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

Tag: literature

  • ‘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.

  • what the lotus knows

    She walks toward the end

    An inch closer, eyes closed;

    Then one leap into the air

    She vanishes into the water

    Where no fate can stalk her

    No care of the world anymore

    But only the lotus flower 

    To forget the memories evermore.

  • Who is the patron saint of the Internet?

    The Internet is a vast open ocean of knowledge ranging from how to fix your clogged toilet and where to find the nearest dry cleaners to the meaning of language you have no idea about and to the year when the world came to being (4004 B.C., just so if you are curious.) Not that the Internet has obliterated the places of encyclopedias or dictionaries, but it has outranked popularity for its convenience with your fingertips without getting your fingers flipping pages after pages. So when I came across an article that the Catholic Church has a patron saint for the Internet, my pique spurred me to write about it.

    It is no other than St. Isidore of Seville, a man of God who was keen on anything in the world’s knowledge. His ambition to know everything was sanctified in making Etymologiae, meaning Origins. It is a significant encyclopedia on everything from grammar to medicine, law, religion, and war. But that doesn’t end it. It encompasses pace, animals, ships, clothes, etc. Until the renaissance, the 20–volume magnum opus was a chief reference book in Europe. In the 1990s, a group of Catholics related Isidore’s achievement to the Internet, which the late Pope John Paul Second agreed with but didn’t extend to the patron-saint naming process.

    I think it’s fitting to regard Isidore as a Parton saint of the Internet in a religious hint of expectation that he will use his spiritual guardianship of the Internet productively and extensively. Naive as I may be, I hope there will be more pros than cons to using the Internet for knowledge of the world. You don’t have to be Catholic, of course. That would be like refusing to serve someone at a restaurant or a fast food joint because they are different from you.

  • Music in my head

    The gramophone
    In the mind’s chamber
    Plays the heart’s leitmotif;
    The fugue of remorses
    In staccatos of ifs
    Flitting on the notes
    Changing sharps, clefs
    Hanging on the five staff
    From lento, largo, adagio
    To allegro, presto, prestissimo
    All baroque without a coda

  • Twilight heart

    The sun chariot
    Reaches the end
    Of the day, west
    Into the gate beyond
    In the molten sky
    Of blue, purple twilight
    With the scarlet hues
    Of the shadow of the sun
    Reflecting on the glass heart.

  • The Pope and the Heretic by Michael White

    I first learned about Giordano Bruno through a tweeter thread about Shakespeare discussing his one of many influences, including this Don Quixote-like miscreant Dominican priest who wrote The Art of Memories, the subject I was and still am keen on to improve my regressing memory. Since then, Bruno has resided in my memory chamber as an enigmatic pariah, a formidable rebel without compromise. So when I came across this book by Michael White, a former member of the 80s pop group Thompson Twins, I knew I had to read it.

    White describes Bruno as a martyr of enlightenment, thinking ahead of his time. Unfortunately, Bruno was born into the wrong place at the wrong time, so he suffered from the Catholic Church’s authoritarian rule that dominated the World’s knowledge. However, Bruno’s theory that Jesus was preternaturally a superb magician and therefore not the Son of God, not to mention that the Holy Ghost was the spirit of the World and that Satan would be saved, was sufficient to raise the eyebrows of the ecclesiastical figures. Also, he opined that the stars seen in night skies were actually suns and that there were other worlds in the universe where living beings like humans existed. I speculate such an opinion might have influenced a modern-day belief that we are not alone in this universe because there are extraterrestrial beings. All these ideas were indeed revolutionary. But unlike Galileo, who was said to murmur, “Still, the earth circles round the sun” after he was acquitted of heresy, Bruno was stubborn in his ideas. He proudly defied the Church’s intention to pardon him if he would recant before the death sentence. In his excellent lyrical portrayal of the dramatic confrontation, White sees it as the microscopic representation of the conflict between religion and philosophy, myth and truth, superstition and science.

    Notwithstanding White’s admirable wealth of knowledge used in defense of Bruno, I cannot help but think that White’s stance on Bruno overlooks or connives at some facts. The Catholic Church put him at stake on account of his theological errors, deemed dangerous to the spiritual formation of the Church and the Faithful as a priest to the Church. Bruno was not a willing martyr of his ideas but a Simon Magus-like figure trying to trade his knowledge for recognition in the arms of different sects of Christianity, such as Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Episcopalianism, across Europe.

    It’s an irony that rather than the man written about, the man writing about him turns out to be a genius in writing. Perhaps White, a former musician, attributes this to his lyrical rhythm of narration drawn from his emulous erudition. Moreover, he writes the language of the general reader in the panoply of academic disciplines, and the reader will find no time for disorientation or disinterest. This book carries a tone of what the Italian anti-Catholic activists campaigned against the Church, with Bruno as the symbol of persecution against what they believed in. Nevertheless, it is worth reading it if you are a proponent of Giordanism or just a curious bystander like me.