I read a lot of pretty statements about making art today, metaphors and aphorisms that, on the surface, sound mesmerizing—sometimes even useful. “Writing a poem is like finding an odd piece of fruit on the ground that you’ve never seen before, and the poet’s job is to describe the tree that it fell from.” I read that somewhere recently. This is beautiful, but what does it mean on a practical level?
The light of such wisdom is strong enough to make us feel something in our hearts about making art, but not strong enough to inform us how to do it.
You can quote or excerpt Angela Davis in whatever way you want; it is not possible to extract from her words the layer that imbues them with their direct address to lived experience, to practical application, to action. Hers are not pretty statements, no matter how beautiful they are: they are instructions for how to live a life. This is the one that I turn to, again and again, these days more than ever, delivered during the Q&A of a 2014 lecture: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
-Eugenie Dalland