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

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  • Dogs and Psychospirituality

    RE: 9/3/2018 The Los Angeles Times article of “Convicts and canines get a new leash in life”

    No one is either excellently good or extremely evil. It’s this ambiguous nature that we must guard at all times lest we should give free reins to our defiant, recalcitrant horse in our soul which can prompt us to go beyond the pale of Reason and Judgment universal in human societies. Nevertheless, this does not mean that those who are sinned against the principles must be forever stigmatized by their wrongdoings in public and barred from turning over new leaves because by doing so, we not only estrange them from a sense of belonging to society but also oblige them to resort to their former errors. That is why every person deserves of a second chance without question to right the ship of the life with wise, practical, and altruistic supports from good folks.

    Janette Thomas, aged 53, strongly believes redemption of the souls of human and the lives of dogs from whatever predicaments they are put in either by will or against the will. Every human as well as every dog needs second chances. Out of her firm conviction in redeeming the lives of Nature comes in a form of 10-year-old organization named “Cell Dogs”. In fact, the program is for the benefit and behoof of both the inmates and the dogs. Throughout the year, the organization takes dogs from various shelters and brings them to correctional facilities where inmates put the dogs through 8-to-10-week training course. The course begets mutual munificence to both of the estranged spirits; inmate handlers gain new skills with confidence, patience, and responsibility that provision them with new career opportunities. Canine trainees go on to become companions to autistic children, veterans with post-traumatic disorders, and physically disabled individuals. In effect, the records show that there is a low rate of recidivism by inmates who participated in this program and that more than three hundreds dogs found their new homes upon completion of the program.

    This program is indeed all things to all people and our canine friends by giving both of them second chances to start their lives anew. The act of bonding between a human and a canine produces the very essence of trust, security and happiness in a psychospiritual way. An inmate who trained his canine partner attests to his noble ends of turning over a new leaf as corroborated by the following verse from the Gospel of Luke: “He who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much.” For any possible criticism of cynics jeering at this beneficial and altruistic program and dismissive of bestowal of second chances to the neglected, it is perhaps high time that they should thumb through the bible and read the following Gospel of Matthew:

    “Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.”

  • On “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”

    91NQY9pyARL._SL1500_J. K. Rowling bewitches us again with her famed literary magic wand. Her fabulous creation of fantastic beasts, a young brilliant wizard, white witches with hearts of gold, an ominous black magician, and an amiable non-magician all coming vividly alive on the screen, will please your senses and touch your heart in no time with delightful feats of magic and boundless imaginativeness without interventions of boredom or cheesiness.

    Set in the 1920s New York City, the film yields the verisimilitude to the story-line that anchors the world of imagination in reality where magic is smoothly laced with chores of everyday life without forcing you to accept the fictitious ludicrousness and cinematic anachronism. At the heart of the film lies the wonderful chemistry of the actors and actresses harmoniously manifested in their illustrious performance of the characters in their own roles, coupled with a dazzling technical employment of bewitching visual special effects.

    What’s more, this film will get to your heart, so after watching it, you do not want to leave the world of the fantastic beasts and remain with them even though you may be non-magicians. A feast to the eye, a festivity of the mind, this film will take you breathtakingly from the humdrum life to the world of magic, making you wonder if you could also find the fantastic beasts just as I did, for “There are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” as Shakespeare believed too.

  • Smell the Coffee and Smile

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    “Holiday~ Celebrate~” with Madonna singing ebulliently in celebration of her holiday from the radio, Sally woke up to the tune and stepped into a hello brand new day. It was also a beginning of a three-day long Labor Day holiday weekend, and Sally was only glad to stay away from the city chockablock with rushing cars and the usually slightly ireful and forever impatient drivers as well as lumpish pedestrians with luggage, perambulators, shopping bags, and suitcases. So she decided to opt for a quiet leisure of her own comprising reading books she had ordered at the recommendation of the last week’s The Avonlean Book Review. But first, Sally had to have her morning coffee with a nice breakfast meal at Hush Puppy’s. Otherwise, she would be grumpy all day long, and that would certainly not be a way to make her day pleasant.

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    Her favorite coffee of a day was always hot hazelnut-flavored with half-and-half because it tasted very smoothly sweet without sugar. She thought that Hush Puppy’s hazelnut coffee was the best in town. But Ms. Long, the proprietor of the establishment had recently been worried about a low sales net of her famous coffee because the city council egged on by a group of hypochondriacs was going to put soon warning labels on coffee cups that would say “Acrylamide contained in this coffee may cause a risk of cancer.” Sally knew it from the articles in the Times and thought it was always the people like Ms. Long whose honest-to-goodness way of running business consorting with her moral character and faith that suffered the waves of unfair backlash from the public. Indignant at such injustice, Sally wanted to cheer up Ms. Long in any way she could do within her ability and measure.

    IMG_3995“Ms. Long, your hazelnut coffee is one of the best in the town, and I told it to all my friends and colleagues at work and suggested them they come by here.They are not hypochondriacs or bombastic health freaks at all. I mean what can coffee possibly do harm on people? The eminent Baroque composer Bach once said without a cup of hot coffee, he would be like a grilled goat. and as far as I am concerned, I have never heard of any one who has died from drinking too much coffee.” There was a flicker of smile flitting in the gracefully aged face that shinned with her incorruptible beauty from within. Ms. Long had never felt more comforted and warm than ever in her long life as a spinster. “Thank you, Sally, for your caring words. I will continue to make the best hazelnut coffee just for you.” There was in the air something that filled the whole of Hush Puppy’s at the moment. It was wonderfully conflated with the aroma of Sally’s hazelnut coffee that Ms. Long had just finished brewing. Sally’s spirit was flitting in the loveliness of the ambience, soaking herself in the moment of happiness coming from within. It sure was a pleasant morning for Sally.

    thanks-for-reading-Rok-Hardware

  • Who’s the Real Ripper of Whitechapel?

    My Review of  9/1/2018 BBC History Magazine article of “The Ripper of our Nightmare”

    It was a diabolical killing spree of the late 19th century that made the residents of Victorian capital shudder with visceral fear, and swivel their heads in incredulity. No one dared to venture the nightly labyrinthine streets of Whitechapel in London’s East End between August and November 1888 when five women were found dead and grotesquely mutilated with surgical precision in a ritualistic fashion. The unfortunate victims of this heinous crime were all prostitutes in the slums of the East End into the bargain. With the evasive killer still forever on the run in the wings of imaginations of many to this date, the stupendousness of the crime and its phantasmal committer still egg the inquisitive minds on coming up with zany theories as presented herein.

    The turpitude of the extraordinary epochal net murder case has gripped the minds of many with journalistic bent who often go to extremes in search of novelty in what is established now as its own field of study. They are called “Ripperologist,” the individuals, as it were, with mission to provide the most feasible cue on who-done-it. Naturally, these Ripperologists have often looked for their suspects in a group of outsiders in the time of the era who were regarded as misfits, introverts, loners with hints of eccentricity because they are easy to be gorged out of the melee without much strains of their cognitive faculties and mental exertions. Yet, out of a pile of idiosyncratic mugshots of their suspects come some profiles I think are worth the noting by sheer dint of ingenious entertainment .

    The Likely Suspects

    • Francis Thompson: A poet with radical religious views was posited as the killer on account of the fact that all of the crimes were committed on Catholic saints’ days. However, this theory is hamstrung by the fact that those days are the feast days of the particular martyrs in celebration of their sacrifice of their lives to the Faith.

     

    • A Mad Midwife: In 1939, a certain author named William Stewart posited that the killer was most likely a bloodthirsty deranged midwife. But then anterior to Mr. Stewart’s theory, Frederick Abberline, an inspector investigating the kills, had also suggested that it could also be a woman’s act of crime on account of a witness who had seen a female figure leaving one of the victims. Yet, the inspector later concluded that it’s more likely that the killer was a man dressed in a woman’s clothing as a way of quelling his potential victims.

     

    • Lewis Carroll: Of all other suspects, I think this eminent writer of Alice in Wonderland stands all alone in his prodigality of literary fame and notability. In 1996, an author named Richard Wallace suggested that the Ripper was, in fact, none other than this famous writer and Anglican deacon into the bargain on the ground of the anagrams in his novels which indicated the carnival of killings in 1888. Surely, positing Carroll as the Ripper may be regarded as ludicrous and beyond the pale and even defamatory. However, Wallace must have exerted himself on interpreting the anagrams to decode the messages that Carroll had left as an act of contrition for his mortal sin. Otherwise, he would not have published his theory, knowing that doing so without any factual grounds might have incriminated one of the most renowned English writers and his descendants.

    It is always interesting to see how people become fascinated with crimes and criminals of the most wicked and bestial beyond the pale. Maybe it’s because of the ignoble, recalcitrant horse that we have in the soul, always inclining to a raw, precarious stimuli to our senses, spurring the other noble, reasonable horse toward such pleasure. But why not so when our minds wonder when they spur our imaginations on devising brilliant theories such as the aforesaid? The theories will only remain possible in the domain of poetic justice and in the wings of our imaginations so long as no substantive facts surface out of the mists of the eerie past. And I defy any of the Ripperologists not to come up with any such ingenious theories to that end – all for the Truth of who-done-it in deference to the victims.

  • Why she reads

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    With the works of great writers
    Of Beauty and Intelligence
    In magical feats of Imaginations,
    She regales with infinite varieties.

  • Vet’s long-lost wallet comes home

    RE: 8/26/2018 The Los Angeles Times article of “Long-lost wallet’s unlikely return”

    For the times passed by, you can just look away and say, “they are gone away” because they are woven by your memories that you have collected through life, willed or unwilled. They become part of you, making you of spirit, fire, and dew, an unique star in a constellation of the universe. Hence nothing could be more pleasingly surprising than discovering that part of you or your beloved kept in photographic images or words of the frozen time, evocative of distant nostalgia that beckons you to reminisce about them, by a happy stroke of serendipity paired with benevolence of a stranger. Something like that happened to Ms. Sharon Moore, a daughter of one former army corporal Robert McCusker.

    When Ms. Moore received a “Friend” request from a certain Frenchman named Patrick Caubet on her Facebook page, she deleted it. But then Mr. Caubet messaged her inquiring about the lost wallet of her father Mr. McCusker with the pictures and documents contained therein that he had accidentally found in a basement of his building presumably used as an America officers’ social club. This time she responded and verified that it was her father’s. Prior to Mr. Caubet’s contacting Ms. Moore, he had launched a campaign for locating the rightful owner of the wallet, which encompassed an aid of his English-speaking friend and inquiries to the Pentagon and the U.S. Embassy for help to no avail. Then the help came from a French military office in Paris that located the names of Mr. McCusker’s children in just days. Being a military man himself with a certain feeling of soldierly camaraderie, he was determined to succeed in his campaign, which ultimately came to fruition.

    Thanks to this benevolent efforts of one French military man, Ms. Moore and her brother living in Dover, New Hampshire, could reminisce about the lost pages of his Korean War veteran father who had died in 1983. The wallet had pictures of their mother and aunt, military documents, Massachusett Driver’s License, and a Social Security Card, all of which were still kept in a mint condition. Ms. Moore said that since she had her father’s Purple Heart, her brother would be in possession of the wallet that their father had lost on his way from the Korean War to home. In return of her gratitude, Ms. Moore sent Mr. Caubet a lovely basket full of sweet jars of maple syrup she had made herself, some of the candy her father had enjoyed, and a New England Patriots Jerky. Thus, the wallet became their treasure of their beloved father’s memories that they had not known – the terra incognita of their father’s memories before they came to the world -. It became the part of their memories that bound them together to the legacy of their lineage, reminding themselves of their father’s valorous war efforts as a soldier and of his tender loving memories of their mother as a man.

    Amid the news of endless politicking, peddling of social media that goes beyond reasonable measures, and a litany of social ills, this article stroke me as a bonanza of altruism that still thankfully kept alive in everyday life, a fresh breath of air that made me feel grateful and hopeful for our future in which so long as we don’t lose a thread of sanity and milk of human kindness, we can make constraints of our lives bearable with a lightheartedness. The kindness of the Frenchman speaks to us that no matter what language you speak, the feelings and emotions that you and I have can strike the chords of our humanness because the principles of reason and of sentiment are universal in all human creatures. The return of the lost wallet as the living record of Ms. Moore’s father attests to the truth.