I’d given up on finding the small volume of Kenneth Patchen’s drawings after searching through my bookshelves several times. But then, of course, by accident, I finally ran across it. I was looking for it because something Patchen scribbled in one of his paintings describes perfectly the way so many of us are feeling these days.
His paintings look like something you might have taped to your refrigerator door, a masterpiece by your favorite five year old of some imaginary creature painted with wide brush in simple, bright colors.
The particular one I was looking for is a painting of a big, round-eyed ,smiling face on a body that looks, oh, maybe a little like a bear or a dog. “The World’s Not Enough Really,” it says in an upright cursive scrawl, “For the Kind of Rent We Have Have to Pay to Live in Us.”
Isn’t that the truth! Sometimes the price for living in us seems excruciatingly high, and the world itself not enough compensation for our suffering. Especially this world. Especially now.
Yeah. Sometimes the rent seems awfully high.
But let me tell you the title of the little book that holds Patchen’s paintings. It’s called Hallelujah Anyway. It’s full of whimsy and bitterness and a profound kind of love. Take these lines, for instance, from another one of the book’s paintings: “Inside the flower, there is room for every sower, whether he be stark monstrous mad as all your ‘Leaders’ are or only some poor innocently crazy one who in his uncontrollable fear would deface and topple every last shrine and tower that are in anyway at all still meaningful to mankind.”
The copyright on the book is 1960, by the way–in case you thought he was describing our current reality.
But look at how that last proclamation begins: “Inside the flower, there is room for every sower.” Even, he says, for those who are monstrous and those filled with destructive fear. I don’t know about you, but personally I find that a deeply insightful and compassionate view.
I have another small volume of Patchen’s, too, a collection of his exquisite love poems. The world may not have been enough compensation for his suffering, but the love he felt for his Miriam was more than enough and let him embrace the world, despite its horrors.
“Any person who loves another person,
wherever in the world, is with us in this room–
Even though there are battlefields.”
That’s the ultimate answer, you know: Love. The saving grace of Love. Even if it’s for someone you have never met. Even it it extends no farther than your doorway. Even if it’s no more than a barely glowing ember in the center of your heart.
Let yourself sit in its light, however dim that light may seem. Let it bathe you with its reality until you feel its freeing power, until you can look upon the sorry places of the world and shout “Hallelujah!” anyway.
Warmly,
Susan