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

Tag: arts

  • about Emily Bronte

    file-20180822-149490-1ns34tc

    The 19th century has produced many a scintillating woman writer whose world of imaginations is beautifully interwoven by the gossamer strands of feminine sensibilities and literary sensitivities tinged with a passionate spirit addressing to that of the reader transcendent of times and spaces. Her world is one enchanting realm of the felicity of beauty, the ire of desire, and the tenacity of will in the witchcraft of words. Such a world belongs to no less a writer than Emily Bronte herself, the elder sister of Charlotte Bronte, who was born on the 30th of this month in 1818. This brief essay about Emily Bronte intends to manifest her commendable trait that is deemed inspiring to aspiring writers who feel estranged from the literary cliques that do not see the hidden jewel of their inner worlds.

    Educated mainly at home by reading of the books in her father’s library, Emily Bronte was something of an autodidact who was always seen with a book popped open and a notepad on her side while attending her daily chores at home. Her lack of formal schooling due to her weak disposition and introvert nature might have made her a poor speller. Still, her protean imaginations compensated furnished the marvelous world of her ideation carved by alluring latticework for her literary casements to her stories. Her fascinating imaginativeness creates the vivacities of the emotions, real and alive. Emily Bronte is a forerunner of Beat Generation, whose trailblazer Jack Kerouac championed a tenet of a stream of consciousness in writing. Kerouac, whose mother tongue was French, struggling with the English syntax, urged would-be writers to write without grammatical constraints impeding the flow of thought. The editing should come after the birth of an idea, which proceeds the mastery of grammar. In this regard, Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy, who were also imperfect in grammatical aspects of writing, are in the libertine society of Emily Bronte and Jack Kerouac. They prove that imaginations precede imperialism of grammar.

    The lionization of Emily Bronte as an austere, astute literary Titaness in our time, obviates her weakness. It gives her a status infused with intellectual solitude of a learned woman writer and egoistic charge of modern-day celebrity writer. It reminds me of the way William Shakespeare, who was also mostly self-educated, is now revered in the grand fortress of the lofty academia as a figure of cultural and intellectual sophistication denoting one’s social status. So many people adulate the greatness of Emily Bronte and her Wuthering Heights in a simulation of her literary style and the romantic notion of solitude while diminishing her human characteristics that they regard dull and prosaic. She attended the household drudgery and took care of her sickly elderly father even in his peculiar habit of firing guns in the air from the top floor window in the parsonage as a warning to the Luddite civil unrest. Besides, she was not an academically brilliant student during her brief school years in childhood.

    I believe that Bronte would feel uncomfortable and discombobulated by such a famous rhapsody of blind admiration without understanding her personality and character that may not appeal to the readers and writers who do not see the beauty of doing simple things in daily life. Emily Bronte was neither Sylvia Plath, a woman of a privileged background whose poetry does not touch the hearts of universal readers, nor Emily Dickinson, a voluntary recluse ensconced in the solitude of leisure. Emily Bronte was an extraordinary writer in the semblance of ordinariness. She possessed imaginativeness that eclipses the brilliance of the other fashionable literary women writers of all ages. That is why her literary world is ao appealing to universal readers and writers, professionals, or amateurs.

  • Gaslighting

    einstein

    There is no more wondrously enigmatic than a man, as betokened in the Spinx’s riddle about the metamorphosis of a man from a quadruped to a tripod. A metaphysical shapeshifter, an astute apprentice to whatever entity is deemed promising, a man is by nature spiritually tenuous in its consistency of adhering to principles of Reason. Concerning the duplicitous nature of a man, no one but Albert Einstein has perspicacious knowledge about human nature. Einstein himself was a genuinely curious admixture of polarities: mad, smart, indifferent, humane, distinguished, ordinary, failing, and excelling, without a hint of arrogance in a semblance of condescendence ingratiating himself with the populace. Accordingly, I find his wise sayings apposite to the several swings of things I have seen in every spectrum of daily life.

    The fallacy of human judgment deprived of sensitivity that is apparent in most of the social phenomena aptly applies to Einstein’s following adage: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.” A man knows one thing but disregards the other in the glorified appellation of a lofty cause of elevated human dignity that people are likely to oversee in the ordinary daily landscape. To illustrate, the current campaign against the systematic police brutality in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Michael Brown is indubitably just and noble in its effort of ending the institutionalized racism in the States. However, the people actively involved in the movement – politicians, activists, celebrities, and the rest of the populace – do not seem to include the feelings of others who are socially outcast whom they can see everywhere in the daily landscape.

    x1080

    The category of the weak and the persecuted should not be limited to people of particular creed or race. Still, it should also encompass those who suffer from daily persecutions by their superiors, peers, and even family members in that relaxed and light-heartedly enforced “Just a job,” “Just a kidding,” or “just a passion of the moment,” which doesn’t mean much. This disguised bullying is an illustration of “Gaslighting,” manipulating someone by callously and sordidly psychological means into doubting his or her sanity when it does not fault the faculty of the mind. The spirit of the victims of gaslighting is only too acute and perceptible to ignore, and the result of the virtuous endurance of socially acceptable bullying is the high rate of suicide and mental illness that people tend to overlook.

    30610249_1300x1733

    The slogan of “Black Life Matters’ itself indicates the ignorance of other lives as well in the sense that it only promotes the dignity of specific people. Whereas, many other people are subject to daily mistreatment of individualities and dignities based on personal differences in external elements and dispositions that make them distinguished from the majority. Take the fictional Arthur Fleck, the wretched man behind the mask of Joker. Fleck is a victim of abuses that have stunned his growth into a confident individual finding meaning in life. Instead, because of his timid appearance dubbed in fumbling mannerism, Fleck is a subject of ridicule, a good-for-nothing clown whom all the members of society regardless of race and gender from top to bottom taunt and ignore. His invisibility caused by ignorance of people carries him over the edge of his sanity. However, people love to hate him, accuse him of being a villain to wreak havoc on the innocent people loved by all. What’s appalling about the plenary inquisition of Fleck is that it happens in the reality of life where many suffer from the inward pain of separation and misunderstanding from the society that is supposed to protect them. The community turns its back on the nameless individuals who do not fit into the social category of the Weak.

    merlin_161549535_81876d30-60ee-4253-a651-402f6b45568f-superJumbo

    The fatuous conception of social equality is then null and void in advocating the well-being of the weak in all aspects of social life. The definition of the weak includes all who feel vulnerable, prone to emotional scars callously inflicted by the brutes of the sense. The Twitter Community, for instance, is the most exclusive of all other social media under the disguise of the magnificent liberality of free opinions. It can hurt the soft-spoken and people of delicate constitution trying to find a supportive community where they can share and spread knowledge regardless of elitist discrimination. The high number of followers is the prerequisite of respectability in the digital social meritocracy. The insularity of each community from within is reminiscent of Salem, the island of the lords of flies, and other subliminal lands of nowhere you are likely to imagine in SC-Fi fictions. The viscosity of educational achievements, social appellation, and physical appearance decides the affability of your tweets, making you endear to the qualification of the followers that your twitter pal has amassed. The more unique tweets are, the less popular they are. Forget the lexical queerness due to different linguistic families. The tweets denoting solipsistic musings or solitude in sadness are not welcome. In other words, tweets should be as delightful as an ascending lark. Otherwise, they will not even bother to read your considerate tweets.

    The stupidity of people amazes me in every possible variety of forms and degrees, and the reaction to their reflection is all the more mesmerizing in superb wonderment. I wonder if people know that when they champion one cause, they are also excluding the other, which is closer to where they live and work. On the train, on the bus, in stores, in offices, people are ignoring the weak. All of this is the comedy of errors, the infinite stupidity of humans. Einstein saw and knew it, and I am confident that he continues to see it with his arms folded, looking down upon his posterity from his chair of knowledge of the eternal universe, and say, “I told you so.”

    unnamed

  • melody of hope

    chih-chan-bluebird-singing-to-st-francis-bluethumb-2-bcc3

    The old pictures I have drawn

    With colors and shapes of

    The images I see in a vision

    Thru the eyes of the Bluebird

    on the balcony of a bastion

    of solitude in the soft sweet

    twilight with the pale hues of

    the sun lingering in the west

    beckon me with the promises

    of the Stars yet to arrive from

    the Milky Way across the Universe

    with the dazzling radiance of Light

    that the Bluebird, the troubadour

    has once seen in a flight of fancy

    to deliver tweets of Hope in melody.

  • treason of fate

    the-solitude-recollection-of-vigen-limousin-1866.jpgLarge

    The stupendousness of darkness

    In a vortex of chaos in treason

    Against sovereignty of ambition

    By divine immaculate conception

    From the union of Psyche and Eros

    In the spiritualization of sensuality

    thru the enslavement of the Sense

    into the ecstatic hands of desire

    for absolute adoration evermore

    touching the soft tissues of delicacy

    of the latticework for the casement

    of the soul thru which her majesty

    is seen spinning a wheel of mystery

    with an eagle telling her the world

    he has seen, diffusing the wind of

    wisdom to his beautiful solitary queen

    whose heart thrilled, reason satisfied

    defies her freedom of Love and Reason

    and keeps her in his cellar of isolation.

     

    P.S. What has happened to the departments of the cerebral control tower? Common Sense is falling out; Cogitation is shaking; Memory is debilitating; Imagination is trying, and Estimation is fumbling. Is this case of Aphasia? Or in the worst scenario Dyslexia, even? If so, then let it be. But memento this. Writing is not a prerogative of the pedantic. You can be boastful of writing excellent prose with a talented assistant of the brain, but never be full of yourself of touching the more excellent tissue of the heart with passion. Shakespeare was of small Latin, less Greek. 

  • My Bluebird

    1675029-bigthumbnail

    I walked in all wither in the dark alley

    A long, narrow, serpentine labyrinth

    Of fake hubris, false hopes in dismay

    as Reason began to revolt from within.

     

    Then I heard the melody from yonder

    High over the mean concrete fences

    Like a dryad’s melody from a flower

    twinkling twilights on her wings.

     

    There I arose from the dark slowly

    And walked into the sound of light

    In the felicity of the unknown suddenly

    Beckoning me with the promise of delight.

     

    As I came to the corner of the maze

    Beyond the alley of another corner

    There it was in the distant misty haze.

    I saw a bluebird waiting for me pretty, ever.

     

    P.S.: The bluebird, as a symbol of hope and happiness because of its fanciful prettiness and rare presence in nature, has been a popular element of folklore. Albeit the French version by Mme D’Aulnoy is famous, my choice is a Russian version of the bluebird, as called upon by Anton Denikin, a military leader of the Volunteer Army in the Russian Civil War during the ill-fated Ice March. And this is my version of recreating the bluebird as a paragon of beautiful hope, the last saving grace for the forsaken left in Pandora’s Box, twinkling like the stars in the Milky Way embroidered on the nightly sky.

  • marrow, whisper, porcelain

    8034723711_49f09634ab_z

    Into the silence of the gentle night

    The soft breeze of the distant forest

    Blows sweet to the leaves of the trees

    Which begin to flutter in the gentle wind

    Whispering to the lunar beauty alone

    Listening to her susurrus of chaste heart.