“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

William Butler Yeats, from The Second Coming

“Sweet Sue,

There is

no first, or last,

in Forever ‒

it is Centre, there,

all the time ‒”

Emily Dickinson, from Open Me Carefully. Emily Dickinson’s intimate letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

The best part of poetry reading is the unexpected way words start talking and migrating to one another, epiphanies emerging along the way. Take these lines from two giants of world poetry: Yeats and Dickinson, so far apart in style and content as well as time, the raging blast of World War One facing mid 1860s peacefulness in Amherst. Yet, how one message rings around the other, how strangely their words speak to us as if uttered by the same poet taken from these strange 2020s, ravaged by war but still open to the illusion of endless possibilities.

Sometimes, it feels like we are living in a schizophrenic age, depression and euphoria tugging at our hearts and tearing all sense apart, our life but a desperate oscillation between pretense and fulfillment. Mass extinction is but a blink away and the centre constantly fails us, loosening beyond holding, already broken by human selfishness and lack of understanding. Yet, a sudden hope lights up every now and then, and every breath becomes centre without bounds, no time and space to hold it back but letting it loose, free flowing in the now and forever of bliss.

Perhaps, writing (and art in general) is a way to explore the centre that cannot hold and its dangerous breach into madness, its vanishing point turning our life (and the planet’s) into debris. But it is also a way to create a never-ending centre, an antidote against madness and mass extinction. When we write, everything stops and holds within our words, and nothing else matters but this beating of sounds breathing through our bones, connecting what the world is to what it could and hopefully will be in a different time, a different space.

Thus, the writing process itself becomes a forever of sorts, with neither first nor last but constant being all the time, what we can really hold on to instead of letting things fall apart, and before things fall apart.