Virtue declaimed
Convention frowned
Religion constrained
Morality questioned
Reason connived
Senses rallied.
P.S I light a cigarette as a disciple of Zoroaster, worshiping sacred fire, and a student of Prometheus, who taught mortals how to kindle fire and use it for the benefit of Mankind. It’s a prerogative of a human being. Apes might simulate semblance of motion, but not the dexterity of manipulating fire and the delight of sensation. Deleterious -yes – but pleasurable and irresistible.
If you save the lives at sea,
Then will you lend a hand
To those in need of thee,
Drifting in tears hither on land?
Rapacious Time feasts on all things
Commandeers it all within his reign,
Ousts everything from its primeval place.
Nothing is granted for long to remain.
Existence precedes
the secondhand identity;
Essence follows
the primary reality.
Where a fact finds a being,
Man defines a meaning.
P.S. The tenet of Sarte’s Existentialism is “Existence precedes Essence.” People love to criticize it because it lays bare to the starkest truth of life, even though they are all aware of it. Man defines himself where he stands in his life vis-a-vis his contemporaries, measuring himself against the burgeoning careers and just moderately settled lifestyles of his peers. I find this school of philosophy applicable to Charles Horton Cooley’s sociological theory of “Looking Glassed Self,” stating that you become what others think you are. Although I do not want to wholly subscribe to either of the thoughts, I can see where these thoughts come from: Human sentience, that is. Our faculty is rather instinctive than reasoning, physical than metaphysical because it reacts to an external stimuli much more than to internal principles of judgment. And I guess the age we are living in now is the apotheosis of sentient modus vivendi in many aspects…
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
You must be logged in to post a comment.