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

Tag: short story

  • Once More unto the Breach! Here comes my New Year’s Resolution

    Once More unto another year, once more!

    As the first day of the new year has almost ended, I feel the urge akin to duty to make a new year’s resolution. There’s not much but high hopes for low heaven, with a reasonable scope of expectation and humble measurement of happiness. And since none other writers know about the depth and breadth of humanity than Shakespeare, I deem it fit to match his quotes with the contexts of what I have resolved to make this year of Rabbit fruitful and blissful.

    1. Be Not Afraid of Challenges
      ‘This is a step on which I must fall down, or else o’erleap. For in my way it lies.’ – Macbeth
    2. Don’t be easily crestfallen
      ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ – Hamlet
    3. Read More, Write More, No Matter What
      ‘We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.’ – Hamlet
    4. Keep it simple with humor
      ‘I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.’ – Much Ado About Nothing
    5. Let not a curse be my light purse
      ‘I say, put money in thy purse.’ – Othello
    6. Be vigilant at all times
      ‘Love all, do wrong to none, trust a few.’ – All’s well that Ends Well.
    7. Overcome existential malaise
      ‘Then I defy you, stars!’ – Romeo and Juliet

    Nobody says life is easy, and we know it to the point that such a saying has become a cliche. But life itself shouldn’t be and is not because we are such stuff made of spirit, fire, and dew, harvesting sunlight and starlight. Now that I have listed my New Year’s resolutions as above, I feel fresh of spirit charged with new energy like the Energizer bunny to keep going in my life, even if perils will lie ahead. But in the meantime, let me be that I am who I am as I write this post in my tiny room with my two cats, Toro and Camille, and seek not to alter this moment of simple pleasure.

  • Winged

    Still yearning
    Still learning
    The eager heart
    Even for the fate
    Riddled with
    Tangled plagues
    Keeps the eyes
    At the stars above
    And soars, falls
    Falls and soars
    With neverending
    Aspiration to fly
    Across the sky
    Even on one
    Winged foot.

  • My Cat Toro and Samuel’s Hodge

    Toro is a very fine cat indeed

    Since I don’t like the word “pet,” I won’t say it when I refer to my two-year-old tabby, tom Toro, a family member. Toro pays a portion of his rental fee and is a controller of rodents in our dilapidated humble apartment we long to escape. But that’s another story, and this story I am going to unravel is for Toro.

    Toro before entering the clinic

    It was that time again to get Toro’s annual physical exam, also required for his Hills prescription Urinary care food. So we took a trip to the vet at Little Tokyo, and all’s well that ended well. His weight was steady at 11 pounds, the same as the last year (what an excellent dieter he is!). He got his FVRCP, FelV, and nails done and was proven generally healthy. What a relief because I had been concerned about his taking more naps than usual and tired expressions with half-cast eyes. The doctor told me that it was customary for cats to show such symptoms as they grew bigger. So albeit my mom thinks that I am overly concerned about Toro’s otherwise fine status quo, aren’t we all concerned about the general well-being of our flurry fur babies?

    Samuel Johnson and Hodge

    It all makes me think of the story of Samuel Johnson and his cat Hodge. Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest men of letters from 18th century England and the author of A Dictionary of the English Language, had his beloved sale-furred cat Hodge, who was immortalized in literary works and as a bronze statue outside his guardian’s once resident abode. We first come to know of Johnson’s cat Hodge thanks to his lawyer friend and biographer James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Johnson used to go out to buy Hodge’s favorite food, oysters. He refused to let his loyal and faithful Jamaican-born master-servant Francis Barber because he felt that it would be degrading to Francis to do such errands for him. But I like to think that it was more affection toward Hodge, whom he called thus: “He is a very fine cat, very fine indeed.” When Hodge was nearing to cross the rainbow bridges due to his old age, Johnson would get valerian, an herbal painkiller extracted from the flower to lessen his fur baby’s pain. But the end of Hodge wasn’t lost in the inner circle of the ether, for his life was memorialized in ‘An Energy on the Death of Dr. Johnson’s Favorite Cat’ by Percival Stockdale, published in 1778:


    The general conduct if we trace
    Of our articulating race,
    Hodge’s, example we shall find
    A keen reproof of human kind.

    Samuel Johnson is one of my most admirable literary persons because of his humanist rules of thought articulated in his mastership of the English language. Hence it gives me a feeling of kinship with his love of Hodge. His affection for Hodge felt genuinely caring and familial, which was never mawkish or superficial. So, likewise, my cat Toro is a muse of my writings: whimsical, independent, intelligent, and affectionate. Sometimes, I wonder if Toro is really a little boy bespelled a tom. Well, what more can I say? Toro is a very fine cat, very fine indeed.

    Hodge’s bronze statue was inaugurated in 1997 by Sir Roger Cook, the then-Lord Mayer of London. Note the oyster at his paw as his eternal token of Johnson’s affection.

  • Turn of the screw

    One more chance
    and the soul’s deep
    misery in the abyss
    would be beatitude;
    Universe!
    Save the soul
    in bottomless watery
    fit where no light dares
    to reach, not even God
    cares to send his grace
    to the despondent
    whose prayer for his
    grace is a turn of the screw.

  • 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.

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