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

Tag: beauty

  • flowers of pleasure

     

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    Enchanting, Intoxicating, Fascinating,

    Enveloped in a trance of fragrance

    As a sweet mirage of romance floating

    Up to her lustrous eyes welled with pearls

    Of liquid dreams, misty wishes in beads

    Of bubbled evanescence that flashed upon

    Her watery eyes sparkling like diamonds,

    A sweet vision of Beauty descends upon 

    Her lithe figure wrapped in lovely heaps

    Of Roses, Bergamots, Jasmins, and Peaches

    In Every Possible Variety of Pleasures. 

     

    P.S.: This is a rather playful limerick that came upon my mind during bathing. The new set of bathing kits was filled with wonderfully lovely scents extracted from the aforesaid flora, which instantly uplifted my spirit. I felt like bathing in a fairy lake hidden in a magic forest or Aphrodite’s Beach in Cyprus with the glamorous spell cast on me that would be unbroken – forever. 

  • ‘Plain Girl’, by Arthur Miller – review

    Plain GirlPlain Girl by Arthur Miller

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    When I first came across this book while looking for my next read on the train, I was immediately hooked on by the simple no-nonsense title of Plain Girl and incredulously surprised by the famous name of Arthur Miller, a celebrity playwright who had once married Marylin Monroe in his prime. Such an incongruous admixture of the images sprang in my mind like phantasms from a presumed association between the Dolorous and the Gorgeous, the Lonely and the Lovely, the Unlucky and the Lucky, all compactness in this beautifully elliptical and deeply heartfelt story about a plain girl whose jewel of beauty was wrapped in a dull, grey, crude titular epithet.

    Janice Sessions, an intelligent young Jewish woman living in New York City, seems to share the sentiments of the introverts whose quiet modes of behaviors and shyness often make them unnoticed, if not obscure, among vociferous, glamorous crowds. Think Maupassant, who at the hour of his death confides in his close friend, “I coveted everything and enjoyed nothing.” And Charlotte Bronte, who always thinks she is deprived of beauty and fortune, which prevents her from a delight of love as a prerogative of beautiful fortunate women. And then the Monster created by Dr. Frankenstein whose deformity puts him in a cruel shackle of absolute loneliness with an outcry of “I see inside but dare not to go inside!” They are the concerted echoes of estrangement – whether voluntarily or involuntarily imagined or devised – from lonely souls roaming around, wandering about in a search of happiness in life that can culminate in the union of loves, both Eros and Psyche, the spiritualization of sensuality in totality. This Janice is in want of, this is the source of her existential distress, noogenic frustration that keeps her away from anything miraculous and wonderful every happening to her.

    In fact, I wonder if Miller writes this story of a plain girl on the thematics of existential frustration in which his protagonist is made to believe what she really isn’t, whereas her extraordinariness of resilient spirit against endless disappointment and distress renders her all the more distinguished from her peers whose ordinary femininity looks banal and trifle without stories to tell. Such emotional distress may arise from an existential vacuum caused by a collective value, such as in this story the disillusioned tenets of political and social ideologies ultimately culminating in World War II and the aftermath thereof. And Miller so elegantly and dexterously accounts for a woman’s solitary quest for the meaning of life, a sense of purpose in life as a woman of true value against epochal tides of world crisis. The apex of Miller’s literary finesse manifests in every sentence delicately nuanced sentiment wrapped in his elliptical expressions and laconic use of plain words, defying every streak of intricately baroque literature that does not communicate straightforwardly to the hearts of readers.

    This book is not to discuss woman’s liberation or to lecture about the superiority of spiritual beauty over physical beauty that so many of you would quickly respond with stock answers. Janice’s doubt about her value of being loved and her preoccupied consciousness to her appearance makes her all the more palpable and realistic to those of you who find a kindred spirit in her and feel that you are not alone in loneliness and that what you think you are may not be the truth. Janice doesn’t need the glamour spell to transform herself into beauty because Janice is not a plain girl, nor has been, and will never be. The same goes for you.

    View all my reviews

  • In the temple of Ishtar

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    The Babylonian Marriage Market by Edwin Long, 1875

    There she stands like a nameless flower

    Alone, away from a heap of roses in the garden

    of the temple of Ishtar, Goddess of love in armor

    and looks not with pride seen but with pain unseen

     

    Days have left, Years have passed;

    But the girl still roams around the temple

    Alone, apart from the beauty selected

    And consummated to a sacred couple.

     

    Alas, what is it not the thing called Pity

    When the wallflower unwanted, unsought

    Alone, as always, waits a cruel eternity

    Till she meets a beholder besotted sought?

     

    P.S. Ishtar is the Mesopotamian goddess of love, war, and fertility. It is said that in ancient Babylonia, every young female when reaching a certain age should go to the temple of Ishta and wait for a man who will approach and take her as a wife to home. The temple was used as an open market for marriage, which was considered a sacred means of attaining divine union between mortals in the presence of the goddess. However, as the unfortunate ones in love have always been the figures of lamentation throughout human civilization, the shy, unpopular girls had to wait in the temple for years to be selected. This poem is to feel the feeling of being unwanted and ignored in the meritocracy of beauty…

     

     

     

  • is not the truth the truth?

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    Though it may be a gossamer of allure,

    Beauty tames the roars of the brute

    and works a magic spell in nature,

    bewitching the savage with witchcraft.

     

    Author’s Note: They say beauty is only skin-deep, but I don’t believe it. Power is to a man is what beauty is to a woman. So much so that Oscar Wilde said, “The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.” William Shakespeare then quipped in: “She is beautiful; and therefore to be wooed.” Beauty purchases indemnity for wrongdoings. You see Beauty Does Matter.  If you disagree with a grinding teeth or a grimacing face, think about a root of racism. It’s all based on how one looks. Capeesh?

  • the milky way

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    The stars in the Milky Way

    Bright in the cold night sky

    Twinkle in her diamond eyes

    Dwell in her garden of senses

    To unravel the universal mystery.

    Author’s Note: Last night’s sky was studded with beautiful stars imbuing me with a new kind of hope and comfort that life is not such a formidable juggernaut to deal with. The beauty of nature did me good indeed. This is my mind’s imprint of the beauty. 

  • Classy and Fabulous

     

    Photo taken with Focos
    Photo taken with Focos
    Photo taken with Focos
    Photo taken with Focos
    “You can never be overdressed or overeducated,” said fashionable Oscar Wilde. Sure, they say beauty is only a skin-deep, but what eyes can see determines what the mind judges. Jane Austen also corroborated being a sensibly fashionable and culturally sophisticated woman thus: “Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former.”

    In this time of social media, propriety and civility seem no longer requisite for ladyship because the impersonality of urbanity and the mingling of ranks in streets have licensed shabbiness and incivility in the facade of casualness and convenience. However, one thing is certain that as our human nature has not been changed since the time immemorial, our appreciation of aestheticism remains in every culture. So much so that even someone like Albert Einstein who looked care less about his appearance said, “Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilization in high boots”

    Hence, the beautiful ladies wallowed themselves in classical elegance, strolling the elegant arcades of Biltmore Tower, where they work as legal assistants. They are fashionistas in their own rights whose ingeniously elegant style endures and emanates from their minds and characters, which are even more fabulous. For they dwell on the beauty of life and think that a thing of beauty is a joy of life.