Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Tag Archives: Yeats


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The center cannot hold.

If we are to take any comfort from the Yeats poem, in times of unrest and mayhem, there will always be a force bringing about a new age, and we will continue “slouching towards Bethlehem.” 

I had first read it in college, but as with any art, it takes on new meaning as I, we, bring new meaning to the words. And maybe it was Joan Didion who brought the most understanding as she wrote under those same words in a collection of essays. Didion begins with a series of essays set in California, her home state. She paints a vivid picture of the Golden State, capturing its unique blend of beauty and decay. She explores the lives of those who live on the fringes of society, from Haight-Ashbury’s hippie culture to the world of migrant workers in the Central Valley.

Perhaps we romanticize everything. Perhaps we have to. Visiting Haight and Ashbury yesterday, it is filled with thrift stores — adorned by the colors of being hippie. And I too am woo-ed like the other tourists. But the daily news looms over our heads. You can feel it. There is an unrest that no tie-dye can calm. Yeats writes, “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.” He says, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” And daily, we have to decide who we are.

I thumb through the rack of colorful t-shirts. I’m looking for answers – but there are none in my size. So I keep writing. I keep painting. I keep believing. Hoping a word, a stroke, will straighten my stride, strengthen it. 

Walking away from Haight. Running away from hate. Slouching towards Bethlehem. 

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Slouching towards Bethlehem.

We lost a good writer this week — Joan Didion. But I take comfort in the fact that we didn’t lose the words. They will be here, as long as we need them. She wrote with such a clarity, even in times of complete distress. She wrote of the hippies, and drug culture in California. She wrote of losing her husband. Her daughter. She says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.”

One of my favorite titles was her book, “Slouching towards Bethlehem.” She took this title from the poet Yeats — “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Didion stands in the same position as Yeats’s narrator, describing a social disaster of her time, feeling the center starting to give out.

The “rough beasts” seem to surround us still, and always. But sometimes it feels they are doing a lot more than slouching. So I look to my center. To hold me. And I find it in the words. The words in poems. In books. In songs. The words that gather in my heart and spill to the page each day. I find it in the ones I love. Standing tall. Standing beside. Ever upward. Whenever I need them.

This is my core. My center. I believe it will hold. I tell myself today’s story. And I live.

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