Summer Afternoon

It is the first day of summer.
The sun is a heavy, thick quilt
That lies over the world to keep out the morning’s noise.
Tiny violets peek unassumingly out from the ivy.
The branches of the trees are free;
They laugh again as they stretch toward the sky.
People have come out to sit on the quickened, vibrant grass,
And the wind is a gentle lady.

Why can I think only
Of my own death?

Warmth

I stand outside, and it is warm,
And I feel power moving through
The sturdy weapons—strong—my hands.
I have completed all my chores,
And it feels good to start anew.
The sunshine’s brilliance of demands
Into my eyelids fiercely pours.
I look toward it, take the pain:
Its warmth is floating, and it lands
Upon my face and draws outdoors
The secrets that we all contain.
And I feel power moving in
My sturdy arms, as strong as wars
That scrape the earth with each campaign.
I have completed all within,
And it feels good to be fulfilled.
The air is warm as sugarcane.
I want to follow and begin
To be outside and then to build.
I look toward the sun and feel
The pain that signals mortal sin.
Inside, my warden, hushed and stilled,
Pulls closed the curtains to conceal
The outside power rushing by.
No one knows what is instilled
By nature in my heartless mind.
There is not one who fathoms why.
Then something stirs inside my frame,
And I feel earth all intertwined,
And I feel power moving by
My sturdy back, my steady name.
Forever I desire that warmth.

Hunger

I know what it means to be HUNGRY.
It seeps up from your stomach and gets into your brain
And then you can’t think.
Your eyes go sideways and the lights buzz buzz buzz into them.
Soon you don’t know what it is that you are missing.
You just feel heavier, heavier, heavier as you stop moving.
You go on,
Because you’re stronger than this,
And because you want to know what the next stage will feel like.
When you finally eat,
Food doesn’t taste, it just goes in so so so fast.
But imagine if,
No matter how much you ate,
You still kept on being hungry,
Being hungrier and hungrier,
Eyes getting fuzzier and fuzzier,
Breath getting shorter and less efficient—
Imagine this, and you will know
How I feel
Every moment of my life.

Hypersensitivity

I tremble at my own cold fingers as they scrape my scalp.
My hair is soft and coarse and lifted;
The curls have chopped-off ends.
Rape! and Chaos!
These things loom over me like the water that masses above the skies.
Why shouldn’t it be true?
Stranger things are believed by all.
When the icy fingers trace my breasts I shudder.
In fear?
But I am sure there is evil in every place.

Mine

He is not mine and I am ashamed.
I have made him me and it is beautiful.
When the meaningless babble of rhythmic text bounces out,
I cling to him fiercely and he does not drown.

I lap up possessively the blood on his neck.
I snap angrily at the men with their teeth.
How could you hurt him? He is no honorable foe.
He is not mine, but I have made him so.

Hypergraphia

I write because I must.
I will bleed all over the shattered window and I will laugh.
Sordid is a wonderful word.

Endless Longing

I have eaten all the ideas and we are one,
Though I sometimes disagree.
They are in my stomach and soon they will overcome me,
And I will burst through the window.
With broken glass in my heart,
I will fly forward and,
I hope, die
Endless longing, he says—
That is the Truth.
I cannot for much longer stand;
Existence is more or less pain.
And hearing these Truths wells up in me tears
Lacrymosa!
For to me, they are immediately meaningful,
Obviously True.
This insight requires no words.
How will I ever put it into a language and convince the nonbelievers?
If they can’t sense it instinctively,
Can they sense it at all?
Oh, I know I access the Sublime!
At times I have wondered if I were really
Not the same,
But now I know I am not the same!
Because today, someone did not understand the difference
Between beauty and SUBLIME
Between sensibility and METAPHYSICS
Between joy and JOY—
But these things to me are indisputable.
They resound in me with honest Disinterest for Art
ART is my RELIGION.
Ach, I can see and laugh at bias even when it is my own.
Endless longing, he says—
How does he know me?

Ultraviolet

The world weighs heavy down upon me,
And like a pendant hangs above my breasts
To pull my head beneath the desert,
To take the shimmered sky-view from my eyes.

And what I fear to say aloud is
That there is no poetic license here.
No gloomy metaphor is whispered,
But Truth unvarnished I give quickly.

And all the Truth that I distinguish
Shall come through my own senses to my mind,
And all the Truth that IS immortal—
To it I am as blind as I am deaf.

Reality’s reality is
That I see with a different kind of eye,
A little like the bee that searches
The colors ultraviolet for fare.

And though there once were others like me,
I cannot find them in my present place,
And like the vestiges of their thoughts,
Which have revealed to me myself at times,

My only hope now is to help one
To understand as I have learned to do,
To meet that one and say in wonder,
With questions spent: I know we are the same.

Our foreheads touch as we draw nearer.
No bashful love have we, nor fond ideals,
But knowledge, wrapped in shrouding sin-stains—
And this is from the words that I must choose.

My words must be so pure and vibrant
So as to show to him himself revealed.
We back to back will feel each other
As we approach the world from different sides.

Hunger Incarnate

It is the second sunny day
and I want to go OUT—
but I have nowhere to go.

My rooms make up a cage
that has held me all winter,
and for the first time in ages,
I’ve been allowed to open the windows.

The wisps of breeze that come through
have woken my numb heart.
Whereas before I was content to remain,
now I am discontent.

Whispers of Yeats whip in with the windows.
The order of words matters more than mere meaning.
And I—
I am hunger incarnate.

The world is so beautiful,
and I pretend to hope to be worthy of it.

I lie on the floor.
The carpet smells of cat food and borscht.
It’s strange that I’ve never noticed that before.

Distended thoughts mix indiscriminately
as I feel jealousy for the voices outside.
I wish I had business there,
a reason to escape this tepid aviary.

And as yet, the desire in my abdomen is so strong
that I fear it will consume me.
Must I live forever in this world,
where everything stirs up in me
the longing for greatness, for excitement?
Must I live with this hunger,
this void that strains to devour everything
and is never satisfied?

How long must I wait?
Come to me, Adventure! Or
Come to me, Death!

Responsibility

I know.

It's irresponsible of me.

I ought to get help,
find someone to fix this for me.

Or I ought to soldier on,
knowing that perseverence brings honor.

This is my problem. I should take care of it.
Everybody has problems,
but everybody has to face the world.

I ought to seize my destiny;
I ought to assume responsibility.

Instead...

How about if I give up,
and the rest of you ignore me?

How about if I withdraw completely
and hand over my duties to someone else?

How about if I dissolve all obligation,
so that I no longer have promises to break?

What I Want

What I want most of all
is for the world to accept that I am going home for a nap.

What I want more than anything,
even more than I want to sleep,
is a reprieve from life.

Life is stronger than I am.
The day is longer than I can stay awake.
Work is a high wave of blunt objects to bash my head.

I am almost in tears
for no reason at all
except that eleven hours of sleep
weren't enough,
and that I'm hungry
but no food has any taste
and that the pain in my stomach
is good because it is an expression
of the pain in my heart.

There is pain in my neck and shoulders, too,
but when I try to release the tension,
I grow faint
I am breathless, my head spins
There is a weight behind my eyes
that makes them dull and sluggish.
I want to put something in my mouth,
curl up,
close my eyes,
and suck until I fall asleep.

There is too much pretending here,
trying to respond to jokes in kind
and ending with nothing but nervous laughter,
smiling with too much giddiness,
speaking with too much brightness.

I simulate mania.

It would be selfish and unkind of me
to tell others about this mood--
it just makes them uncomfortable and unsure.

So, I pretend to be happy, friendly, normal, sincere.

What I want more than anything else in the world
is to be manic.
And if I'll never feel that way again,
I'd rather die.

I do not dare ask God
to grant my wish.
I know that justice demands retribution,
that there must be balance,
that I must pay for the ecstasy
with utter despair.

What I want is
to stop
wanting.

To Joseph Berglinger

I ever loved you, and I love in vain,
Yet knowing you will not return my love,
And I would not for any man refrain
From love and the futility thereof.

Your thoughts and aspirations give me hope;
They hail the evening when the stars awake.
You are the Art, the Truth’s romantic scope.
You are emotion, and like me, you ache.

And when I realized you are contrived,
My hopes were dashed to think you were not you.
Perhaps no one like you are could have thrived.
My solace—that a soul imagined you.

Like me, he wrote of bright, unmingled Truth
As if my aching spirit he foresaw.
But of course, he died in untried youth,
As do all men, it seems, who earn my awe.

Sonnet IV: In the Land of the Fisher King

The land that once was fertile falls a-waste,
And where the grail, of which I might inquire?
Why, prophets false, deny we are disgraced?
The Fisher King must falter to retire.

The foolish ask which sin has caused this blight,
But all sins are and each sin is to blame.
I flush to think that in my fear I might
One question ask and finish all that came.

Still in my heart, the stirrings of the quest
Entice me deeper still into the drought.
Deceptions will obscure our god’s request.
And is it here? I long to seek it out.

To follow close my fate is ever cursed,
And yet another man will find it first.

White Crane Spreads Its Wings and Folds Them

Last night, we cleaned the house. Erin needed me. I was supposed to do the dishes and finish everything that needed to be done. But I went outside to take out the trash before I did anything else. Then,

the clouds were moving across the sky, so, so fast
and there was much gray and cold
It bit across me like pleasant teeth of the world and I died in glory.

There were sounds, too, sounds like water moving
with twelve hundred shapes of noise
like tiny triangle pieces that flicker across the eyelids

My body was hot from the inside out,
not with flames, but glowing, like iron in a forge
and here it was crisp and free and full of wind

Gods! I wanted to gasp,
to draw the air of life into my lungs
To stay outside,
to run and run and run and never return
To just go--to just go
To fling myself into my car and to drive!

I wanted to fly!
White Crane Spreads Its Wings
Dragon Holding the Pearl

I wanted to go go go go go

...

But I didn't.

...

Every day I die a little bit more,
until I fear that, one day,
I will become insensible to that wild innate cry.

Assertiveness

Sometimes I feel
I ought to have been born a man.
I’m lucky I wasn’t, I suppose—
I’d have to fight for my interest in Art.
I don’t want to be a man.
I just wish…
there were women like the woman I want to be.
I have the perfect personality to do manly things, like
adoring from afar
and
knocking down walls.
In my daydreams,
I am the rescuer, the lover, the rider, the emperor
I am the one who does.
The subjective. The superlative.
Endless striving,
like that cad Faust.
My beloved is Dulcinea, she is Beatrice—
Is there a man for me to love?
Or will I have to love a woman?
In the dreams I have at night,
I can fly and nobody notices.

My Beloved

Am I a cynic or an optimist?

That is the question we have been pondering.

I am an idealist; that cannot be denied,
and it is true that a cynic is merely an idealist who has suffered.
(For a person who never expected Good Things would never be disappointed by their failure to appear.)

I think sometimes that I am an optimist, because I’ve never been able to believe that bad things will happen to me:
Obscurity
Poverty
Failure to Create Something Important
But… still…
I am terribly afraid that bad things will happen:
Giving Up
Giving In
Growing too Tired to Resist

I know that I’m going to drive away everyone that loves me,
I’ll kill myself,
I’ll fall in love with a monster

But what if it’s even worse?

What if I become… boring?

What if I forget about the heights and learn to be content with mediocrity?

This thought makes me sick.

I don’t care if I DIE, I don’t care if I have the skin ripped off me and my intestines fed to pigs,
I don’t care if I’m the discarded plaything of incubi and aliens and secret government agents,

just… please…

don’t let me marry a man with whom I’m not in love.

I don’t believe in True Love.
I never would have said I did, but my cynical protestations were the cool postulations of a girl who never truly disbelieved.

There is no love that lasts—
not forever, not for a lifetime, not even for twenty years.
What exists in lasting relationships
is just the fondness, the respect, the commitment that exists after love is killed.

There is no happy love—
love makes you joyful, ecstatic,
and then it pierces your insides and twists your mind until it becomes nothing but ugly, hateful SIN.

Love should never be consummated.

It should never be reciprocated.

Because after that bright instant of wonderful death that occurs when the beloved object relents,
the story is over.
Love is lost in a mundane effort to get along.

How can you love someone who flosses his teeth? Or drinks cheap beer? Or can’t stand up to his father?

You can care for this person, surely. You can want good things for him. You can hope he becomes a better person.
You can enjoy his company. You can respect him. You can share with him and miss him when he’s gone.

That is marriage. But it is not love!

How could you love this person? This person is no better than you are!

Love is worship!

Love is adoration!

I will not truly say, “I love you,” until I can hold the adored object up to the lightning with both of my hands, saying,
“This is what I ought to wish I could be!”

When I love, my beloved will be an innocent child,
an angel who sings the primeval songs in the language of Ur,
a holy infant whose only sin is naivety.

My beloved will look down at me with frightened, bewildered eyes,
and I will tear down cities to protect him.

I will not pray for him to love me—
for him to do so would indicate his poor taste, if not unintelligence—
I will only pray for him to accept my love,
and perhaps for my work to make his world somehow more pleasant.

His beauty will make my heart stop,
and his kindness and generosity will be boundless.
His extensive knowledge will place him as a part of the spheres,
The part that wills the universe to turn and grow.
Plants will grow at his touch,
Animals will come to him freely.
Only evil or stupid people will shy from his outstretched hands,
and he will not understand their wicked hearts and will cry.

I will fall at his feet and he will not think to abuse me.
All I give to him will be from my own heart and with both hands.

I will NEVER touch him. Never.
I will never plunder him nor allow him to be despoiled.
Any bruise on his pale skin will awe me with its beauty and incite me to wrath.

Every day for me will be pain, because he will never be mine.
But I will forget the pain, because his goodness will overwhelm me.
I will drown and pass away in the many waters of his radiance.

His skin will shine bright white like a pure light,
and his eyes will sparkle like the life incarnate he possesses.
His white hands, with long and graceful fingers,
will gently part the clouds to bring about the daybreak.

He will be tall enough to see the universe at one glance
and small enough to cuddle in my arms.
He will be infinitely compassionate and steadfast in the face of evil.
He will always try again,
he will never give up,
and if he loses,
it will be in honorable death.

I will never stop speaking of him, never stop writing of him.
He will be the motive of every phrase, the theme of every movement.
He will be his own leitmotif in the gesamptkunstwerk of time.
He is the hero of every novel, the rose that drops inspiration onto the poet;
he is the uncut marble and the emerald still buried in earth.
He is the motion of the water that inspires the dance.
He was the first smile, the first laughter;
he is the laws of physics and the mysteries of metaphysics.
I will never tire of praising his wonders,
and the world will know him through me.
I will never cease singing of his virtues until the seas dry up, the stars fall into blackness,
and the whole world knows his glory.

When my task is finished,
I will die,
not happy,
not satisfied,
but noble and steady.

Satisfaction means that you stop wanting to improve,
and happiness means you learn to love the imperfect.

This is what I pray will never happen to me.

I want the moon—the moon is my love.

He does not exist now, nor will he ever.
And so,
I must never marry.

What do you think I would do to a husband who doesn’t measure up to my beloved?

You see, I am neither optimist nor cynic.

Awake at Night in January

Again, restless melancholy forbids me to sleep.
Am I depressed? No, only melancholy.
By now I know,
Sadness and Happiness are Irrelevant;
All that matters is Energy.

Energy I have now,
in the aftermath of the exhibition:
the Theater, the Concert Hall—
they never let me rest.

My room is too hot and too quiet
and the moon is unseen.
I want to open the door and look at it,
to go out onto the cold metal railing
and hurt myself with snow.
My body craves action!
Anything! Except the hot and stifling stupor
that will not come.

I could do anything now!
I could dance, I could drive!
I don’t want to sit or eat or talk with friends.
Right now I want to sing as loud as I can,
outside to the stars,
with the empty forest to surround me.

And here I have the uneasy feeling that I have hurt the people who love me.
Just by being myself.
It’s my nature to injure others.

I ought to go alone.

Please be silent, O Music!

Ice

There is a thick layer of ice everywhere,
and I, like Whitman,
am pouring out through the soles of my feet and freezing in puddles on the pavement.

The grass is still so soft and silent and
green, green, green
as it is preserved in a fragile tomb of ice
like stabbing knives of thick cold pain--
the ones that I thrust into myself

I must feel something!
I cannot feel, and I am frightened.

I am trapped inside my body, I am no longer alive
The smallest of my fingers no longer respond to my will
They are like corpses' fingers, cold and rubbery

I see the delicate beauty of the sparkling ice and I think,
"I should love this."
Last time there was ice, I could see as others could not
I could hear the movements of the tiniest molecules as they danced
I could feel light, I could taste sounds, I could smell temperature

Now I can sense nothing,
except as though through a fog of hazy, poisonous smoke.

Written Furiously During a Concert

I don’t want to do anything. I want to stop.
I want to sleep, to go away from here
To some safe place inside my head and outside my heart,
Where injuries will pepper my body and I will never have rest, only adventure,
Busy adventure to occupy my thoughts.
There, though my body lie wounded, my soul will be safe.
I will have no soul; I will be paper
Just paper, just a heroine, a doll.
There where there is no question, no sin—I must go,
But I can’t because I don’t know how to manufacture such a world.
How can there be pleasure without agony? Love without suffering? Heroics without morality?
And so my own imagination defeats me.

¤

I need the boy who makes the plants grow.
He’s imaginary. You don’t know him.
If he were here, he could take care of everything.
I need him to stand between me and responsibility, to stave off hunger and deadlines and the creditors.
I need him to love me, adore me, assure me that I am not nothing, that my existence is justified,

Because I know that I am useless; I can do nothing for myself, and I get in the way of everyone else.
I need him to take me somewhere where there is no one else for me to bother—only he will be there, and I can never hurt him. He is protected by his endless patience, his adoring indulgence.
I can only create. But he believes I am beautiful, and that my creations are beautiful. Therefore, I may live.
I am not completely worthless if I can make beauty.

¤

But to make beauty, I first must spend interminable time here.
Here, inside my stomach, in darkness. The pain here is unending.
It is this fear and shame that binds my hands, not allowing me to work, to find food and eat, to sleep without dreams, to think about anything except my self-hatred. I want someone to understand, to pity me. But no one except the one who loves patiently.
I could leave, I think. I think I may have found a way to shut this off, to function. I have only to seize my destiny with both hands, to ignore steadfastly the bitter bile that poisons my thoughts.
I do not pray, because I know what I ought. I have only to accept myself as the author of my own future. I have merely to force myself to work.
Thank you, esteemed philosopher, but I will not take your offer. I have been to that place, that place of sanity, responsibility, empowerment. It is a place with no fear and very little disappointment.
I refuse to go. There is only work there and no rest. There is never a realization of dreams there, only one goal after another. There is no beauty there—there is no communion, no ecstasy, no glorious pride of the elite!
Here at least I know that I am special, beautiful, better.
I don’t want your power, your success, your security, because it excludes creation!

¤

This must be a mixed state—depression and mania together. I’m so unmotivated, yet I can still feel the shivers of overactive perception on my tongue.
I do this now: analyze.
Well, of course I analyzed before, but now I know the proper words to use.
Every morning I wake up and think, “mania” or “depression”.
Can this be self-induced?

¤

They are playing Gabrieli’s Sonata pian’e forte, and I scold myself for writing during a concert.
What’s one more bad thing when I am already impossible to live with?
I force people to hate me. I attack them and poison them and then we all—everyone—die.
I hate and fear Him. He did this to me.
Or maybe I would have been like this without His help.

¤

I absolutely must write something serious today. I must.
I can’t, though.
I’ve put it off for ages, and now it must be done.
I can’t do it.
I hate it. I want it to go away.
If I try to write, I’ll cry. I’ll go to sleep. Tomorrow will be shame, because it won’t be done, but I don’t care.
I can’t imagine caring ever again.

¤

I don’t want to get better.
But that means I’ll have to find someone to care for me and my affairs.
Where can I find someone who will marry me for nothing in return? (Nothing but poisoned words and strange screaming.)
I need someone just as crazy as I am, someone dependent, loyal, compliant, someone who serves unquestioningly, someone who feels deep jealousy but truly believes it is not his place to possess me exclusively, someone who supports and enables my strange relationship with fickle Art, someone who stays no matter how many ways I find to hurt him.
There is no love like this among the healthy, and so I search for him in the ranks of the ill.
I will know him by the desperation in his hands, by the fervent oaths on his lips.
He will faint when I touch him.

¤

I hate music. It hurts.
I hate how I listen, how I hear.
I don’t want that liquid meaning in my womb
I’m not wonderful or beautiful; I’m just strange.
How many others here are tormented by the sounds that tease the body and taunt the mind?
Today I am tired and boring; another day I am angry and bold.
I will twist your soul with my hands and teeth, like a growling animal.
Perhaps I will live with animals. I am like them.
Outside,
I can find my true mate—the only thing that satisfies—Art, Music, the Moon.
He has so many others, but he calls for me, too.
I obey and follow; I live now for the taste of his ambrosia, and I suffer also at his whim.
Oh, stars, I thank you for aligning to create my misery!
The sanguine melancholy that pursues me, the blood and the bile, oh!
You, Reader, may think this is mere poetry, but it is Truth!

¤

How can the world be so ever-new and so ever-old at once?
Ceaseless re-creation and endless monotony—
There is nothing new, and nothing that is old.
Here is Brahms—he knows—
Schumann—he knows, too—
Why are we trapped here?
A timid voice asks, Would it be possible to love without anguish, to see and hear as we do without knowing the fear of darkness, to understand the inner workings of the universe without also comprehending the depths of sin?
Oh, little voice—that must be Heaven.
I know, I believe I will see that place,
But I can’t now imagine it, and I can’t make myself want to go.
Here is a Canadian folk song.
To me, it is better than Ewazen or Rachmaninoff.
Only I can’t find how to applaud with sincerity.

¤

I feel the need to write, but I think I have nothing to say.
Shall I then write about nothing?
People here are happy.
I don’t hate them.
I just want them to leave.
Or I could leave. Either way.
I feel like a character in a televised sitcom.

¤

Red. It breaks through the black and white.
We are supposed to feel joy.
There is glory coming, the program says.
The synthesized organ tunes the brass.
Glory to God in the highest, have mercy on us.
These chords are overdramatic for me today.
Have mercy on us; receive our prayer.
For you alone are holy.
That’s for sure.
Gratias.

¤

I expect you think it arrogant to me to believe that you don’t understand what I understand.
I don’t believe it’s arrogant, because such a thing is true.
It has been given to me to know many things.
They are as varied and as many-faceted as thousands of carved emeralds in an endless sea of obsidian water.
These gems come from a land of light and warmth that your senses cannot perceive,
Just as we cannot see the ultraviolet colors that seduce the bee or hear the high and tiny pitches that guide the bat.
I want to bring you there with me, and I want to keep it all to myself.
Oh to meet another there! What things we could say and do then!
I have never met another living soul on those beaches, though I know that others have been there.
I have read their guidebooks and their maps. I have seen their footprints. The seeds they planted here have grown into thick vines with heart-shaped leaves. The dew that was on their hands is left sparkling on the black rocks in lingering fingerprints.
I, too, hope to leave something lasting here.
But my hands are bound by despair, by fear, and by knowledge.
You will not feel sorry for me, but will instead live through a cataract of fog.
You are happier than I; this is clear.

Criticism: Paolini's Eldest

Apparently, they are making a movie of Eragon. This is a travesty.

In case any of you are unaware of this wretched novel, it is a truly sickening piece of trash by a pompous teenager named Christopher Paolini.

All right, this is not true. Eragon is not a terrifying example of pretentious post-modern excrement. However, its sequel, Eldest, is the sort of insignificant rubbish that makes one want to shove knives down one’s throat.

Here is commentary by my friend Clay on Eldest.


So, I finally finished it. I just took a day and sat down and forced myself to read the whole thing.

It did get a little better as it went on, but it was still really bad. And, even then, it had rough patches. Did you notice whenever Eragon had to learn something he always had like a day to learn it and they only went over it once and then he all-of-a-sudden knew it! For example: the Dwarven Gods, The Elves' hand gestures and proper titles (all that -elda crap that I still don't understand and was never explained), and large groups of peoples' names ('He worked at memorizing every one's name' WHEN?! Maybe when they were being CONSTANTLY ATTACKED). Also, everyone has 7,000 names because every sect of every race calls everyone something different. (Nusualda or whoever had several, one I remember from the Krull) Plus when you add on all the elven endings to every ones' names...)

Anyway, besides getting slightly better as it went on, it has very very very bad rough patches. Especially during his training with the elf, where it seemed to get kind of preachy about life and religion and anything else I have a firm belief that the author feels strongly about. Did you feel like this? Do you think Eragon still believes in the Dwarf Gods? What's he going to do about that? If I were him I'd still observe the traditions. I mean he can't defy a races religion (especially when he, ceremoniously[wrong word?], IS a dwarf).

I was rather upset that his system of magic wasn't explained in more detail, but I have a feeling I'd be even angrier if he had, because he'd probably screw it up for me. When I read Eragon I thought 'this is a really cool magic system, I've never seen or heard of anything like this!' (have you? I think it's strangely unique. Think he stole it from something else?) But when it is mentioned in Eldest it feels less cool and more impossible. You can either just say the word 'fire' and hope your own scalp doesn't catch on fire, or you can say 'fire arrow' and hope your arrow doesn't explode, or you can say 'light my arrow on fire', which is a complex sentence needing grammar, which is slightly upsetting.

The descriptions... I ended up, at one point, just reading the first line of every paragraph and anything in quotes and I still understood what was going on. I like books that just give me the meat. I can imagine what the lace on the chair looks like in my own head, I don't need the author to go on about it for paragraphs on end. In fact everything was described in such extremes I had difficulty telling when something was actually going to be difficult. Such as in the last battle. Every other paragraph was 'Eragon's power was completely and utterly, uselessly, drained as that of a large brown funnel after all the golden syrup has drained out of it slowly, like molasses, back into the lack-luster bottle that held it in tact with the utmost grace.' Yet Eragon kept casting and was, decidedly, not 'completely and utterly, uselessly, drained'.

I'm definitely not reading the third one. I'll just make it up in my head. I didn't like the ending at all. I didn't even REMEMBER who Murtagh (something like that) was, it had been so long. If you recount most of the book almost NOTHING HAPPENED AT ALL. He goes on at length with his stupid adverbial (adjectivial didn't sound right) descriptions so often the book is mostly description (in detail, I might add). I felt empty inside, really. It had very little plot (Arya) except what happened at the end and even that was stupid and anyone could have written that. 'omg he's your brother!!! DUN DUN DUN!!'. So stupid. I was really upset about that. And how the hell is Murtagh more powerful than Eragon? WHEN did he train? Besides not having time to train, even if he did have someone really powerful training him, he's not blessed or whatever (elven looking, you know?) so, WHERE is he drawing his power from? Is the freakishly old elven-blacksmith going to end up making a new weapon for Eragon? This is the author's style...


Let’s go over some of Clay’s points.

1. Eragon’s amazing ability to be awesome—This is because Eragon is a Mary Sue. In case anyone does not know what Mary Sues are, here you go: a Mary Sue is a character created for the author (and sometimes the reader) to use for the sole purpose of self-insertion. Mary Sues have very few faults, and the faults that they do have usually turn out to be virtue. (Examples: “I love my friends too much”, “I’m too generous with my money”, “I steal from the rich to feed orphaned kittens”.) If you do not believe that Eragon is a Mary Sue, just read the description of Eragon in the beginning of the first book. Then flip to the back and take a look at the author’s photograph. Ha!

2. General preachiness about life and religion—This is the preachiest book I have ever read. Now, I have no objection to authors who include their philosophical views in their books, even when I disagree with them. For example, Sartre and Dostoyevsky are two of my favorite writers. And Camus, although he frightens me, is a master craftsman. However, these authors deftly weave their points into the plotline, so that at the end of the novel, the reader is left thinking, “Aha! I understand! The writer is trying to make Point X! And it makes sense from the story!” In Eldest, however, the reader is stuck in the middle of the book, reading a tedious “narrative” in which the Wise Old Man Archetype lectures Eragon on How There Is No God and How People Who Believe In God Are Stupid. Word. For. Word. Hello? Mr. Paolini? Can you at least learn subtlety? I have no doubt that in the third book in the trilogy, Eragon will make his break with religion, although if the author is feeling particularly magnanimous, Eragon may come to accept that other people, who are not wise enough to be Wise Old Man Archetypes, are stupid enough to need religion. (Like in Marx, right?) If the author isn’t feeling high-minded, I predict that Eragon will single-handedly convert the entire world into a religion of Post-Modern Vegetarianism. Mr. Paolini writes as though he has just taken an Introduction to Philosophy course and gotten much too excited. He is the proverbial kid in a candy store. (I am tempted to take this metaphor too far. Let’s say that Kant is represented by gummy worms, and that Aquinas is the Tootsie Pops…)

3. Superfluous Verbosity—and long-winded wordiness.

I have some of my own to add.

4. Inane Clichés—The series is filled with them. Like every other stupid fantasy novel, the main character (Eragon Everyman) is in every way normal and average but at the same time inexplicably different and slightly uncomfortable with his provincial neighbors. But THEN—surprise!!!—a magical being drops into his lap and announces “Only you, Mr. Everyman, have the power to SAVE THE WORLD!” Of course there is an aloof and beautiful princess who is ridiculously far above him, but we have no doubt he’ll eventually rise to her level. She is an elf, naturally. All of the elves are better than all of the other characters, and everything they say can be taken as straight from the author’s mouth. The plot deals with the typically dull themes of Respect for All Life, Responsibility Comes with Power, etc. (It’s as if Post-Modernism was a big rock that was slammed down on Mr. Paolini’s head and melded with his brain.) This is not to mention the equally mundane plot devices such as The Magic Sword, The Journey on Which We Meet Lots of New Cultures, and The Main Character’s Personal Journey of Growing-Up-Ness. Naturally, the Evil Villain is a Dark Dictator that wants to TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Shockingly, the mysterious character Murtagh turns out to be Eragon’s BROTHER! I’m gonna go out on a limb and bet that the EVIL VILLAIN turns out to be Eragon’s FATHER! (I know! You are shocked!)

5. Appalling Use of English—Who edited this book? Here is an actual quote: "Keep thine back to a wall, Shadeslayer. Capricious, they are... What will you do with thine horse?... On mine honor, you will return to find him fat and sleek." And I couldn't even find the part where they use "thou" as a direct object. At first I thought the author was ineffectively trying to establish a cultural variation of speech, but then I noticed that this use of English is pervasive throughout all cultures in the book, including the Almighty-Elves-Are-The-Best Culture (which is treated as the author’s own personal voice). Now I think that Mr. Paolini was just trying to sound “archaic” and “urbane”, so he just threw in some obsolete words, assuming that since he didn’t know how to use them properly, none of his readers would, either. Let’s review, Mr. Paolini. Thine and mine before vowel sounds, thy and my before consonants. Thou is a subject, thee is an object. It is NOT acceptable to simply add “-est” and “-eth” indiscriminately to the end of verbs (or, I add with a shudder of horror, other parts of speech); they are conjugations that accompany the pronouns “thou” and “he/she/it”. In short, Mr. Paolini, when you try to look smarter by using words you don’t understand, you end up looking STUPID.

The worst part of this fiasco is that I am afraid that I will have to read the third book, simply because I have read the first two. It also seems wrong somehow to own two books of a trilogy and not the third. Only… how else can I punish the author for his infantile posturing without boycotting his book? This is a mystery that must be pondered.

My only recourse is to spread the news about the atrociousness of this book, and to beg responsible guardians to protect their children from Mr. Paolini’s blatant philosophical proselytizing, his tiresome clichés, and his unforgivable grammar.