actual truth, anything but shocking. No, he never objectified women, in my book; in my book he only loved and noticed them.He is the person who singlehandedly opened my eyes to writing. Three years he is gone now and it has taken me almost that long to read his final collection of short stories, slim as it is. I just didn’t want it to end, knowing there would be no others.Here's one thing he said that I love and agree with. He said his theory was that God already knows everything and can not be shocked.In the same essay he also said,

Only truth is useful. Only truth can be built upon. From a higher, inhuman point of view, only truth, however harsh, is holy. The fabricated truth of poetry and fiction makes a shelter in which I feel safe, sheltered within interlaced plausibility in the image of a real world for which I am not to blame. Out of soiled and restless life, I have refined my books.

I love that last sentence: Out of soiled and restless life I have refined my books. And I understand exactly the part about the shelter his creative writing made for him, remembering a description earlier in this book of the place he loved best as a child: it was the spot on the side porch of his first home where he would upend and then hide under the wicker furniture to become the observer unobserved.It’s what I wanted to be since my own baby days, only my spot was under the dining room table. Now I lurk in my car or on the park bench, listening to the old men and yelping teens and the women together talking. It’s what I have been since the dawn of the Reagan years when I began writing my column. For all these years I have written every week for the papers and now, here on this blog, I write every day.Seeing and then telling what you have seen is for me what I think it was for him too: merely a way of saying thanks for it.

Diamonds and Rust

She loved him, for sure. She loved that Bob Zimmerman who renamed himself Dylan and the song 'Diamonds and Rust' that she wrote a dozen years after their affair proves it. I’ve always been haunted by the image in it of her watching him, his back toward her, as he looked out the window of a rundown hotel in the Village; the brave vulnerability in that line "speaking strictly for me we both could have died then and there.” In that moment anyway, she was ecstatically happy.She wrote 'Diamonds and Rust' the same year she let someone shoot this brief footage of her in a bar where she has gone to meet her former lover. In the two-minute segment she suggestively caresses her shot glass, arches her back, comes in too close, far too close to this man who no longer loves her. It squeezes the heart to see it. Slide the bar in to about one minutes 25 seconds marker to catch the brief, brief scene.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09wI0j9nkkE&feature=related]So apparently there was sex between them; however there is never only sex between two people. If they sleep together over a period of time it is never ‘only' sex I don’t think. I remember feeling cloven in two the first time I read the book by Evelyn and James Whitehead called The Sense of Sexuality. They assert that in sex very subtle but real promises are always made, promises not well kept in casual encounters. “They need a home, a place in which to grow." We also need to rescue Eros from its contemporary degraded connotation as the merely erotic, they say. In classical times, people understood Eros to represent our passionate drive for life and growth. "It moves in all our longings to make contact, to be quite literally in touch. That's Eros, whereas intimacy refers to the many ways we hold one another. As friends we hold one another in affection. As colleagues, we hold one another accountable in work. Intimacy is part of sex but it encompasses more than sex they say. “An intimate relationship draws us close enough to one another that we are changed in the process”.Maybe that’s what happened between these two. Anyway here footage from the 2005 Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. Watch it and think about who you have linked your life to, whether in passion, or work, or devotion to a cause; then think what the two of you together have put in the world as a result.We don’t know what there was between this Baez and Dylan when they were this young in a long-gone world. We do know what they did together; we know the songs he wrote and she sang in that long ago time. Dylan himself speaks about four minutes and again at eleven minutes in. The best part though is Joan, all grown up in her 60s, looking back with such kind wisdom at the boy who broke her heart. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkyGqrfPf4Q]