Today's Soup: Hearty Beef Minestrone

Rich, flavorful stock plays host to a crowded gathering of tender cubes of beef, red kidney beans, pasta shells, green peas, green beans, celery, carrots and tomatoes, seasoned with onions, garlic, fresh basil, fresh parsley and bay leaves.

My Soup Group colleagues are a cultured bunch. They support the visual arts, music, dance, and especially theatre. I realized today that several of them hold subscriptions with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. So naturally, theatre reviews feature frequently in our soup-making conversation: what shows we've seen, what shows we want to see, what shows we recommend the others go see.

(Arts patronage is only the tip of the cool, cool iceberg that is these ladies' spare time activities. They travel internationally, they get outdoorsy in the mountains, they host anniversary blowouts. They all have other volunteer obligations that they take seriously and where they make a serious contribution. They're passionately committed to their families. I'm taking notes.)

Today Elizabeth announced that she had been to see Spring Awakening at the Denver Performing Arts Complex. We were instantly interested. Mom said she'd heard that the NYC production had received mixed reviews, and Jodi piped up that she'd heard a review on National Public Radio that the show was pretty strange. All of us were eager to hear from Elizabeth what the story was about and what she thought of the local production.

It only got more interesting when Elizabeth began by saying that she had left, walked out, at intermission.

People just about stopped working. I know I put down my spatula and turned around to look at her. Elizabeth is a dedicated patron of the arts, so even a schlock production wouldn't put her off that much. Furthermore, she's worldly and a little tough, I think it's safe to say. She has not yet struck me as the type to shy away from ugly truths. What on earth could this musical have done in the first two acts that would provoke an Elizabeth to leave without seeing the resolution?

Well, she said the play dealt with themes of adolescent sexual awakening, incest and child abuse; and she talked about the juxtaposition of quasi-19th-century costumes and modern rock music that she didn't connect with. We waited for her to say more, because so far, to me at least, that didn't seem like enough to run off someone like Elizabeth. And indeed, she went on to say that the deal-breaker was what she described as a very graphic rape scene early in the play, maybe in the first act. And with that explanation, our soup group seemed to understand.

I understood. I mean, I can understand that you don't want to look at some things, some times. I overheard Elizabeth saying a little later that there are ways to convey violence without explicitly enacting it for the audience. And that is certainly true.

It got me thinking, though.

For one, I got tangled up in the unanswerable question of "what makes good art". Sometimes there's an artistic bravery in presenting negative things in all their graphic realism. Sometimes art makes a greater impact when the audience is allowed, encouraged or required to use their own imaginations to fill in some of the blanks. There's no one way, no "right" answer. And to my mind, asking the question is only a philosophical exercise anyhow. We as a people should always leave room for artistic license - I believe it's vitally important that society grant artists the freedom to express their vision. (I'm pretty sure that's what I believe. There is art that tests this value of mine.)

Elizabeth's tale of walking out also got me thinking about the responsibility to self that any one of us might have to look away sometimes.

And about the tension between the personal responsibility to look away sometimes, and the social obligation not to look away. (Ever?)

And about the privilege it is to have the option of looking away.

And about the role of censorship in art and in media.

I saw a girl die on YouTube. I'm more than embarrassed that I don't know enough about world politics to remember which nation-in-conflict she lived/died in. She might have been Palestinian, she might have been Iranian. She was very pretty, and there was war in the streets, and she was just a bystander, but a stray bullet struck and killed her. It killed her in front of her dad and her brother and someone videotaping the violence. We see her fall and her eyes glaze over. We see the men with her cradling her and begging her to respond, and we see them begin to howl when the blood starts pouring from her mouth and her nose and maybe from her eyes, too.

I shouldn't have watched that, I immediately thought to myself when it was over. And I'm not talking about government censorship, here. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been available for watching. (Separate issue.) I'm saying that my own personal peace-of-mind patrol should have been on higher alert and stopped me from pressing the "play" button.

But there is a question that raises for me, and it's a question similar to the one that gets raised in arguments about government censorship: If something terrible is happening, why should I be protected from seeing it? How is the fact of an event's atrocity the argument that I shouldn't see it? If anyone has to bear witness, then why should I be spared? If it's reality, and I want the truth...

Why should I protect myself? Why should I look away?

Why do we look away? I'm reminded of images of the burning towers on 9/11/2001, and how the networks edited out the people who were jumping/falling from the windows on the upper floors. The fact that people were dying that way is completely brutal. And maybe on top of all of the other horror and carnage and shock of 9/11, we didn’t need to see people falling to their deaths.

But what’s that language - “didn’t need to see”? Why don’t I say what we mean: “Maybe on top of all of the other horror and carnage and shock of 9/11, people’s minds and psyches wouldn’t be able to handle it. Maybe we would have been irreversibly damaged by seeing it.”

It's to some extent an individual matter, though, what’s damaging. Because to some extent it's a question of what the human mind can stand, that is, what any one human mind can stand. There do exist some broad, obvious parameters that we mostly agree on as a society about what's highly disturbing - for example, apparently, the broadcasting of Americans falling to their deaths as a result of a terrorist act. Most often, though, individuals themselves make the best judge of what their own mind/psyche/spirit can handle.

(I am aware that this doesn't even address those who don't have a choice about what they're exposed to, who have no control over their exposure to whatever daily horror might be engulfing them. And that's not a separate issue.)

I guess a lot of us have learned to put some limits on what we take in. (Those of us with a choice in the matter, anyway.) Of course, on the far end of that spectrum are ostriches - those who bury their heads in the sand so they don’t have to see what’s scary and acknowledge that it's happening.

I can't help but think that maybe we should strive to be stronger than that. Stronger of heart, stronger of stomach, sounder in mind.

Shouldn’t we?

I’m not going to link to the video of that girl’s death in the streets because I tend to avoid linking to anything that’s notable because of its negativity. I’m not going to participate even in the promotion that comes from saying, “This is so gross/wrong/horrific, have a look.” This ain't a news outlet.

I am going to link to a really thoughtful and thought-provoking short film called “The Falling Man” that addresses the absence of jumpers/fallers from the images of 9/11. It’s tough stuff, but maybe just tough enough. Consider it in the vein of a healthy workout for a spirit striving to be strong enough to handle a range of life’s realities.