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

Tag: creative story

  • entry from this universe – #1

     To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
    Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
    Signifying nothing.
    — Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17–28)

    It’s been a long time since I last wrote in this online journal. To my surprise, I found out that all my past entries are gone! I have tried fruitlessly locating them, but Penzu has no such easy function to retrieve the past entries UNLESS you have to upgrade to a present version! So, that’s how they make a profit from their business. But as I think of it as some kind of sign to refresh my life, I will not attempt to retrieve the bygone times.

    It’s nice to write anything now using my cute iPad. Don’t get me wrong. I love writing, even though I am not perfect at English grammar. I love the English language and the way of western cilivization, even if the people who were born into the culture do not seem to take a liking to me. I consider the English language to be the most efficient global lingua franca. It’s convenient and catholic. So, what the hell! I am not scared of writing in English because I love the language and the act of writing in it.

    So, job-wise, I think I am doing okay because I am still working at the same place as a case manager assistant. I believe I work the most diligently and efficiently in my team, which is mainly composed of younger people. Yeah, the glorious MZ Generation. But they will not stay young any longer, and mind you and them; they will one day lament the bygone days of their youth. Well, I guess you have already noticed my not-so-kind opinion about them, which might have come from my experience working with them. Hell, yeah!

    Oh well. Enough for pouring this hateful rant about the deplorable generation. I want to focus on the rest of my life and take control of it. I am considering setting up and running my own small online business selling cat toys and cat-themed fancy stationery items via Etsy. Or maybe Amazon. I am seriously considering such a business prospect as a plan B for my economic act, always having backup financial resources in force in significant situations. I do not want to repeat, though helplessly, depressive times when I do not have a job.

  • Prompt 13

    What is one word that describes you?

    One word is insufficient, for you and I are not a manufactured byproduct of living organisms. So I will defy it with the following parade of words that tells about me: munificent, seI am sentimental, sympathetic, compassionate, funny (in a delightful way), naive (but more leaning toward gullible), agerasia, Renaissance, timid, introverted, vivacious (only when I am in the mood under right conditions with right company), blue-stocking, independent, unreconstructed, passionate when talking about books and history with kindred spirits, ambitious, neverending, resilent, optimistic, silly, sometimes pretty when my spirit is high, sybil, Cassadra, ancient, cosmopolitan, spiritual, witch (a good one), dreamer, laid-back, warm, dilligent, genuine, trusty, mysterious, and hopeful.

  • Prompt 3

    How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

    Truthfully, in every mistake I am making and have been making and will make, I am yet to learn. Perhaps, such a cycle of faux-pas will continue until I meet a psychopomp on my final day on earth. Yet, I move on and march forward to whatever my destiny is. I will most likely be making the same mistakes over and over, falling again and again. Yet the resilient spirit is indomitable, and even fate cannot destroy it unless I voluntarily abandon it to the force of darkness. And I think it is this spirit of resistance against a series of failures that strengthens my will to stand on my feet even after the losses, which makes all my attempts all the more sublime in triumph over despair like Santiago uttering, “Man can be destroyed, but cannot be conquered,” in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea.

  • ‘Just So Stories’ by Rudyard Kipling – book review

    I believe history is a branch of literature full of events and stories made by artists and artificers weaving facts into myth, and vice versa, into a timeless tapestry of the world that was, is and will be. In that regard, Kipling is an artist who spins beautiful tales of how animals became what they look like into a poetic wheel of ear-delighting and cadenced words aided by gorgeous illustrations distinctively graceful and dazzlingly beautiful.

    Kipling’s evolution of animals explains why they look the way they are, such as a Leopard with spots, a Carmel hump, and many more. The stories become a fable and a history of its kind. It’s a literary version of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the wonderful menageries of Man and Beast that cannot live alone despite the differences in species because we are the inhabitants of this world, Earth. But, above all the fantastic tales of wonder, the Cat’s tale stands out in the story and the subject. Kipling’s Cat is proud but not arrogant, independent but affectionate, and vain but graceful. It’s a cat who walks by himself, and everything is alike to him and nothing else. The Cat is a beautiful stranger even if he likes to be a family, a kind of forever loner, the Puss in Boots with a cowboy hat and an empty holster. Kipling’s writer’s eyes saw the romantic solitude in a cat, and the result is one poetic Cat that rhymes well like the graceful way cats do their amazing somersaults.

    Just So Stories are not just for children even though it is classified in Children’s literature on the shelves of libraries. It’s a book for everyone who loves legends and magic, who still has a childlike innocence that refused to put away as an adult because it’s in nature. The stories are not for academic analysis or psychoanalysis but simply for the enjoyment of the mind and the delight of the heart. Remember Freud’s saying, “Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.” So are Just So Stories, so delightful and so pleasant.

  • dum spiro spero

    Light and dark, full and empty – how mysterious!
    Spring of Words is now elusive – how tantalizing!
    To the secret seeker with no pity – how heartless!
    And no more spirit so festive. – how agonizing!

    Midnight and moonlight and shining stars – so beautiful!
    Angles and fairies and ghosts – so ethereal!
    Come to my aide before I lose sight of it! – Yes, quickly!
    And possess me with the best of your powers – by all means!

    Is Tree of Knowledge going to become sere? – How unthinkable!
    Has Tree of Knowledge already become sere? – How miserable!
    Let nothing dishearten my spirit still pursuing, still trying
    With hope, while I breathe, even if it seems impossible. How beautiful!

  • they come to her at night

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    The night was a strange paradox of light and dark. It was too dark to invoke images of the bright beautiful things. It was too light to provoke imaginations of the blissful obliviousness. The night was a white heat of the sleepless senses that kept taking in all seen and heard even after the provocateurs were long gone out of sight. This was maddening and becoming madder and striking the notes of all madness. Iris couldn’t sleep as the night was getting deeper and darker, and it was consuming every part of her in a great white incandescent flame like a funeral pyre that once engulfed Dido’s forsaken body and unfortunate heart. The senses that kept her awake besieged her glass castle without mercy and started to screen the scenes of sadness and more sadness as an apparition of the past narrated the story buried in its tomb without an epitaph. She was wide awake at the bewitching hour, and she was helplessly defenseless against the force of the hour.

    Since she was a little girl, Iris has been going through the same nocturnal rituals of waking up at 3:00 AM on time, precisely, continuously, as always. Every single night was every single rite of this uncanny performance of sleeplessness – that is, exactly at 3:00 AM. When she wakes up, the electronic digits always show 3:00 AM with glows that seems to grow lighter the more she looks at it in fearful awe. Fearful because Iris has learned that it is the hour when the gates of the underworld, the netherworld, the world beyond are open, and the regions of faeries and wandering spirits roam the earth as witches fly to the devil’s banquets. Hokum it may be, but the bewitching hour also seems to include Iris as a coterie of the supernatural for what’s worth. This secret is hers and hers only in fear of being branded as a weirdo or a witch’s apprentice even. Yet, because Iris’s soft heart cannot bear a secret too long for its painfully tender fullness of emotions and feelings to keep it to herself, it now agonizes her sense and antagonizes her sensibility. And it was this night that got her to a paroxysm of inquisitiveness, inadmissibility, and ineffableness, enveloped in the mysterious veil of incredibility so enigmatically eerie that it almost felt infatuating with the unknown.

    The magical hour was now in possession of the waken Iris with wide eyes, and the effect was smeared into every part of her body without a miss like ink instantly and ferociously diffusing in a glass of clear water. She did not like it, but her opinion was useless under the power of the supernatural hour. Iris wanted to break the spell and doing so would require her of facing another unknown mysterious force. Her Catholicism would defy her magical assumption on the incredible symptom, but Iris knew that her religion itself entailed the magical qualities of belief and that it was only natural for her to connect the dots between the two belief systems as a solution to her ghostly malady. That’s it. She can’t take it anymore, she can’t have it any longer. Forget the religion, and think primal. Iris has made up her mind to start her investigation of the supernatural phenomenon that she has been going through to find whys and wherefores.