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Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/2012395-Paratactic-Parrots
by Sara H
Rated: E · Poetry · Other · #2012395
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.”
© Copyright 2014 Sara H (harley.sara at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/2012395-Paratactic-Parrots