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

Tag: essay

  • All is Lost (2013) – Film essay

    Some movies should be noted, some memorized, but only a few should be applauded and taken by heart amid the luxurious streams of movies flowing from the screens. These movies chime the bell of your mind, enshrined in your dome of thought, and stay in your heart forever like beautiful memories that have become part of you, an inspirational lamp to give your life cheer and humor in times of need. In that light, All is Lost (2013), directed by J.C. Chandor, is such a movie that sheds light on your life when things are not going well for you, or you are lost in the middle of your voyage of life.

    The movie opens when a man (played by Robert Redford) wakes up, finding water in his quarter from a hall made by a collision with a stray container in the middle of the ocean. We don’t know the man’s name or where he comes from, except that he is somewhere in the Indian Ocean. We know that the man has the ambiance of a seasoned mariner whose demeanor is stoically calm and composed, rendering such an emergency look small and manageable. But it is the prelude to Nature’s test of Man’s Spirit, the beginning of his trial of hope when the damage to the yacht deteriorated due to storms to such a degree that he must abandon the yacht and sail on a lifeboat with a modicum of food and a navigational compass. But his will to survive and hope for rescue seems to be bludgeoned by the play of luck. He lights up rods to signal his location for rescue, but ships leave him alone on a vast ocean.

    Moreover, sharks steal his fish and cherish his flesh, swarming under his half-deflated lifeboat. These images immediately conjure up those of Santiago, a seasoned fisherman, and the formidable great shark from The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Or the bright-eyed mariner from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their silence speaks volumes of the voice of their strong spirits that can be destroyed but never conquered. Their aspirations, ambitions, and arduousness may be bent, but their souls are always ready to be rekindled by a passion for triumph over the darkness and fear, aided by a ray of hope.

    All is lost is an illustrious image of life in which we are alone in each yacht, sailing on the uncharted seas until the tailwinds carry us to the East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Illustrious it may sound, but the movie is never flamboyant, and Robert Redford plays the role of the mariner as if he were playing himself in dignified silence, wonderfully emoted by his face and action alone without overtly elaborating gestures or soliloquy. It is a realist’s story and as real as our daily sailing in life’s voyage. He has lost all his possessions but not himself or his life. And even if hope seems to dissipate into the fathomless abyss, there’s still a chance of hope, and we’ve got to give ourselves a chance to hope because while we breathe, we hope. Dum spiro, spera.

  • Talking about It Generation

    Dear Reader,

    The Roman orator and senator Cicero warned anyone defying one’s age is asking for trouble from the law of nature. I have no intention to falsify my date of birth in legal documents or to make a pact with the devil to keep me from being an old hag. Instead, I want to address the vagaries of getting old and the travesty of maturity that has become all the more conspicuous as time passes. It is a life to tell, and I am addressing the voice from the heart with a spirit of undying youth at the center of the heart to you, my readers, young and old, across the oceans and lands. Thus begins my soliloquy.

    They say we are all young at heart with willing spirits, but the weak flesh. While truth is truth to the end of reckoning, the reality of life forces you to realize that you are getting old and older as you find yourselves surrounded by people who are decades younger, the race of the new generation -especially the MZ Generation. Gone are the Second World War generation with the departures of Queen Elizabeth and her better half, Prince Phillip, Tina Turner, Jane Birkin, etc. The Korean War Generation has become a thing of the past, along with the former, replaced by the Vietnam War Generation. Here’s the Reality Bites Moment. The MZ Generation born in the 2000s has taken over the workforce, equipped with digital savviness and adorned with Social Media. 

    For instance, where I work is filled with the MZs, and they take such a shining pride in being of such a high-tech era, dwarfing all those born before them. I wallow in their endless chatting and overtly hyped self-promotion. To them, anyone over the evolutionary scale of 30 years old is, needless to say, “Old” and therefore not worth being associated with. To them, we – yes, I am one of them – are invisible and ignorable unless you pretend to be someone you are not so that you can be jovial with them. What a tragedy!

    Looking back, the years of work since I graduated from college at the beginning of this century – Geronimo! – I see the working environment then and now and realize the world has changed a great deal in terms of the way people think and behave. Until 2015, people still had the cultural traits of the analog times when writing journals with pens was more prevalent than typing into iPads, laptops, or iPhones. I could find people I could talk to effortlessly, and they would also speak to me about a common topic back then. But now, it is a different world because it is filled with the neotypes of humanoids. It’s like being marooned on a planet surrounded by cone-headed aliens or besieged by hideous Its in Backrooms. 

    Have you ever seen the movie Logan’s World? It’s the world of Youth and Beauty where anyone over 30 is being put into a spectacle death under the pretext of being “renewed.” Renewed because the presence of the Old becomes purged by

    the company of the New Army of Beautiful Youth. I look at the world around me and see the images from Logan’s World, which dissolve into one another and shape the Leviathan of the MZ Generation. I know now how Hamlet felt when he uttered thus with the skull of the dead jester: “Alas Poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio!” Ditto to that, Hamlet.

  • prompt 29

    Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

    Dear Readers,

    There are many things I wish I had done but aborted by the yoke of life or through the vertigo of existential distress. I had to smother my true spirit under the duties and responsibilities of an elderly child of an immigrant family struggling to make a living in a land of people who do not like me very much. But I will say it anyhow in my blog because I am asked by today’s prompt to which I am willingly obliged.

    I wish I could have become more articulate in expressing myself in writing and speaking so that people could understand why I am the way I am and that they could be my friends, as many people seem to achieve the art of expression without effort. That would have changed my life in a brilliantly green way to happiness because if you can’t articulate yourself effectively, it is like being socially and mentally awkward, and people will ignore you and leave you alone, even if you hate being lonely. What a tragedy.

    I wish I could have realized that worrying will get you nowhere because it will derail you from the tranquility of the mind with multiple faces of a fool. That life is livable, even if it is unlikable sometimes or many times is what I wish to realize someday. To that effect, being serious every time will trap me inside the existential backrooms with a point of no return. I wish I could look back on the foot steps I have treaded upon in my life and say with a smile thus: “My goodness, was I too serious for nothing?”

    I still have a life that I haven’t forsaken, and I want to give it another try to make it as beautiful as possible. The words of St. Teresa of Avila could not have sounded more soothing and curing than any other time than this time: “Let nothing frighten you, let nothing disturb you. All these will fade away.” I hope to see the world around me as workable and achievable, and most of all, adorable in its own oddly enchanting way, which I hope to utter someday, “Oh, LOL! Was I too serious back them?” Why not? Wishes and hopes are free.

  • Prompt 28

    What personality trait in people raises a red flag with you?

    Hello there,

    So, I am finally back to my blog after a long suspension of the magical practice of writing. Blame the daily duty of earning bread outside the home, but most of it was a low level of will to write. Thus, I was happy to see today’s prompt topic that caught my immediate attention and galvanized my vapid spirit to put pen to paper.

    When I see people who ingratiate themselves with those in power or popularity, I am disgusted with the preponderance of the absurdity of humanity. The sight lays bare the Darwinian law of the Survival of the Fittest, the Victory of the Strongest at the expense of the Weakest Link. William Golding must have kept such unpleasant human characteristics in mind when writing Lord of the Flies. And I see the tribes of the id-driven adult children (or incalcitrant adolescents) ubiquitously, especially at work. They curry the favor of those who are outwardly meritorious and dominantly overpowering. And if you are out of their clique, you are invisible and ignorable. It doesn’t matter your depth of erudition is unfathomably deeper than theirs, for seeing is believing. It’s a tribal mentality still and always practiced across the strata of class, race, and gender. And I can always see it, but I can’t do about it.

    Be it ever so pessimistic, it is the most displeasing sight of the rudely annoying red herrings in the body of humans. They remind me of Yahoos from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Aristotle said human beings can’t live alone, and it’s true, but that doesn’t mean I have to supress my innate dislike of such ugly trait and accomodate my nature to the animalistic practice. Joan of Arc, Thomas More, and Socrates were never part of those syncopants.

  • prompt 26

    What is a word you feel that too many people use?

    There isn’t one but too many words I find too many people use, and they are all about one’s mental state, often over-generalized either by sheer prejudice or highfalutin malice against the subject of the remark. Here is a list of the words that prick my high-strung sense.

    Weird is considered charming, compared to psychopathic. Anti-social is a new parlance for a witch or a woman who appears socially adroit in public. Depression is an overused excuse for being fashionably morose or rude among peers. And what about bipolar for anyone whose emotional continuum is conspicuously distinctive among melees? But the basest and vilest word is “MAD.” It’s a most convenient word to accuse someone getting on your nerve with a not-so-pleasing face or personal charms that purchase indemnity for arrogance or incivility. Simply artless and innocent it may seem, the word underlines the most acrimonious intention to call someone whom you don’t take a liking to for whatever reason. Forget the key to open your storage of vocabulary in the mind. You use the word like a hidden dagger to do harm on the spirit of the other, and the effect is often long-lastingly advsere and deeply indelible.

    Indeed, you can be mad about your lover without reason, but you can’t call someone mad just because their faces always look agelast. There may be a mad scientist but never a mad, lonely person. If all of this makes no sense, let it be a tale told by an author, full of fury and sound, signifying something.

  • Prompt 25

    Describe one habit that brings you joy.

    Writing is a magical portal for me to escape from reality, a sort of near-astral body experience Dr. Strange does so effortlessly. It is a particular alchemy of literature where thoughts become images and then come alive, flitting in the garden of senses. Or I can fly across the blue firmament chasing the Sun Chariot and riding on the Moon Chariot and glide on the first ray of sunrise.

    Although these days I haven’t written as much as I used to because of work and other matters, a desire for writing always stays as an undying ember glowing in a phosphorous blue diamond so rare and beautiful in the abyss of malaise. I don’t believe that writing is not a prerogative of elites, nor a status symbol of the perfect grammarians. As long as you can communicate your spirits and souls in words and strike the chords of readers, that makes you a good writer, and that’s a joy to see your magic working.

    Writers- I mean whoever writes, not just professional writers- possess a spirit of poetic madness or a gift of seeing spirits in every living thing in this universe, akin to a Sybil or a Sherman. Therefore, anyone possessed with a desire for writing can see things that others can’t see and, what’s more, begin to form the shapes of the unseen. For these reasons, writing to me brings me the joy of being a wonderful white witch of beauty.