Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Author: Stephanie Suh

  • Lunchtime at Snoopy Cafe

    IMG_3943

    A new cafe is opened in Avonlea. “Snoopy Cafe” is the name of the venue selected by Ms. Katherine Cookson, the propriteriotess of great culinary skills and business acumen originally from Dublin, Ireland. Before opening up Snoopy Cafe, Ms. Cookson used to work as a head manageress at a popular pub called, “Irish Spring” in New York City for thirty good years. With her lifetime saving and investment from stocks she has sagaciously sold when the market trend was very favorable to her, Ms. Cookson was able to start her own business in her own accord. And voila! Since the opening of the cafe two weeks ago, it has been bustling with virtually all the residents of the town as well as customers from the neighboring cities who have become her regular customers hooked on her savory food made on premises on a daily basis served at affordable prices ranging from $6.50 to $20.00 for lunch and dinner menus.

    IMG_3954

    The cafe is needless to say what a cafe should be like in terms of the quality of food it serves to customers at prices that do not break their banks and its atmosphere; i.e., whether it has a pleasant, comfy ambience that attracts both  sensitive souls who delve into reading and writing with coffee or tea and gregarious spirits who like to confabulate with their ilks or friends on things interesting to them.  That is to say, Snoopy Cafe can become your elbow room during lunchtime out of the stuffy offices to refresh your minds or at dinnertime when you want to stop by to compose your stress-overwhelmed spirits, or to meet with your select few to get together.

    IMG_3946

    Sally has become one of the regular customers of Snoopy Cafe since the last Monday lunchtime when she accidently found out the existence of this new cafe; actually she had heard about it through the grapevine at the office, but never bothered to try it on her own because being painfully shy and a habit of creature, she had no auspicious audacity to go there by herself and check it out. Then – maybe it’s because of the beautiful weather or her acquisition of a new ipad her aunt Mary had bought for her that emboldened her caged spirit- at one Monday lunchtime, Sally finally recognized the store sign of the cafe while waiting for a green light to cross the street. “So there is that popular cafe… Maybe I can try it today.” So the history of her elbow room has begun.

    IMG_3956Aura Magoo whose husband owns and operates a seven-eleven type of convenient store nearby stops by at the cafe with her new friend Bonnie Poodle, who is opening a new French bistro at the end of the month with the trust fund bequeathed to her by her deceased paternal grandmother in France.So Bonnie wants to share her excitement for her impending new entrepreneurship for the first time. Aura, the prettiest lady in the town, is in fact secretly jealousy of Bonnie’s financial and social independence as a single woman because she has to rely on her husband’s (named Zeus) monthly allowances to her for tending household and other expenses.  Of course, she would not manifest her true feelings on the outside because she accepts it as a fact of life which she has to bear  with smile, now that she has married with three children named “Apollo, Artemis “Mina”, and Hercules “Herk.” All this complex of emotions and feelings while having a bowl of veggie salad and listening to Bonni’s rhapsodizing about her imminent business enterprise is on the brink of manifestation on Aura’s pretty face, but she manages to quell it by forcing herself to turn to the delicacy of the salad with a cup of red tea, her favorite cup of tea.

    IMG_3957Mary is taking a repose from her popcorn operation, opting for a Lunchtime Pick-Me-Up Sundae at the prices of $3.00 as a lunch special, instead of a meal set. Mary has a sweet teeth and loves to appreciate quality sweets regardless of calories, for calculation of calories at every eating time is thought ridiculously fastidious to her. After all, every edible element has calories, and just because you live on greens or proteins, it does not guarantee you optimal health, let alone svelte body. As one of the ancient epithets inscribed on the wall of the Oracle of Delphi, “Nothing in Excess” should be Rosetta Key to healthy body, beautiful body, and sound mind. In other words, if you do everything you do in moderation, you will never be led astray.

    IMG_3958While having her afternoon pick-me-up, Mary is joined by Brenda Beaver, wife of Randy Beaver, who has just lost a job as a head mechanic at “Troika Auto Body Shop” in the city as the shop went bankrupt three months ago. Thanks to his long years with the shop over ten years, Randy has been receiving his unemployment benefits that go straight to this household which has also been supported by Brenda’s income earned from her cleaning service on request. Randy has been thinking about his and his family’s future seriously but doesn’t let it shown lest he should lose confidence and hope. But his wife Brenda knows it all and understands his pathos, so she acts like she does not know any trouble in the world to keep up with Randy’s confidence as well as hers, for they have Betty and Billy, their apples of the eyes. Since Mary knows Brenda’s present family circumstances, she treats her with a swell luch of homemade-style spaghetti, one of many Mrs. Cook’s signature dishes.

    IMG_3962

    Snoopy Cafe  latently serves as an agit in which you can read and write however long you may like without ordering any more than what you want – say, a cup of black coffee or tea only – amid Baroque or Classical music or Pop-Classic music, such as any piano pieces of much written and played by Richard  Clayderman. Viewed in this light, Snoopy Cafe is meant to be a niche for any timid soul wandering desperately to rest the weary soul with good lite food just to refresh the soul for the other half of the day to make it a grand finale. Moreover, there are no vagrants importuning to patrons of the cafe, menacing money  with offish attitudes in uncivilized manners, for even though tramps are not to be despised, neither are their present abject conditions, such depravity does not/should not confer on them right of rudeness, incivility, and solicitation without a sense of civil obedience and societal codes of conducts that are essential to be citizens with money or not, all of which is overlooked for the sake of liberal/libertine ideology that gives no regard for societal values so crucial to the communal life. And all of the customers of the cafe want to keep their new elbow rooms untainted by such political ideology that does not care for the importance of civility in the name of equality.

    img-thing

     

    저장

  • Spirit of Spring

    1-210

    Fresh-faced April, daintily bedight,
    Adorned with a wreath of flowers,
    Heralding her arrival in high spirit,
    Liberating all from the grim shackles,
    Breeding new lives into the gray kingdom,
    Lets us leap with Joy of Spring in tandem.

  • The Brilliant Legacy of the Mycenaeans: Ancient Greece’s First Advanced Civilization

    The Mycenaeans: The History and Culture of Ancient Greece's First Advanced CivilizationThe Mycenaeans: The History and Culture of Ancient Greece’s First Advanced Civilization by Charles River Editors

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    Before Homer wrote about the fearless warriors and extraordinary heroes enshrined in the temples of the Olympians in Iliad and The Odysseys, there were a people of invincible spirits and adventurism on a par with those of the characters – The Mycenaean, the torch-bearers of a great Aegean civilization in the Pre-Classical Greece existing from 2000 to 1200 BC, whose bravery and enterprising minds inspired Homer to pay tribute to them as immortalized in the two great Classical epics in the history of western civilization. Accordingly, The Mycenaeans: The History and Culture of Ancient Greece’s First Civilization by Charles River Editors takes us to look back on the Mycenaean culture in the Pre-Classical era when these ancient ethnic Greeks ruled the Aegean Sea as the maritime power and left their indelible marks on the posterity of the Classical Greek culture.

    The Mycenaeans, the first Greeks, were never unified under a central state and were a collection of several kingdoms. Influenced by the earlier Minoan civilization (2000-1450 BC) at Knossos, Crete, the Mycenaean adapted the Minoan art and religious practices and developed them to their highest expectation of militaristic and cultural ideology. For example, the Mycenaeans developed Linear B Script, which was the writing system comprising hieroglyphics, used between 1450 and 1100 BC especially in Knossos and Pylos, the corporate headquarters of the Late Bronze Mycenae. The letters were mostly written in clay tablets largely concerned with documenting economic transactions of the palace administration and various business transactions. In fact, the Linear B Script, preserved as the oldest Greek writing system, indicates that the Mycenaeans were the linguistic and ethnic ancestors of the Classical Greeks.

    In addition to transcribing economic activities Linear B Script also lets us glimpse into the belief system of the Mycenaeans with the names of the deities they worshiped, such as the head of the Pantheon and Poseidon, the god o f the seas whom the Mycenaeans paid special due respect for their being sea-faring people. The Mycenaean reverence for Poseidon is worth noting because it betokens the importance of the Mycenaean as the maritime power of the Aegean Sea as well as the most of the Mediterranean Sea. They eclipsed the Minoans and their Aegean neighbors in terms of open sea trade by establishing trade routes with the islands of Sardinia and Sicily as well as the Libyan coastline and importing more goods than exporting, such as grain from Egypt and metal from Cyprus and Anatolia to make weapons.

    With respect to artistic and cultural historiography of the Mycenaeans, the art of burial practices entailed the Minoan influence assimilated into the Mycenaean of their own accord, which was akin to the fashion of Hellenism, the spread of the Greek culture through enculturation by Alexander the Great centuries later. Likewise, after then conquest of Crete, the Mycenaeans continued to employ many of the Minoan artistic traditions one of which was burial practices and their beliefs in afterlife as expressed in the Hagia Triada Sarcophagus on the island of Crete. Made in a Minoan style under the rule of Mycenaeans, it depicts scenes of funereal game held in honor of a fallen warriors and dead kings, consisting of the following athletic events as part of the ritual:

    • Chariot Race – Popularized by the Hittite and the Egyptian as a symbol of power and prestige; powered by 2 to 4 horses carrying a team of 2 to 3 men. The Hittite had 3 men – a driver, a shield bearer, and a warrior- while the Egyptian simply had 2 men – a driver and a shield bearer. The Mycenaeans would most likely to have either of the styles, though not manifested.
    • Armed Combat – conflated with the Hittite sport
    • Boxing – popularized by the Minoan and developed by the Mycenaean

    In fact, the actuality of the aforesaid athletic sport events is alluded in Homer’s Iliad, suggesting a Bronze Age tradition of funerary games in Greece with vivid descriptions of the games to honor the slain Greek warrior named Patroclus, which were all coordinated by Achilles. However, contrary to the nude events of the Classical Greece Olympics, which were the offspring of the Mycenaean funereal games, the competitors in the funereal sport events wore loincloths called “zoma.”

    The demise of the Mycenaean Kingdom resulted from several factors one by one in a period of times, including the invasion of the Sea Peoples and the emerging of the Dorian in the north, all of which represented the end of the Mycenaean Age, coinciding with the collapse of the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East, where the Mycenaeans played an important role as a formidable trade partner with the Egyptian. Notwithstanding the fall of the Mycenaeans as the major sea power in the ancient Bronze Age, the brilliant legacy of the Mycenaean culture still thrives in; (1) the form of Linear B Script, the oldest writing system of the Greek language before the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet system many centuries later; (2) the belief system in which Zeus and Poseidon were first recorded in the writing tablets and revered with due respect; and (3) the initiation of  the sparks of the organized athletic events developed into the Olympic Games in posterity. It is this ingenuity imbued with the spirit of adventure and the policy of engagement in adopting cultural traditions of other people that exemplified themselves among other Pre-Classical peoples, which is something we in the modern time should adopt as well, so that our posterity can benefit from what their ancestors learned and experienced, for it also becomes our legacy of heritage and culture to pass it down from generation to generation.

    저장

  • Spirited Away

    poppy-flower-9
    from google

    The funeral offerings by a sepulcher for Eternity to a soul departed,
    Crossing the River of the Styx to the gate of the Underworld,
    Paying a fee to Charon for carrying the soul of the departed,
    For without it, he will refuse to let him board his ferryboat indeed,
    And the soul will wander around the shore for a hundred years stupefied
    By Eternal Slumber in the amidst of the laments sung by those left behind
    Until they are heard no more, seen no more, believed no more, and banished
    Into the ancient all with his shattered dreams shuddered with fear – all in nil ended,
    Are burnt in the funeral pyre as the embers spirit away in great red.

    저장

  • A Ghost Call

     

    Afikoman
    from google

    In the sound of silence
    The phone breaks silence,
    The numbers on the screen
    Don’t tell me anything;
    In the simulation of anticipations,
    A concatenation of awry expectations,
    I pick up the phone with hesitations
    then listen to the silence of the caller
    Vanishing into the electronic ether.

  • Demeter and The Eleusinian Mysteries

    demeter
    Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries (from google)

    Veiled in the ancient shrine of the mysteries,
    Robed in the esoteric knowledge of Olympus,
    There appeared a numinous woman on the altars
    Of a great temple built by Keleos, King of Eleusis
    At the instruction of Demeter, the disguised goddess
    Presiding over grains and the fertility of earth in distress,
    For her daughter Persephone, deflowered by Hades,
    The god of the Underworld was still retained in Hades.

    The tale of woes so lachrymose with her eyes so dolorous
    With the tears of the goddess welled with pains of heartaches
    Began as Demeter called Keleos and other priests by the altars,
    All of whom were equally intoxicated by her divine humanities
    Of Anguish, Despondency, Dolefulness, and even Wretchedness
    And listened to the elegy of their goddess of sacred grains
    Of earth where now was barren and fallow for she was without grace .

    “My daughter Persephone, the apple of my eyes, Flower of Flowers
    On earth was ruthlessly ravaged by Hades, that dreadful Hades,
    Of the Underworld, who then abducted her to his realm of darkness
    Where only shadowy spirits wander with eyes depraved of lights,
    Where the shadowy spirits importune for drops of blood for prophecies
    To those a few mortals of valor destined for performing heroic feats.

    There, Persephone, my beautiful daughter, was bound to Hades,
    Who was also a brother of Zeus, god of gods, the ruler of the Universe,
    Who was also an accomplice of this great crime, this god of gods!
    Alas! Where’s Justice? Where’s Nemesis? Where’s God of the Universe
    When this god of gods connived at his brother’s crime and sealed the mouths
    Of other gods and goddesses who were nothing but divine cowards?

    Thus, I searched high and low for my dear Persephone for nine days,
    And on the tenth day, Hecate, a daughter of Rhea, and the sun god Helios
    Came to me, for their pangs of godly consciousness disturbed by the pathos
    Of my grief and lamentation was more divine than their divine essences
    To tell me the crime of Hades and where my Persephone was that was
    Hard to bear, harder to believe when my divineness was betrayed in Olympus,
    Where all but I, the goddess of grains and fertility on earth was left amiss!

    Thereupon, I fled Olympus, the ghastly place of godly beings in idleness
    Who were nothing but abductors of fair maidens, manipulators of wars,
    And conspirators of jealousy, all of it was against my nature and sacred office
    With righteous contempt for all of it, I left that place of lewdness,
    With no regrets, but with a longing heart for my Persephone in darkness.

    Into this land of Eleusis, your land of Eleusis I wandered with hopes
    Of meeting my Persephone one day as an old slave woman in disguise
    Named Doso and met your wife by an old well near your splendid house
    Where I became a burse to your son whom I fed ambrosia at nights
    For Eternal Youth and put in the center of fire for Immortality, my Graces
    To your kindly family till your wife full of foolish speculations
    Betrayed my sacred appreciation and divine intentions and thwarted your son’s
    Gifts of Eternal Youth and Immortality, the essence of the Immortals in Olympus!

    Here, you built me my temple in honor of me, to initiate the Eleusinian Mysteries,
    My Persephone will also preside for her four months’ stay on earth from Hades,
    Alluring her to eat four pomegranate seeds, so she can’t stay here in bliss
    For ever, forever with me, when the land will abound with crops and flowers,
    And when you will purify yourselves with nine days of fasting and celibacy
    with a consecration of the first grain harvested first of the year for the rites
    In honor of me and Persephone, the goddess of spring of blissful liveliness.

    Thus was a tale of the goddess, who was the goddess of humanities in essence,
    Who was the goddess of the Eleusinian Mysteries with full of arcane principles
    Of Purity, Morality, and Humanity, sealed in ancient secret rites so mysterious,
    With sacrosanct pledges of select a few mortals mystified by the Mysteries
    That would elevate the excitement of the souls and the passion of the hearts
    Like no other in this world and in that world, afterlife where the spirits
    In bliss promenading in the Eleusinian Fields boundless into the Mystic Universe.