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

Tag: logotheraphy

  • prompt 65

    What are your biggest challenges?

    I find today’s prompt topic, compared to what I am experiencing, seems too pat that it gave an extra fillip. The challenges I have to tackle are lifelong, and I haven’t even half succeeded. I don’t know if you want to read this litany of woes, but if you do, I will appreciate your kind soul because writing this post will be my logotherapy for the broken heart and wounded soul.

    I have zero tolerance for incivility and any offenses that others regard as insignificant because I take it as a disrespect of my existence. In the office, the majority of them speak Spanish even if they were born here in the States. I am the only Asian, and more particularly Korean, so they always treat me as if I were invisible. They may act politically correct or pretend not to exclude me, even if I try to be as friendly as possible and am always courteous, offering help they don’t appreciate. So I resign to aloneness and hopelessness in the crowds, withdrawing myself from their circle of sociability. How would you feel when everyone says hi to each other but you when they know you are there? Doesn’t My Life Also Matter?

    My other challenge is to be too soft-hearted, growing no apples of wrath for those who hurt me with acrid remarks and unkind gestures. Although my furies will arise from slumber when provoked, if the instigators show moments of human weakness or even an instant ray of warmth or kindness, they will retreat with steps back until they return to Valhalla.

    This morning’s episode was an excellent example of this topic. After a morning mass for the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, there was a communal breakfast prepared by the church ladies. I stood in a line to bring food for my mom, who had taken seats in advance. Then, these old ladies dressed up nicely cut the line in front of me with the friendliest faces! My indignation burst out, so I asked them how they could be so sneaky when we all had just heard the mass with the Holy Communions. They apologized to me but didn’t bother to go back on the line. I was inwardly crying over the fact that these people disrespected me, and I fell to the pit of sorrow ever again.

    People say to love thyself to be loved, but that’s impossible because humans are, by nature, political animals, as Aristotle said. We don’t live alone and shape our perceptions of ourselves mostly from what others see us. It’s called a “Looking-Glassed Self,” a theory of sociology coined by Robert Cooley. Thus, I feel I was born in the wrong place under the wrong circumstances. Many claim they are ugly ducklings, swans among ducks, but I believe I am the one. Hercules’s Twelve Labors seems pale in comparison with my most demanding challenges in life.

  • 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.

  • Live, Die, Repeat, Repeat…

    Life is still beautiful, even if it deceives you.

    I wanted to find the Church’s stance on reincarnation and, above all, what the Bible said about this seemingly endless shapeshifting until the purification of the soul is complete, so to speak. What about the Christian belief that we live only once and have no return of life?

    According to “A Concise Dictionary of Theology,” reincarnation is the belief or metempsychosis (“animate afterward”) that the soul preexists its embodiment. After death, the soul exists in a ghostly state before animating one again, a body of the same in a different state, which sounds a lot like a demon or malevolent spirit possessing the body of the living. It is this very belief in resurrection and official rejection of the preexistence of wandering souls without corporeal substance that denies reincarnation itself. By maintaining an endless series of chances, the doctrine of reincarnation reduces the seriousness of God’s grace and, most importantly, human liberty exercised in one life that is ended by once-and-for all death.

    Furthermore, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, death is the end of man’s earthly pilgrimage. When the single course of our earthly life is completed, we shall not return to other earthly lives as “it is appointed for men to die once” [Hebrews 9:27]. Christianity defends the duality of the body and the soul. However, reincarnation defends dualism that both beings exist separately and that the body is simply an instrument of the soul; existence by successive existence as an altogether different body is repeatedly assumed each time one recycles life. Thus reincarnation denies the idea of the resurrection of the body, as evidenced by the resurrection of Christ, and most primarily rejects the Christian doctrine of salvation. Therefore, there is no reincarnation after death.

    I feel much better now than before. While I succumbed to the belief in reincarnation, I couldn’t accept the thought of my present life as punishment for my wrongdoings in my past lives. To think that I have to live in a miserable state of discipline until my subsequent due recycling puts me on the verge of lunacy in the form of murderous headache for which I recently found myself in the ER. Viktor E. Frankl, the survivor of concentration camps during World War 2 and the founder of Logotherapy, urged us to trust that there is meaning in suffering, which helps us lead to our purposes in life. Samuel Johnson, one of the most significant 18th-century English men of letters and the author of A Dictionary of the English Language, describes life as progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment. Forget the arguments about the religious dogma dictating an institutionalized belief for mass mind control. Or it so, then so be it. After all, reincarnation is also another offshoot of mysticism developed into religious thought. Then I will follow the light that gives me a sense of hope. And for this reason, I proclaim that my body and soul are inseparable and that I live only once, and that’s it.

  • Spirit Away: ‘The Sentence’ by Louise Erdrich

    The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is about the power of words, spoken or written, awakening the spirits of the author, storyteller, characters, and readers, all adrift and luminous as the boundary between the real and the ideal collapses. It’s a polyphonic work of trauma narrative, cultural studies, social commentary, and philosophical memoir interwoven in multiple strands of a joint account.

    The story evolves around Tookie, a doubting bibliophile who thinks books have everything you should know except what actually matters. Books are no more than a portal to mental escapade, a world of make-believe in the likeness of truth or reflected in the highest ether of reason and sentiment, which makes no defining impact on her checkered life as if it were her sentence from the judges of this world and the beyond. So much so that when Tookie finds that the newly deceased soul of a regular customer haunts the bookstore, she works at, she laments her fate of chaos that seems ever to stalk her small wish to live a quiet everyday life. Is it her sentence to live In perceptual existential malaise? And yet, Tookie ends up living daily life with a loving husband and daughter in a house of their own with a steady job as a bookstore attendant. Isn’t it what is considered an everyday life? So why can’t Tookie let the ghost alone when ghosts refuse to depart for the other until they finish their businesses in the world as part of their spiritual sentence?

    I decided to read this book after reading a review from the NYT Book Review a couple of months ago because of Tookie for being exceptional wanting to be ordinary. I felt for her, which was valid until the middle of the book. But as Tookie became settled with her husband in their own house burgeoning as a knowledgeable employee at a local bookstore, she began to lose her fabulous, unique luster. Indeed, I was all high fives for her happiness that I felt deserving, but the further I progressed to pages, the more my heart parted with Tookie’s existential frustration, except the touching moments of love between her and her husband. Also, unlike the book’s general introduction as a ghost story, It is not a supernatural book that will fulfill your cravings for an intelligent horror story. Instead, it is an extended short story featuring a ghost as a fire-starter of narratives connected by bibliophilia. The author believes bibliotherapy is a recipe for the existential malady to quiet the anxious mind. There is no more enchanting than a book, electronic or bound. The lifeless words become alive as the reader awakens the book’s spirit by entering the world of make-believe through the labyrinth of stories leading to the secret garden of truths that the author has fruited.



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  • Triumph of the Will

    Like Hecate, the goddess of underdogs, I have a soft spot for writers and thinkers who arose above personal hardships and triumphed in the will. If they have not experienced human highs and lows, how could they write and explain the meaning of life? Take the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky whose near-death experience on the gallows and subsequent travails shaped how he viewed humanity, the purpose of God, and the dichotomy of good and evil. I compared the life of Dostoevsky with that of Victor E. Frankl, the father of Logotherapy, who survived five death camps during World War 2 because both men’s intellectual fervor saved them from self-destruction in the darkest hours of their lives.

    Dostoevsky (hereinafter “D”) was a political prisoner sentenced to death for reading banned books. But the most incredible feat of luck pulled him out of the gallows, and he was sent to a Siberian work camp. He forced himself to channel a danger of hopelessness and resignation in such a squalid environment into the world of imagination. His characters were his alter egos trapped in a cycle of solipsistic containment of morality, religiosity, and social justice. In these attitudinal and creative values as a way of relieving himself from the slough of despond, D finds a kindred spirit in Frankl (hereinafter “F”), whose spirit never succumb to the hopeless situations in death camps where life seemed to be a curse. Instead, f kept himself busy by constantly devising his school of thought, analyzing it, and structuralizing the concepts in his head and on any writable medium he could find discreetly. The result is Logotherapy, the third Viennese school of psychotherapy that encompasses philosophy, religion, neurology, and psychoanalysis, whose nature and method are common to all humans and applicable to all regardless of age, gender, race, and culture.

    So much so for the reading of the brief article, but the effect is magnanimous and resonant with a pellucid tenor of a victorious high human spirit with humor as a handmaid to intellect (wit), which would otherwise be grim and dreary subject to temperamental bouts of depression and pessimism. Both men in their prime of youth had their sovereign rights of individualities in tatters and shackles, but their willingness to live and achieve their goals exceeded the compass of the malicious fortune and triumphed in perennial glory. They are, as Ben Jonson in his humor might have concurred, men not of an age but for all time.

  • ‘Royalty’s Strangest Characters: Extraordinary But True Tales of 2000 years of mad monarchs and raving rulers’ by Geoff Tibballs

    Royalty’s Strangest Characters: Extraordinary But True Tales of 2000 years of mad monarchs and raving rulers by Geoff Tibballs

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    It always amazes me that some people can get away with their character flaws and faults under the aegis of social status and wealth, such as modern-day celebrities. The celebrities of the bygone days were kings and queens whose God-given authorities indemnified them from punishment. Their entitled strangeness swiveled my head in wonderment at the stupendousness of freakiness. Ironically, this anecdotal recounting of the cruel-to-be kind potentates reminds me of a tenet of Logotherapy, which explains that a healthy dose of suspense in life helps us escape boredom, resulting in excessive indulgence in perverted pleasure-seeking.

    This book tells of the infamous kings and queens and some aristocrats. They are famous and lesser-known, mainly from Russia and Eastern Europe, which gives a somber ambiance to the tales of weirds born with silver spoons in their mouths. The most memorably horrible and ignoble characters that left indelible marks on my consciousness are as follows:

    1. Elizabeth Bethany: This diabolically perverted Hungarian countess whose uncle was a king of Poland had a fixation on blood and pain in devotion to youth and beauty. Some say she was trained to be cruel, but I think it has to do with her connatural inclination for cruelty passed down in her lineage. Her aunt was a Satan-worshipping noblewoman who sought erotic pleasure in young girls, which Elizabeth also learned and practiced in her castle. She had her trusty three maids lured beautiful young girls, usually from poor families, under the pretext of training them for top-rated maids-in-waiting with generous munificence to the families. What happened next was all over but the shouting. Bethany tortured the girls in unthinkably cruel ways and bathed in their blood because she believed doing it would restore youth and beauty. She deserves no revisionist or appeals on the crime against the girls under her care. Nevertheless, modern-day feminists and the radical leftists are moved to portray her as a wrongfully accused Calvinist woman in a time when sectarian religious rivalry and antipathy were rampant. Her being charged by a Lutheran minister in the town does not ipso facto constitute Lutheran machination of destroying the Calvinist influence in the region. If the minister conspired to concoct any such plot, he would have targeted a man, not a woman whose social status was not entirely regarded as equally significant as a man even in high birth.

    2. Vlad the Lad, aka the Impaler, aka Dracula: The proverbial bloodsucker ruler had a penchant for impaling men, women, and children for leisure and punishment. The point was to give them slow deaths to heighten the apex of pain till the last breath. The legend of Count Dracula is loosely based on this Romanian ruler who might have inspired an idea of shashlik, kebab. Or any skewed food. Thanks to the detailed accounts of how Vlad artistically mastered impaling, I swore off any such skewered food lest it should conjure up the vista of the impaled helpless.

    3. Frederick I of Prussia: A stout and short, the king’s obsession with men in great height was his actualization of ideation. He had the tallest men in all the regions of Europe, especially from the North, to establish the royal military version of a freak company called “The Potsdam Giants.” The recruits, or in many cases, abductees, were consisted of a former woodsman, laborers, and farmers, allured by abundant compensations promising dazzling delights of secured lives. Yet it was an empty promise, beguiling the simple-minded low-class foreigners, who were subjected to mistreatments and even punishments should they attempt to escape. The king’s pastime was to call upon the guards at any time anywhere, including in his chamber at night, and watch them in full uniform, admiring their impossibly imposing physique that he coveted but could never have. Thank God that his son Frederick the Great disbanded the freakish guards no sooner than had he succeeded his father upon his death.

    I wonder if these royal characters were due to in-breeding abnormalities, which were usually customary in European dynasties to preserve their noble royal lineage. It also testifies that keeping means in one’s life is a blessing because extreme wealth and poverty lead a soul astray due to listlessness and exasperation, resulting in amoral walking dead subsisting on the pain of the others. Robinson Crusoe’s sagacious father was right in saying that the best is the upper station of low life. Mel Brooks once uttered, “It’s good to be a king.” Unfortunately, it only applies to these afore-described weird and evil characters. A good king or queen doesn’t.



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