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

Tag: essays

  • “On Falling In and Out of Love With Dead Artists as an Art Historian” by Allison Leigh, published in Literary Hub on November 5, 2026 (Saturday Reading)

    FARMHOUSE IN PROVENCE
    Vincent van Gogh

    I have a confession to make. I am a ghost lover. A lover who finds love in language made flesh. Aeneas, Virgil, Sappho, Anne Brontë, and Clarice Lispector remain as I have read and thought of them, without the disappointment of their human foibles in life. My ghost love is not necessarily erotic; it is closer to the Elizabethan sense of the word “friend,” which could mean “lover.” Perhaps I don’t belong to the current period of time, or I am simply made that way. And I love it.

    “On Falling In and Out of Love With Dead Artists as an Art Historian” is an Augustinian confession by Allison Leigh, an art historian who fell in love with the artists despite their infamous misogynistic tendencies and appalling behavior towards women. Leigh described her growing attachment in the way a method actor becomes the character she plays. But to me, she seemed more like an investigative journalist covering an artistic scandal who then found herself infatuated with the artist. Or shall I call it erotic Stockholm syndrome?

    Honestly, it seems to me that Leigh’s love of the infamous misogynistic artists must have come from her attraction to men with similar tendencies, such as the handsome Russian Karl Briullov. I say this because I could never feel for an artist who enjoyed painting women being stabbed to death, as Eugène Delacroix did, or for Picasso, who slapped his girlfriends simply because they went out without his permission. And anyway, I never liked Picasso. While people rhapsodized about how creative and ingenious his art was, I found nothing to admire about him except his ability as a businessman.

    Artists, especially painters, express themselves in colors and shapes, unlike writers or poets. I do not feel as close to their minds, and honestly I couldn’t care less, except for Michelangelo, who endured Leonardo da Vinci’s contemptuous comparison of marble sculptors to bakers. I am not trying to stage a pugilistic contest between a painter and a writer or poet, but I see no reason to be attracted to abusive men, no matter how lonely they were when they tried to be artistic by forever sulking and being uncaring. In this regard, Vincent van Gogh was a romantic man before he was an artist, with his generosity, compassion, and warmth.

    You can’t put art before man. I can’t admire the art when I don’t admire the artist. How can you separate the creation from the creator? Artists need not be saints or model citizens. But art does not absolve an artist of vice. That is why my admiration for Charles Dickens has been tainted since I learned that he tried to send his sane wife away to an asylum.

  • At the Harbour, Before I Know the Story

    Reading Day — Thursday, August 13th, 2026

    On Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour

    My first time in the harbour: at the dock, standing in the sea breeze. English air. An unfamiliar coast, oddly familiar. But this is not a book about the cozy English sea town in a postcard.

    I have read only the first few pages of the book, and it has already given me its weather and atmosphere. I feel the harbour holding the secrets of the townspeople. I feel the sea carrying the flotsam and jetsam of life quietly and bringing them into the harbour—an always moving inside a never-arrival.

    The characters I have met so far are ordinary in the sense that none of them has that fierce individualism, existential malady, or anything that instantly piques the senses. But people may find pornography in Jane Eyre: the tension, the ache, the desire. They are not spoken but felt. People keep them in the mind, as if giving a voice to the forbidden would desecrate Jane Eyre.

    I think that is what the book wants us to see: what may seem ordinary on the surface, like a calm sea, hides a storm spiraling into a pillar of fury, discordance, and disorientation. I have not yet come to know the characters, except for Prudence, whose two Siamese cats love pushing their small heads against her legs. It is the cats that draw my attention to her, but she seems to have a story to tell as a beautiful young girl who does not act like a beautiful teenage girl.

    Prudence is Prudence: Quaker in name, puritanical in action. But she may turn out to be someone different from what I have seen as I progress through the pages, although I want her to remain as I see her now. I want her to be beautiful without being popular.

    That is life, isn’t it? Change is human, an uninvited grace. You want someone you like to remain the way you know them. That is what I want to know after I complete reading the book.

    The sea will remain the same. The harbour may not.

    — Stephanie Joori Suh

  • On A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux

    On returning to the quiet joy of reading, one discovers that some stories are not only theirs but yours too. Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story was one of those stories—hers and mine.

    It was one of the days I visited my mom at the convalescent hospital for the elderly when I started reading this story, sitting by her bedside. Call it providence if you are religious or coincidence otherwise, but I wasn’t expecting it to become my story as well about my mom, who had been hospitalized since her stroke in January of this year. It was as though Ernaux was speaking to me as a daughter to daughter about her mom and mine, collapsing time and place and the cultural and social differences between us. No wonder I wanted to finish reading it at one sitting.

    This book is not of a certain literary genre. To call it a biography of her childhood and her mom’s influence on her misses the point of why it took her a year to finish the book. It’s much more than that. The absence of her mom made the author realize her mom’s place in her memory. Her mother was the first witness to Ernaux entering the world naked, and later, to her becoming the woman she is. It’s both a biological and an existential view of the author’s raison d’être. That there is no longer anyone on the other side of the first relationship, which has ended forever. It aches. It lingers. It evanesces. And before all of this will vanish into the ether, Ernaux lives to tell about the presence that was so familiar with her being that not seeing, hearing, and feeling it is painful to bear without letting it take the form of writing because writing is personal yet public, pensive but assertive, and quiet but powerful.

    I can understand the kind of ache the author felt after her mother’s death. Whether you loved her or not, you would never see her in life again. She may live in your vision of the past, but her person as a presence does not exist in this world. And that realization of forever disappearance would throw you into the abyss, stifled, blinded, and muffled—by the ineffable sorrow mixed with mystical longing.

    I think about my mom and me. What if she leaves this world soon—tomorrow, the day after, or anytime soon? Oftentimes, I wake up with indescribable terror at the thought that soon I will lose her to eternity if I breathe, like a panic attack. And it dawns on me that it is this feeling of detachment from the relationship, as the bond between mom and daughter is severed forever.

  • 🐾 Understanding Cats as Mirrors of My Soul

    They say pets reflect the personalities of those who care for them. The way they respond to others and express their feelings seems to mirror how they’re treated at home—or perhaps how their owners reveal the rawness of human emotion, unfiltered and instinctive.

    My two cats, Toro and Camille, mirror my ego and superego, respectively. Toro is a sensitive soul, easily shaken by the outside world and never shy about his emotions, almost like a little human. Camille, in contrast, is calm and observant. He watches me in silence, as though he sees through to the very center of me. At times, I think of Toro as the General Cat from Cat’s Eye, and Camille as Jiji from Kiki’s Delivery Service.

    Sometimes, I wonder if they are the little brother and sister who were never born—that they somehow returned in fur and paws to be near me… and, strangely, near my mother, who once chose not to bring them into the world.

    Whenever they curl beside me, their small hearts pulsing gently against mine, I feel the wonder of life swell within me—a quiet awe at its vividness, like a tide of feeling stirred with reverence for the mystery of creation, and the One who makes all things beautiful.

    Rudyard Kipling once said that a cat walks by himself. But perhaps he never met mine.

    Whatever happens, they are my familiars—silent witnesses and gentle companions, walking beside me through this strange and lovely journey of life.

  • Prompt 206 on mind boggling

    What bothers you and why?

    I am bothered by people and their hypocrisy. Injustice, Avarice, Cruelty, and Ignorance. A lack of charity and understanding. Weakness to all that glitters, power to all that pleads. Aristoteles said we can’t live alone unless we are beasts or gods. But I tell you, humans are angels and demons, the children of Janus with two faces of light and darkness.

    People can move heaven and earth, making a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, so much so that we can make a criminal of an innocent man like a human sacrifice to idols or false deities. For example, I watched a Netflix documentary about Henry Lee Lucas on Friday. He was known as a “Confession Killer,” who claimed to have murdered 600 victims all over the U.S. But did he kill them all? He killed his mother for sure because she was atrociously violent toward her son, beating his head so severely that the portion of his frontal lobe was permanently damaged, let alone his right eyeball that burst out, which was later replaced by a false prosthetic eye. Lucas was said to have an IQ of 87, but he could read, write, speak clearly, and draw quite beautifully. It was his social IQ that put him on a pedestal of the mentally inept.

    While watching the documentary, I could not help but think that Lucas was a victim of circumstances and prejudices. He was coerced into confessing falsely to the killings that he had not committed because the sheriff under whose custody Lucas was fatherly to him with warmth and kindness that he had seldom received. It was painful to see Lucas pleading not guilty to the falsely confessed murders through the cell in front of the hordes of reporters and camerapersons as if he were a freak in the circus. He was crying, and even if he might have lied, you could not/should not bear false witness.

    Nevertheless, those who chanted vehement epithets with no mercy but spite for the murders that he had not committed did not apologize to him as if doing it would be an immoral thing to do. And people continue to be merciless to those lowly in social status or need care out of collective neglect. We champion human rights, equality, and justice while doing the opposite things to those who need the championed values. It’s sickening, and that is what bothers me.

  • prompt 112 on strategies

    What strategies do you use to cope with negative feelings?

    When I feel like I have plunged into the lowest abyss and hope is just a vain, dangerous illusion, I watch supernatural movies or funny comedy shows to channel the fear into scare or laughter.

    Fear because it will take me to the world of those who forget they are dead and wander around in this world. Laughter is what others self-prescribe for symptoms of dark spells, but it works in most cases, like excellent over-the-counter medications to relieve temporary pain. If these do not function effectively, I opt for a coloring book or decorate my journal with stickers and other ephemerals.

    However temporary the effects may be, engaging in those above surely helps me not to dwell in the pit of the most bottomless abyss and stay there for a long time.