She walks into the gray maze
Of endless corners serpentine
In the prosperousness of the haze
Under a moonbeam travertine
Beguiling her into remote hopes
Cycle and epicycle, amaranthine.
Tag: Poetry
-
The Rambler – Religion
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary,” said Thomas More, who died for his relentless faith despite Henry VIII’s promise of honor he would confer on to his most trusted counsel in his cabinet. Samuel Johnson also confirmed that faith required no byzantine theories or philosophy for the validity of truth. Until I attended a public Sunday mass in a parking lot yesterday, I had not realized the power of faith, which I doubted I still had in my heart.
The beautiful liturgy of the mass, which culminated in the Eucharist, was akin to a flowing of streams of life to the eyes of a seasick seaman and the thirst of a weary traveler. I had never expected such exaltation of the soul with faith disappearing into an abyss of despondency populated with a school of doubt, disbelief, and frustration nurtured in a reality of everyday life. But while listening to a priest’s sermon based on the reading of Matthew 25:31-46, which is about the importance of practicing faith into actions, especially by sharing milk of human kindness with people you feel least likable or unkindest.
The priest further asked if we would counsel with God in making decisions in life or just about anything needful of help. No one answered yes because let’s face it, we regard such tendency to recourse to God as a derogatorily medieval way of living life in this Digital Age of Artificial Intelligence. We try to reason our faith with the validity of practical truth and willfully turn our heads from the Gospel with the usual facade of “Religion has nothing to do with it.” But then can you also prove that we are nothing but of a highly complex living organism made of accidental atoms, sans souls? What is the feeling that urges you to search for meaning in life, our sense of purpose? Can atoms do it?
It is my wholly solipsistic reflection of hearing mass, but now I feel like finding Ariadne’s Thread in the labyrinth to find a way out on this last day of the church calendar. What a feeling. Peace to be with you, and God bless you all. -
Timid, Sleepless, Evergreen
A sky maiden sprinkles stars
Across the celestial vault
With a moon mirror she hangs
As the earth below sleeps
And dances in the night light.
-
‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’, by T.S. Eliot – review
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by Eliot T. S. (Thomas Stearns)My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It was like being transported to Hayao Miyazaki’s beautiful, fanciful animated world to discover that T.S. Eliot wrote this delightfully whimsical book because, to quote himself, he was of “a Catholic cast of mind, a Puritanical temperament, and a Calvinist heritage.” To me, Eliot was always a grim, grave intellectual who would not deign to regale himself with anthropomorphic cats. It was part of curiosity about the writer himself and my interest in anything about cats because of my first cat at home. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is a compact collection of amusingly scintillating and elegantly profound poems about why cats behave the way they do and who they are really.
And the more I read, the more I enjoyed it because it was full of wittily whimsical rhythms and brilliantly capricious expressions like a pleasant medley of amiable Dickensian characters. The psychology of the indomitable, the incredible cats through his amiably keen observation of feline behaviors in everyday life is conveyed through the live practical cats:
- Jennyany dots, a neat, elegant tabby Molly living in a tidy, smart household.
- Growltiger, a sailor cat., living in the harbor, who knows all the taverns and pubs around, the
- Rum Tum Tugger, who is and will always be himself
According to nominative determinism principles, Eliot gives the inscrutably and ineffably particular names to the cats that befit their characteristics and personalities. The names become the cats, and the cats become the peculiar existence.
The poetry was the inspiration of the mega Broadway musical hit “The Cats.” However, to go against the grain, I think that rather than the famed musical version, Hiroyuki Morita’s animated version of “Whisper of the Heart” about a good-hearted high school girl traveling to the land of talking biped clothed cats because of her kindness to cats, is close to Eliot’s idea of practical cats. The anthropomorphic cats in animation are free in all expression that human actors cannot perform with theatrical effects, which forces the audience to believe that what they see are cats. It is impossible to disassociate the visual fact from visceral imagery. The humans in makeup imitating cats render the feline characters fatuous and clownish. Ben Jonson, the great Elizabethan English playwright, would have adopted Eliot’s practical cats with his superb masks and sans the ludicrously exaggerated makeup and costumes.
In conclusion, with wits and simplicity, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is a hidden gem of Eliot’s works that is enjoyable by general readers, even if they do not have cats at home. Indeed, Eliot himself was a cat lover, and this adorable collection of poems might have been the whimsical scribbling of his cats at home from his daily lives with them. But what a way of tribute to his lovely creatures it is! Upon reading this book, you might want to write like him about your cats or other pets you have at home. I should think so, for I want to and am doing.
-
The Lonely Heart
The Romp Pomp Bunter is a Little Kitten living on Kenmore Avenue
Whose natural curiosity becomes day by day Curiouser and Curiouser.
From the windows, he watches the World below and the Sky above
Day and night, till the Doves on the roof fly away higher and farther.
Left in the silence of loneliness that becomes the sound of sadness,
The Little Cat, friendless always, goes to a Fish called Hope, as always
In the vain hope of friendship, for he is also alone, or so it seems,
And knocks on the door of the aquarium and waves at him with his paws.
Alas, Poor Little Cat! I know him! Hope wants no friendship with the Cat!
He hides in the pineapple castle in his watery kingdom, safe and sound
For his loneliness is submerged in water and dissolves into watery mote,
Leaving the Little Cat in the silence of friendlessness round and around. -
New Possum’s Book of the Curious Cat
There’s once a cat name Romp Pomp Bunter, aka the Curious Cat,
who liked to romp with pomp and bunt his head against
his guardian, the woman with the beautiful but lonely heart.
She named him in rapt contemplation of the thought, of the thought
of his name; his ineffable, effable name, debonair and extraordinary.The Romp Pomp Bunter has a secret that no one knows it:
The Romp Pomp Bunter once saw a grand statue of Bastet
In a book on the history of cats originating in ancient Egypt
And was so impressed with the splendid grace of the goddess
That he wanted to emulate the mysteriously beguiling poise
Even if he was a Californian moggie tomcat of Los Angeles.But the Romp Pomp Bunter, ever the Curious and Adventurous,
An orphan kitten whose parents nobody knew or cared even,
Felt that he was originally from the Ancient World with a reason
That he looked nothing like the ordinary domestic short-haired,
The insignificant, the common, the trite, the obsequiously tamed
Breed of Cats that contrasted the Egyptian Mau, the First of Firsts
Endeared to Pharaohs, Queens, Priests, Soldiers, Farmers, and Artists.So, the Romp Pomp Bunter believed that he was the Royal Descendant,
The indolently elegant, adoringly capricious, the inscrutably alluring
Egyptian Mau, the paragon of the goddess Bastet, divinely beguiling.
You see, that is why his name is the Romp Pomp Bunter, the Curious Cat.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
You must be logged in to post a comment.