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

Tag: books

  • The legend of the Catskill Mountains

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    courtesy of google

    Where the earth meets the sky on the mountain, 

    An old mountain spirit opens and closes the doors

    Of Day and Night every day at the proper hours

    And works the wonders of nature in the divine design.

     

    The vault of heaven, the dome of Sky God’s palace

    She frescoes with celestial ephemerals every night

    With new moons hung and old moons cut into stars

    Sprinkled across the nightly firmament golden bright.

     

    The garden of the earth, the parterre of Earth Goddess

    She waters with rains spun out of soft summer clouds

    Woven by early morning’s gossamer cobwebs and dews

    Flake after flake, like those of fluffy white cotton balls.

     

    The wise mountain spirit, the wonderful divine artist

    Adorns the heaven’s frescoes every night with cheer;

    The wise mountain spirit, the wondrous fairy gardener

    Cherishes nature’s garden every day with delight. 

     

    P.S. This poem is based upon my reading of Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’ in which the fictional historian character named Mr. Knickerbocker relates to the native American legend of an old squaw spirit living on the Catskill Mountains in New York. I envision her as a fantastic fairy version of Michelangelo frescoing the vault of the Sistine Chapel and as a fabulous gardener tending the earthly garden with tenderness and quiet assiduity. What a fascinating vision of a magical magnitude it is!

  • fee-fi-fo-fum, fee fi-fo-fum

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    The owl hooted on the oak,

    The crow cried in the dark;

    Dogs howled on the hills,

    Cats purred in the bushes;

    The Night was ripe and ready.

     

    Fee-fi-fo-fum, Fee-fi-fo-fum,

    The Three Witches began to hum

    Standing in the grim gray garbs

    With the gray eyes glaring in silence

    They were ready to tell his destiny.

     

    “Scotland, the jewel of thy crown,

    The sword calls for thy title to own,

    The blood is thy sacred power,

    As it runs redder and deeper.”

    Thus, the prophecy of his fate’s cast in

     Fee-fi-fo-fum, Fee-fi-fo-fum, Fee-fi-fo-fum!

     

    P.S.: This week’s #FairyTuesday theme on Twitter liberally encompasses witches, ghosts, and other supernatural beings, so my choice is the Graeae, the Three Sisters personifying the Fate of Man in the ancient Greek mythology. They had only one eye and a tooth to share, but the pre-Herculean Mycenan hero Perseus intercepted the eye when the Sisters fumbled with it in the air and forced them to answer the whereabouts of Medusa. They ultimately relented to the demand, whereupon Perseus set about killing Medusa. 

    This image of the Three Sisters is then also wondrously associated with the Three Witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth by the sheer dint of the somber, dismal greyness of the three uncanny women. But as Mcbeth was a tragic figure consumed by guilt and greed, so were the Three Witches, malevolent and dystopian, vis a vis the somewhat faltering and fumbling Grey Sisters menaced by Perseus bullying them to elicit what he wanted to know. 

    This poem, however, is more of Macbeth’s Three Witches leading him to perdition because the grim image of the witches conjured up by Shakespeare is terrifically atmospheric and dismally spell-bounding without the pageantry of words and expressions. 

     

  • ‘Fairies: A Dangerous History’, by Richard Sugg – review

    Fairies: A Dangerous HistoryFairies: A Dangerous History by Richard Sugg

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    According to the races of the supernatural world, there are classes of spiritual beings that humans have arbitrarily defined with ostentatious pedanticism. For we treat the otherworldly guests of honors, such as archangels, angels, principalities, vampires, werewolves, trolls, big-foots, and even extraterrestrial aliens with awe-inspiring reverence. In contrast, fairies are regarded as sort of the underclass, juvenile guests reluctantly invited to a terrific festival of supernatural beliefs. Such spectral discrimination, argues author Richard Sugg in his Fairies: A Dangerous History, results from the fact that unlike demons, angels, and other ethereal beings of educated Christianity, fairies are in want of respectful scholarship codifying their existence and nature, cultural influence on arts and literature, and spiritual elements of faith/belief traditions in lettered authority.

    The book is a meta treatise on why the author himself believes in the belittled mystical beings’ existence. Sugg takes us to Shetland’s remotest area to listen to a nonagenarian man whose vivid memories about fairy sights are amusing. Thenceforth, the author brings the readers to the fantastic feasts of fairies as seen and described by William Shakespeare and Edmund Spencer as the rulers of the Vegetable Kingdom in their Elysium of poetic fancy, Sugg keeps us hooked on pages after pages filled with his magic spells of words because he sees and believes in fairies with their own dangerous history. It is dangerous because the truth about them is theologically reasonable, spiritually potent, culturally dominant, and physically palpable.

    In sum, this book is one fascinating account of fairies that serves the author’s purpose of educating and entertaining readers. The book is filled with the glamour spells of the author’s erudition. This book is something of the authorial account of the Fairy Folk.

    View all my reviews

  • Officially Haunted, Really

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    Prologue: I wrote this post in March of this year upon reading an article about historic haunted places in the UK from a subscribed issue of ‘BBC History Revealed’. I wanted to contribute my knowledge about the Whaley Museum in Southern California in a letter to the editor. The new July issue arrived on my Kindle Fire this morning, and I saw my letter featuring therein. It was edited in the context, but only for the perfect perspicacity. The letter is, in fact, one of the fifth letters that have been so far published in the magazine. 

    Sometimes they either don’t know they are dead or wouldn’t accept it because of strong attachments to their once earthly abodes. You may think it’s a puerile imagining to believe in ghosts, but there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. As someone keen on supernatural phenomena happening in the background of our ordinary landscape of daily life, it gave me a fillip when I came upon an article from my subscribed history magazine the other day about the historical capital punishments going horribly awry as though to use the grisly scenes of capital punishment as a reminder of societal retribution for an eye-for- an eye. It also reminded me of a story of the condemned whose ordeal of execution was so unbearably painful that he is still roaming around at his execution site as though with eternal lingering attachment to his earthly life.

    Here in Southern California, the story of James Robinson (aka Yankee Jim) who was executed for attempted grand larceny in San Diego in 1852, is something of haunted folklore that attracts tourists and ghost hunters alike. He was hanged on a gallows off the back of a wagon, but being a tall man with long legs, he resisted being killed by keeping his feet in the wagon but was at last pulled off. His body then swung like a pendulum until he strangled to death. And it was this very site of hanging that one Thomas Whaley, who happened to witness the execution himself, built his dream house where he and his family soon began to hear the unexpected phantom footsteps as if being made by the boots of a large man, walking noise, and the windows mysteriously unlatched and opened up. Lilian Whaley, the Whaleys’ youngest daughter living in the house until 1953 was certain that it was the ghost of Yankee Jim haunting their house. Now the Whaley House is the Whaley Museum, a California Historical Landmark located in Old Town, San Diego, California.

    However, ‘Yankee Jim’ still lives there because although unseen, his presence is felt and heard by visitors and staff at the museum. Never malicious or naughty, the ghost of the hanged man is said to rather shyly manifest himself by footsteps, markings on the wall, or opening and closing of windows. So much so that the Whaley Museum, along with the Winchester Mystery House, is certified by the US Department of Commerce that it is genuinely haunted. So if you live in Southern California, it’s worth visiting the Museum and Jim. I think I may pay a visit. The address is 2476 San Diego Ave, San Diego, CA 92110.

  • the secret of the sea

    Scylla-and-Charybdis

    In the wilderness of the great ocean

    Lies a secret script of the Fate of Man

    Sealed in the silence of tidal motion

    In dissimulation of the opprobrious plan

    Harboring the secrecy of the Age of Man

    That gods so have kept to themselves alone.

     

    The Ages of Man, the Plays of Man

    On the Stages of Acts in Humanity –

    Those gods wrote and watched for fun

    In the theater of Comedy and Tragedy

    As the Wheel of Fortune decided what

    Would be played the next, and whatnot.

     

    The heart of the ocean sends a pulse thru me

    Of the secret hidden in the watery main

    With the sunny breeze that pushed Odyssey

    To sail forth against the forces of the divine

    To find and write a new Age of Man to witness

    The victory between the Scylla and Charybdis.

     

    P.S.: This is a poem written out of my existential crisis in the reflection of Herodutus’s theory of the Age of Man. I am not a fatalist but a believer of luck as Shakespeare was. I believe that time and chance are what ascribe to the fulfillment of your ends in life or for the nonce. Didn’t Thomas Alba Edison also corroborate that a genius is made of 1 percent of ingenuity and 99 percent of efforts? I want to embark on an Odyssey to claim my own destiny.

  • vertigo of words

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    Words inviting, the eyes accepted

    the spirit willing, the heart exalted

    the mind laboring, the brain revolted

    against the lust of learning to be learned;

    Woe was to her as her will yet essayed

    Amid the vertigo of cogitation whirled

    Like a never-ending merry-go-around

    Swiveling her head in pandemonium.