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

Tag: essay

  • Nobody’s property

    My letter to the editor of BBC Wildlife was printed in this month’s issue. I wrote about my impression of an illegal primate trade in the UK featured on a previous issue, which reminded me of human slavery where lives were treated as expendable chattel.

    The story of TikTok tells the marmoset baby monkey who was rescued from a miserable life as a pet in a birdcage abandoned alone. It raised awareness of animal abuse in mental and physical forms as pets at the mercy of whims and caprice of the owners, who regard them as nothing more than live, expendable toys. TikTok was first bought for its exotic beauty and rarity in the illegal animal market, but the owner soon lost interest in the new pet, forsaking due care owed to him. When TikTok was finally rescued, he was in a state of fear and shock, so he was put together with another rescued older marmoset who cared for him like his son. Looking at the two photos, I thought of enslaved people who were sold off like commodities seen from Alex Haley’s heartrending saga of American black family “Roots.” In the story, humans are perceived and treated as nothing more than talking stock, and therefore the most basic unit of society in the form of family is unthinkable for slaves. Mothers and children are forcefully separated, let alone husbands and wives are for mating purposes only to multiply the population. Such comparison is not a stretch of the imagination but a sheer fact of association.

    We have come a long way to the progress of the mind regarding human rights and animal rights compared to the past, or we like to think it so. Perhaps it is our animal instinct to dominate what is perceived as controllable. That is why a force of civilization in the form of rules and law is essential to reining in our unruly and crude id in implementing reason as a way to prevent cruelty against lives. But such rationalism should always complement humanism lest we should act on the mechanism of the mind. And let us not forget that those who mistreat animals also do the same to their human brethren.

  • woes of workers

    I have always appreciated the magnificent impacts on the Industrial Revolution, especially during the mid 19th century in the West, as it upended the contemporary foundation of the economy and reconstructed the social systems and culture around the world. However, I cannot help but look on to the plight of workers at the mercy of ruthless employers in a toxic working environment still practiced in this aeronautical, wireless internet age.

    While the rights and benefits of workers have even been recognized and improved, thanks to people like Lord Ashley, the mistreatment of workers is yet rampantly prevalent by their callous employers exploiting their labor in the toxic environment. Unfortunately, sad tendencies exist everywhere in our world, particularly among non-western populations for whom the Industrial Revolution is the relatively late advent of human progress in terms of collective welfare.

    Workers may be born free by the bill of rights, but they are at the whims and caprice of their employers like their ancient slave owners who would decide the livelihood of those under their mastership. Otherwise, Elon Musk’s Tesla would be careful about their non-white workers at his factory, but that’s just the tip of a vast collective unfair employment iceberg. Indeed, the history and experience exhibit to be utterly inconsistent with the advanced minds in the real world.

  • Polaris

    Remember, when you see the North Star
    On a high cold night drifting away at sea,
    Your destiny isn’t doomed altogether
    Even the spell on your life fades away;
    Hope leads the path most brilliantly,
    Humor cheers a sailing most pleasingly,
    And tomorrow is always a new adventure;
    No fortune’s malice can cover the Polaris
    Nor can sorrow dim the diamond light
    With heart even for the fate unkind ever.

  • still now and then

    There is an excellent article in the newest issue of BBC History Revealed about how the Industrial Revolution has upended the fundamental social and cultural structures of the world as the French Revolution has changed political and economic systems of the world as we take for granted nowadays. Epochal changes are a juggernaut of our human civilizations as a process akin to a caterpillar turning mulberry leaves into fine silk despite seismic transitions ensuing from such transformation. A terse army motto of “No pain, no gain” rings true as a universal objective reality, whether or not you embrace it with open arms.

    Yet, amid the mountainous waves of indomitable revolutions and a Levitan that dictates new norms and conventions in every aspect of life from clothing to parlance, one thing never changes, and that is a life of a worker, spending most of the day outside the home with strangers for livelihood. For instance, a person whose labor is paid is not entirely free from the whims and caprice of the employer for fear of losing jobs. There are still employers whose common sense is inconsistent with the progressive minds that today’s employees are not modern-day indentured servants or maids, if not those ancient slaves under Roman mastership. It would be anachronistic and unfair to compare the slaves with free citizens working for money, but a provision of service for subsistence puts the progeny on the same continuum.

    Come to think of it, now I know why neurologist/psychiatrist/linguist Steven Pinker, aka the Rational Thinker, disagrees with Descartes’ dualism that the body and the mind are separable and Rousseau’s theory of the Blank State of the mind. We can’t be all workaholics without being personal, like cyborgs at work. Maybe that’s why nowadays, many self-checkouts have proliferated in retail and manufacturing sectors. Mind you, that the Luddites were not brute, ignorant anti-machinists destroying the factory machinery in 19th century England. They were somewhat naive angry workers who repelled against the sordid working conditions they were placed like human-like automation. The class distinctions demarcated by the types of work have become new social hierarchy even after the revolutions as aforesaid.

  • ‘Buck and the Preacher’ (1971)

    Rousseau’s dictum of “Men are born free and are chains everywhere.” fittingly describes the condition of what it means to be free from slavery after the Civil War. Even so, freedom was recalcitrant to belong to them, and the hardships that came with the price of liberty from the carnage of the war still beset the newly freed along the trail of exodus to the new promised land in the west as articulated in Sidney Poitier’s classic western film “Buck and the Preacher” (1971).

    Buck (played by Sidney Poitier), a former Union sergeant turned scout, leads a wagon of freed blacks from Louisiana to the west, where they hope to start their new lives without a shadow of slavery. But alas, the shadow of slavery still haunts them. It is up for grabs in the form of renegade ex-soldiers, probably both of the Union and the Confederates, hired by the former enslavers to bring the migrants back to the chains of slavery. They attack the wagon, rape women, and kill the old and the young, constantly intimidating them to return to where they belong. But the pain of loss and death is even less painful than the thought of returning to the past, and the journey marches on. Buck protects the journey, and the self-proclaimed preacher conman artist (played by Harry Belafonte) a former slave, chimed in, despite his original ulterior motive of money-gaining. This unlikely dup proves to be something of Moses and Aaron, so to speak, in a way that they guide and protect the persecuted people from the sordid bondage to a new promised land even if it takes a nearly decimal lot.

    Then there are Indians across the wilderness as gatekeepers to the land of freedom. They are no outsiders to the persecution with their land taken away and their very beings threatened to decimate. The Indians live by the toll fees migrants have to pay when crossing their territories, not the least due to the paucity of livelihood resulting from the government’s confiscation of the land. When Buck implores the tribal chief to help them against the white attackers because they are all brothers, the chief retorts him by saying, “But black people also fought against us with the whites.” The mistrust is natural, as is the confrontation of the two peoples whose rights are put to contests orchestrated by the forfeiter of the rights. The class consciousness between the Indians and the blacks needs a manifestation of shared injustice and empathy, which both of them attest to an objective reality where they prove to be on the same side.

    This film is one of the great Sidney Poitier’s and finest as I have been watching as remembering this brilliant actor who has recently died. Always poised with a commending presence filled with natural confidence and will without being febrile and vociferous, Poitier exudes his irresistibly graceful charisma on screen in this memorable Western about blacks and Indians, who are often seen in the peripheral characters contributing to highlighting main white characters. But this is not a revisionist Western at all to polarize the thematic elements of the genre. Hardly so. Instead, “Buck and the Preacher” is an eye-opening Western film about the peoples who are likely to be cast as outsiders even if they also rightfully belong to, to quote Lincoln, “the family of freedom with a jewel of liberty” called Americans.

  • Rembrandt is Jacob and the angel

    There is something about Rembrandt’s (15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669) paintings that are fascinating, like Bach’s Baroque musical pieces that are profound and elegant. Rembrandt was Northern European art’s answer to Italian Renaissance art. Then there is more to this wonder of genius that touches humanity’s universal hearts and minds.

    What distinguished Rembrandt from his contemporaries was his choice of subjects that were both common and profound in the everyday setting, tinged with a religious theme. Although he was as Protestant as Bach and Handel in terms of his birth of origin being the proud Dutch, he had a Catholic cast of mind regarding the scale and ambiance of the biblical scenes he chose to express. His paintings are an exquisite admixture of sweet simplicity and magnificent sanctity communicated to the eyes then lingers in the heart. It is also realistically factual and mystically imaginative, producing a powerful pathos and awesomeness as though to play a great drama across the canvass in which the actions of the figures, even in still positions, give the impression that they are not suspended in the silence but caught in moments of action.

    To illustrate, one of Rembrandt’s most celebrated paintings, ‘ Jacob wrestling with the angel,’ epitomizes such fine moments of vigor and sereneness altogether, sensuously wrapped around in the forces of life of this world and the meaning thereof. Jacob represents our human life full of highs and lows, loaded with energies that fuel the muscles of desires and the heart of will. Jacob looks coarse, plebeian, and sturdy, simultaneously faulty and confused, whereas his angelic opponent is slender, patrician, and imperturbable. The angel of heaven is supra-meaning, the meaning of life, the refinement of life itself, the beauty of life that we strive to find through trials and foils. If Jacob is the Strength of the Human, the angel is the Spirit from within.

    Rembrandt is a kind of Artist who has the sense and sensibilities particular to Artist with heart, which matches the spirit of enlightenment that mind without humanity is not genuine intelligence that nourishes our mind. So Rembrandt deserves his constellation of stars shining bright in heaven’s dome in all brilliance.