There is a happiness in creation that is not without its own pain and struggle, a sensation that feels sometimes buoyant and sometimes earthbound, sometimes like lighting fires in snow, sometimes like untying knots in which you have been bound. New questions, new problems — of shape, of strategy, of materials, and, yes, of purpose — unfold even as you unlock present difficulties. There is a happiness in finding what will work simultaneously with the discovery of what it works for, which has often been reduced to separate issues of “form” and “content.”
… This partnership of unconscious and conscious work can also happen in collectivity. And the happiness I’m speaking of, which knows itself as part of a continually unfolding process, which can never be complacent, is what I imagine true revolution would look like: subjectivity and objectivity, vision and technology, together inventing conditions for the spontaneous imaginative life of all of us.
— Adrienne Rich, from What is Found There
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