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

Tag: book reviews

  • Triumph of the Will

    Like Hecate, the goddess of underdogs, I have a soft spot for writers and thinkers who arose above personal hardships and triumphed in the will. If they have not experienced human highs and lows, how could they write and explain the meaning of life? Take the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky whose near-death experience on the gallows and subsequent travails shaped how he viewed humanity, the purpose of God, and the dichotomy of good and evil. I compared the life of Dostoevsky with that of Victor E. Frankl, the father of Logotherapy, who survived five death camps during World War 2 because both men’s intellectual fervor saved them from self-destruction in the darkest hours of their lives.

    Dostoevsky (hereinafter “D”) was a political prisoner sentenced to death for reading banned books. But the most incredible feat of luck pulled him out of the gallows, and he was sent to a Siberian work camp. He forced himself to channel a danger of hopelessness and resignation in such a squalid environment into the world of imagination. His characters were his alter egos trapped in a cycle of solipsistic containment of morality, religiosity, and social justice. In these attitudinal and creative values as a way of relieving himself from the slough of despond, D finds a kindred spirit in Frankl (hereinafter “F”), whose spirit never succumb to the hopeless situations in death camps where life seemed to be a curse. Instead, f kept himself busy by constantly devising his school of thought, analyzing it, and structuralizing the concepts in his head and on any writable medium he could find discreetly. The result is Logotherapy, the third Viennese school of psychotherapy that encompasses philosophy, religion, neurology, and psychoanalysis, whose nature and method are common to all humans and applicable to all regardless of age, gender, race, and culture.

    So much so for the reading of the brief article, but the effect is magnanimous and resonant with a pellucid tenor of a victorious high human spirit with humor as a handmaid to intellect (wit), which would otherwise be grim and dreary subject to temperamental bouts of depression and pessimism. Both men in their prime of youth had their sovereign rights of individualities in tatters and shackles, but their willingness to live and achieve their goals exceeded the compass of the malicious fortune and triumphed in perennial glory. They are, as Ben Jonson in his humor might have concurred, men not of an age but for all time.

  • the unlikely family

    “So you have now the earth, the water, and the sky in your room! Awesome!” That was my brother when I told him over the phone about my recent adoption of a parakeet from a Petco. The paroxysm of excitement catapulted me into the awareness of a reality that I did bring a bird—those small but sharp beaks and those wrinkled tarsi feet manifesting the atavistic characteristics of dinosaurs, particularly the T-Rex. The truth that I now have to cohabitate with the least-likely coveted descendent of T-Rex still swivels my head in wonderment as if the ghost of Alice in Wonderland possessed me. So why the bird then?

    Dreaming of Sinbad and Serah

    While there might be the remotest chance of using my parakeet as a divine medium to consult my future, I have recently brought Sera home with great expectation of making a friend with the lonely Toro. Toro is now one year and four months old, and his growing curiosity calls attention for a playmate to share his enthusiasm and vociferous nocturnal stamina. Of course, the kinship of feline presence is the best option to fulfill the requirement. Still, the existential circumstances of present life eliminate it. Hence the lot fell into a blue parakeet I named Sera after the talking bird Serah, a travel companion of Sinbad the Sailor, from my favorite childhood cartoon. As you can guess, Sera is a girl who spends most of her time in front of the mirror and then trills in high soprano like a pretty and prim starlet prima donna.

    The crossed Sera befriends a reflection of loneliness.

    My endless attempts to tame Sera to sit on my finger and her constant ignorance of my presence are both disheartening and ireful. Toro is a susceptible and timid cat who denied looking at dead fish by turning away his head from the sight. Even though Toro wishes no harm on his new friend Sera, who fastidiously avoids him with all her feathers and beaks, she defends herself from him with all her might. Toro looks at me with his large sad eyes full of liquid heartaches whenever the conflict occurs, and I comfort him in my arms. Sera then flaps her tiny pretty wings, returns to her castle, and ensconces herself on a twiggy perch with a loud and snappy chirping as a sign of victory over the feline Goliath.

    I still don’t know if my decision to extra-species friendship is counterproductive amid Sera’s callous attitude toward Toro and me despite our apologies and continuous endeavor to reconcile with her. Perhaps I should not have taken Sera yet from the cage while she might have been still not familiarized with her new home. Still, there’s hope in my Pandora’s Box weaved in a rope of sparkling diamonds that promises a dazzling delight of trust and love filling the loneliness of the little hearts in our room. Who knows, one day Sera suddenly talks both Korean and English and tells me my todays and tomorrows? You never know.

  • On Aristotle and Philosopher’s Stone 💫⭐️✨

    Edgar Allan Poe expressed his contempt for readers who habitually flocked to books by famous authors on the sheer merit of their popularity without an individual appreciation of the contents. Likewise, I have a handful of the famous, the great people whose celebrity I hold no regard as I am going to unveil now. I have never liked Isaac Newton, albeit his genius is doubtlessly uncontested. Cantankerous, bellicose Newton was horrible to deal with, especially when you were his servant or maid or whoever he thought insignificant in his Elysium of high intelligence. He was also a closet occultist masquerading with the face of Rational Man with long-faced gravitas adorned in a long wavy wig. So how come Newton became a votary of Aristotle, who took the virtues to be central to a well-lived life? Since I tend to disassociate any such persona non grata (Newton, obviously) from one in my high regard (that is, Aristotle), I wanted to find out the incompatibility of the sullen scientist and the benign thinker.

    Aristotle’s ethics, or study of character, is constituted around the premise that people should achieve an excellent character as a prerequisite for living a meaningful life. It is an essence of metaphysics in which Aristotle holds that there must be a separate and unchanging being that is the source of other beings. Only by becoming excellent could one achieve eudaimonia, happiness/blessedness that constitutes the best kind of human life. This philosophical perspective also applies to the ideas of self-sufficiency by Ralph Waldo Emerson and of Amore fati, the intellectual love of life by Friedreich Nietzsche.

    Emerson regarded two separate elements as being united to create the world inside of you for the former. They are raw experiences gained from somatic sensory stimulation transformed into ideas and thoughts in the realm of reason, a process akin to a caterpillar transforming mulberry leaves into gorgeous silk. Nietzsche’s Amore fati is theologically conceived in an attempt to manifest the presence of Providence or God’s will with his infallible existence through Immanence by which an adequate idea of simple attributes of formal essence of God is applied to an adequate knowledge of the simple truth of things. It might be akin to the Eureka moment when Archimedes started running naked around the town in the enthusiasm of knowing the weight of the gold in the king’s crown from his water-filled bathtub. Or it could be the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa captured by Bernini as a cherub was mischievously thrusting the arrow back and forth into the heart of the virgin. In sum, Aristotle was right in saying that knowledge isn’t innate or guaranteed prima facie but gained from the reports of the senses and logical inference from self-evident truth.

    I still believe that someone like Newton had no regard for moral excellence any more than gaining the knowledge of the universe because studying humanity was anathema to his lofty vision of the world and beyond, such as the alchemical realm. Newton was keen on Aristotle’s theory of the 5th element on top of the earth, air, fire, and water – that is, space of aether. Methinks, Newton was trying to get Rosetta’s stone in manipulating the 5th element proposed by Aristotle. He had not known that it would have become such a magical element to turn stone to gold. Notwithstanding Newton’s beguiled ambition to be a perfect Gargamel with the help of Aristotle, so to speak, my appreciation of Aristotle’s metaphysical school of thought decides that his brilliance is brighter than Plato and on par with Socrate in the constellation of philosophers’ stars.

  • Leave the children out of it.

    We tend to be ready and eager to put fingers on those in need as if the milk of human kindness is not fit for them because we don’t like them as we see them. Such is because humans are physical rather than rational, operating on optical illusions to create our versions of reality. The present migrant crisis in the border of Belarus and Poland manifests dominance of Id over Superego, the eclipse of Reason by the Sense, in the face of travails on both sides of narratives.

    Migrants mainly from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan now fly to Belarus on tourist visas after paying from $1,000 to $4,000 to brokers and go-betweens in the high hope for a low heaven. They think their and their children’s lives are grim and dreary, with holistically low living quality in their home countries. So, they keep their eyes at the stars in West Europe’s firmament, scintillating bright futures despite the impending hostility toward their religious belief and cultural unfamiliarity. The frigid cold and the equally cold reception do not seem to overthrow the migrants’ will to catch Luck of Troy in Unfriendly Europe. On the contrary, it brings the grist for the mill of furious Belarus disaffected with the EU’s economic sanctions for its still Soviet-era Modus Operandi of the government. Belarus sends the influx of migrants to West Europe through the gate of Poland as an audacious manifestation of vengeance and anger.

    The Polish government defends their territory against the unwelcome intruders, clenching the fists toward heaven that their predecessors bled for the Polish, not for the aliens. The good-hearted people in the border area who help needy migrants face backlash from their neighbors and often become subject to judicial harassment for humanity. In this traumatic atmosphere threatening even the most basic requirement for and right of survival, the presence of children is default to provoke sympathy used as an emotional gambit to win the game of chance – for either side. People should not use children to acquire their political or social demands because that is another form of exploitation of childhood, using the vulnerability of children for soliciting the need for however righteous the cause is.

  • The Truth About Horror

    Stephen King, the King of Horror, said we make up horrors to help us cope with real ones. Some people drink themselves to numb their existential maladies of daily life, or some abandon themselves to unguarded sensual or psychedelic pleasure. But I seek refuge in the stories about the supernatural world that have to be the actual, not the second-hand replica of the author’s imagination that I find hard to be connected. That said, to descry the headline title ‘The Horror’ from a recent issue of the New York Times Book Review delivered on my kindle seemed too pat not to feel psychic about it with a jolt of fillip bolted to my neural circuits. Reading it allowed me to reflect on my affinity for supernatural scare about whys and wherefores.

    The article posits that horror movies scare us through exteriority with image and sound to create the illusion of danger, whereas horror fictions are more sophisticated and cultured to understand the complex interiority of the characters by passing over to the creator’s mind. But why do I have to play an amateur psychologist to analyze the inner world of an author when I try to find a niche for my battered spirit in a supernatural realm where no bullies, despots, or melees would follow me? My kind of horror has nothing to do with overtly thought-provoking fictional narratives that are more like psychological thrillers than supernatural ones. That is why I favor the Japanese ghost stories bereft of bodily fluids and materials but full of silent terror in the presence of a sorrowful dead refusing to depart for the Otherworld. Fear is universal. However, its expression is nuanced in the ordinary landscape of daily life, with the undead still among the living in their everyday attire as if they were still alive, not least because Japan is a country of spirits and gods dwelling in nature among the people.

    The article is correct in saying that a love of the horror is a part-time love with a mysteriously eerie beautiful parvenue in Howl’s Moving Castle. By wallowing myself in the supernatural, I feel anxiety loosened, nervousness coaxed, anger diverted, sadness halved, and depression diluted to a certain degree. You may say it is another form of a psychedelic illusion of escapade from reality, then let it be. After all, aren’t we all addicted to something to that effect to relieve ourselves from existential frustration in a socially acceptable way?

  • what if it all just happened at once? – book essay on the Denisovans by Charles River Editions

    The Denisovans: The History of the Extinct Archaic Humans Who Spread Across Asia during the Paleolithic Era by Charles River Editors

    My rating: 3 of 5 stars


    The case of Adam v. Ape in search of where humans came from seems to have waned since Charles Darwin’s seismic theory of the Origin of Species, by which we have become distant relatives of primates, whether we like it or not. The biblical Adam as the first man of Mankind is pitchforked to the first chapter of the Old Testament. The first human ancestor is now obdurately held to come from Africa, making Africans our universal ancestors. But how are we so sure about what we are as we are told to believe? What if the modern humanoid just came into existence as in the case of the Big Bang? How do you prove that the races of Caucasoid and Mongoloid originated in Africa, on the prima facie evidence of their present physical characteristics, pace the evolutionary scale of time in such a short biological time?

    The Sentinels

    The theory that all humans come from Africa has become infallible in the 21st century. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, peoples of nations have begun to worship ideology politics under the pretext of rewriting history, which in reality means upending the contemporary status quo of all social and cultural systems, even if some of them intended to remain valid. Then, for example, how would they explain the existence of the Sentinelese, the most primitive and dangerous tribe living on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean? If all non-black races came from Africa and changed to what they look like today, why do these uncivilized people preserve the most representative features of Negroid in the most shockingly prominent way?

    Then scholars will retort with the theory that we all come from Homo Erectus that branched into humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. The missing link between the root of Homo Erectus and the branches would solve the key to what exactly our direct ancestral medium was. Would it be just another kind of primate that looked closer to humans? On the other hand, some scholars believe that modern-day humans have more Denisovan DNA than Neanderthal DNA. The latter migrated from Asia to Europe between the land bridge, just as ancient Asians crossed the Sea of Bering from Asia to North America, becoming Native Americans. Then a thesis of Africa as the cradle of Mankind requires a preponderance of onus to prove it a fact. As a matter of fact, Eurasian faces will exemplify how the ancestors of Europe would very much look like. The physical characteristics of East Asians attest to a hypothesis that the Neanderthals from the Asian continent migrated to Europe before prehistoric ears, breeding with what the population that had already existed there be it ever Denisovans or other tribes of Neanderthals.


    My view on the evolutionist theory also includes Adam as the first man after prehistoric times, the dawn of civilization. Hesiod’s Golden Age is equivalent to the archeological Paleolithic age. In the period described above, humans looked like us and produced handy tools and weapons essential for developing civilizations. If we think that Adam’s progeny dispersed all over the world a myriad of times ago, then it makes sense why we look like what we do. The gist of my argument is that race is not something that can be altered by itself. Neither a climate change nor a duration of time can change racial characteristics in themselves.

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