![\"Othello\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2015\/03\/4865763964_9d56b0dc50_z1.jpg\")
<\/a>Seeing a fine production of Othello<\/em> recently has got me thinking about the art of evil, a fitting topic for Lent. And, yes, that pun in \u201cart\u201d is intended.The creativity of Iago\u2019s evil machinations is the force driving Othello<\/em>\u2019s plot; and art in general\u2014in all its genres\u2014often portrays how evil works in our world.<\/p>\nI hadn\u2019t seen or read Othello<\/em> in decades, and I\u2019d forgotten how much it is Iago\u2019s play.<\/p>\n Not only is he the primary character for the first half of the play: the one with the most lines and the one whose absolutely evil essence is the play\u2019s focus. He\u2019s also, in a sense, scripting the entire play: he sets up the scenes where characters act out his bidding; he puts the idea of Desdemona\u2019s infidelity in Othello\u2019s mind and craftily whips Othello into a frenzy of jealousy; he even scripts the manner of Desdemona\u2019s death (\u201cstrangle her in bed\u201d he says point blank to Othello in IV, 1).<\/p>\n In fact, Othello only becomes a truly Shakespearean character\u2014one speaking dense, luscious language\u2014after Iago has deliberately transformed him into obsessive jealousy personified.<\/p>\n Watching Iago at work, I was terrified by the ways that evil can get a stranglehold on us. In fact, I think this was Shakespeare\u2019s own interest in the play: not Othello\u2019s jealousy but rather the power of evil to turn us into monsters who destroy one another and ourselves.<\/p>\n So I found myself wondering: Where is Iago at work in our own world today?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think it\u2019s mainly in individuals. Yes, there are some evil dictators around the world. Yes, there is ISIS. And yes, I\u2019m often tempted to label as evil some of our own politicians and media personalities, whose policies and pronouncements I find terrifyingly destructive of the collective wellbeing.<\/p>\n But the \u201cart of darkness\u201d (to play on Hardy\u2019s title) is practiced today on a grander scale, I think, and all the more insidious because it\u2019s not<\/em> concentrated in a single person.<\/p>\n The enormous systems of injustice that keep whole classes and even populations in poverty and oppression; the greed that seems the driving force of the multi-national corporate power structure; the racism and demonization of the \u201cother\u201d who is different from ourselves; war itself, I\u2019d even add. These are all much slipperier than Iago\u2019s evil, harder to get a grip on, in our minds and in our art.<\/p>\n Do we have an art of evil that portrays the workings of these huge systemic horrors? I guess the modern locus classicus would be Harper Lee\u2019s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>, with its gripping dramatization of the deadly mechanics of scapegoating.<\/p>\n Not long ago, I re-watched the magnificent 1962 film version and was struck by how literally dark the whole movie is. Over half of its scenes take place at night, in a menacing manner made especially effective by the black-and-white camera work.<\/p>\n Earlier in the century there was Steinbeck\u2019s Grapes of Wrath<\/em>, also a masterful portrayal of systemic evil at its nasty work of grinding up the poor (as I wrote about in a previous post<\/a>).<\/p>\n But what about paintings, music, poetry?<\/p>\n I think of Auden\u2019s verse, especially his sequence Horae<\/em> Canonicae<\/em>, with its condemnation of our collective indifference to the suffering of others. I think of Rouault, of the dignity he gives to the marginalized like prostitutes and clowns, and his subtle way of implicating us all in their victimization.<\/p>\n For contemporary visual artists, the collection A Broken Beauty<\/em>, edited by Theodore Prescott, includes some extraordinary works that grapple with the scary grip of evil forces. The great French composer Messiaen gave us some of the sounds of absolute evil in his \u201cQuartet for the End of Time,\u201d composed while he was a prisoner of war during World War II.<\/p>\n And there\u2019s no more powerful assemblage of worldwide recent poetry meditating on systemic evil than Carolyn Forch\u00e9\u2019s anthology Against Forgetting<\/em>.<\/p>\n And the effect of all this art portraying evil? I\u2019m sent to my knees praying the close of the Lord\u2019s Prayer: \u201cdeliver us from evil.\u201d<\/p>\n Systemic evil seems overwhelming. I\u2019m afraid I have to concur with Reinhold Niebuhr in his classic analysis Moral Man and Immoral Society<\/em>\u2014that, \u201ctragically\u201d (Niebuhr\u2019s term), we will always have systemic evil with us.<\/p>\n Yet I don\u2019t believe that God wants us simply to roll over and let systemic evil have its destructive way. Here again, the arts come to our aid. These very arts portraying evil\u2019s force also enact our hope. I once heard Elie Weisel say that \u201cevery act of creativity is a defiance of evil.\u201d<\/p>\n Creativity is an act, an action, a \u201cyes\u201d to the forces of good. And all our individual or group activities in defiance of evil are creativity at work as well. But to engage in these activities, I need the pep talk that Denise Levertov gave herself at the end of her poem \u201cWriting in the Dark\u201d:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Keep writing in the dark: \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n or opened \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n words that may have the power \u00a0<\/p>\n Like words, our actions against the dark \u201cmay have the power to make the sun rise again.\u201d Or they may not.<\/p>\n Yet, as the hero Atticus says in To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>: you stand up against evil because it\u2019s the right thing to do, not necessarily because you\u2019ll win out over it. This is the art of living aright.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Peggy Rosenthal<\/strong><\/a> is director of Poetry Retreats<\/a>\u00a0and writes widely on poetry as a spiritual resource. Her books include\u00a0Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times<\/em> (Franciscan Media), and The Poets\u2019 Jesus <\/em>(Oxford). See Amazon<\/a>\u00a0for full list. She also teaches an online course<\/a>, \u201cPoetry as a Spiritual Practice,\u201d through Image<\/em>\u2019s Glen Online program.<\/em><\/p>\n
\na record of the night, or
\nwords that pulled you from depths of unknowing\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n
\nas flowers of a tree that blooms
\nonly once in a lifetime:<\/em><\/p>\n
\nto make the sun rise again.<\/em><\/p>\n