My fiction professor once told me that when he has writer's block (if that's even a thing that really exists, I'm not sure, but I sometimes think that it's just an excuse that we all use in order to avoid the terrifying blinking of a cursor on a blank white page), that when he has writer's block, he likes to write Haikus (should that be capitalised? I'm not sure. I could look it up, but I have a cluster headache today, and it's enough that I'm sitting here writing at all right now) in order to clear his mind. I wrote four of them just now as my lit theory professor was telling us how to diagram sentences (ugly little stick things sticking up out of the words making me hate the sentences that I would ordinarily love) and none of my H/haikus are any good, to be honest. Capitalism Libertarianism Cannibalism That's the closest I came to some sort of deep meaning, and it only turned up because I wanted to try to write one with just three words. Now he's talking about parataxis (I just spelled that with an o in place of the second a, and my laptop tried to auto-correct it to parrot, which makes me think of the time I bought a puzzle with no picture at all on the box, and I realised how much we're always all depending on guidance to get us through the world; we're raised and taught in a world that teaches us to parrot back the things that are told to us, in no uncertain terms, as the Right Ways of Living. So rarely do we ever go it alone, try to figure things out for ourselves, and we're so often told what to think that I sometimes wonder if people who read, readers, if they even are readers anymore or if maybe they've actually become parrots of classical, profound ideas. Funnily enough, that puzzle turned out to be a parrot). “Parataxis gives the impression of spontaneity, as if the writer is simply jotting down their ideas as they pop into their head, when, in reality, it is actually a highly constructed form intended to make you think.” |