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

Tag: story

  • prompt 41

    What is one thing you would change about yourself?

    Beauty may be skin-deep, but it makes people know more about the person, especially a woman. I wish I could find a fairy – specifically a pixie who knows glamor spells – who can make me beautiful so people will stop ignoring and mistreating my existence. 🧚‍♀️

    Jane Eyre knew she wanted beauty like her spiteful cousins because she learned that beauty could purchase an indemnity for a doer’s wrongdoings. Thankfully, Jane was endowed with a fortitude that would withstand any form of injustice, so a lack of external beauty would be compensated with her scintillating intelligence as a saving grace. Honestly, I believe and feel that although the degree of treatment of women according to their physical attractiveness in the eyes of the beholders has been civilly lessened with the advent of Feminism and growing political correctness, appearance does play a significant role in how others shape your personality in society. It’s called the Looking-Glassed Self, a shaping of self-image by how others see you, whether you agree or not.

    The standard of beauty is all the more appreciated by the faculty of the mind affected by the works of imagination. It is universal in all humans regarding principles of judgment and sentiment common to all humankind. Beauty transcends race and class for women. Not every woman is endowed with angelical goodness, dazzling intelligence, and admiring wit. Beauty will complement it all, and I want it. ✨

  • Tabby Toro

    Of all the cats that alone walked
    There’s none like Tabby Toro;
    He is the sweet of my heart
    And he likes to sleep at my feet.
    There’s no cat in the world
    is half so sweet as Tabby Toro;
    He is the sweet of my heart
    And he likes to sleep at my feet.

    The soft furs are like a great fluffy pillow
    his little heart pounding at my feet
    with the brilliant eyes riveting billow
    bright sparkles of emerald secret
    he keeps from the faraway star
    where he was once a little prince;
    He is the sweet of my heart
    And he likes to sleep at my feet.

    My mother tells me all the time
    that I love Tabby Toro too much,
    And, but for him, silent I am
    Smiling at the taunts and sighs such;
    But pity not, for I am fine as long as
    I feel the little heart at my feet,
    And I know there’s Tabby Toro
    He is the sweet of my heart

  • Prompt 32

    If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?

    I would like to meet Jane Austen, George Eliot, Mary Seacole, and Francis Barber, whose backgrounds and personal aspects interest me not as celebrities but as persons from my knowledge of their extraordinary lives birthing from the ordinary milieu.

    1. Jane Austen – Today, Austen is one of the most revered writers of world literature worldwide. But her novels were not regarded as a lofty tome of literature in terms of academic value in her days. Austen was not of blue stockings, but a woman attending the household cares that feminists call drudgery. She took care of her elderly father, and writing was a means of her creative outlet to express herself. Also, she was weak at spelling, just as Leo Tolstoy was. (What a relief that perfect grammarians are not necessarily great authors!) She was also unmarried, so she and I would have many things to discuss as a single woman taking care of her family with a love of writing.

    2. George Eliot – a great intellectual writer, Eliot used to churn butter out of milking the cows on her family farm. But her family denied it because it would mar her image of an intellectual as if doing chores were considered unfit for a woman of her literary status. She was a strong-minded, independent-willed woman with the power of words to compensate for her lack of physical beauty.

    3. Mary Seacole – I want to ask her how she upheld her confidence and determination to care for the wounded soldiers during the Crimean War after Florence Nightingale rejected her application to volunteer for her Nurse Corps. Her love of humanity and keen observation of societal norms and behaviors have impressed me, and I want to ask her for a word of advice.

    4. Francis Barber – Born into slavery in Jamaica, Barber was a loyal servant of English essayist and author of A Dictionary of the English Language, who took him under his protection against racial injustice and mistreatment. Johnson even bequeathed him a small fortune after his death, so Barber set up his small business and started a family with an English woman. His descendants still live in Lichfield, England. I want to meet him and ask him about what Johnson was really like – as it is the best way to know the character of one’s boss – and how his life became after the death of his master in the time when the blacks on the British Isles were conspicuously existent in small numbers. Was he treated like his counterpart in the U.S.?

    It would be best never to meet your heroes or idols in real life because you will be disappointed with their actual characters. But my list of people will not be a disappointment because they were not from the highest estate of the ether and seem approachable and relatable. Or so I should think.

  • Shape of Love

    “View From the Cliff at Pourville Bright Weather” by Claude Monet

    What is a shape of love?

    Have you seen a shape of love?

    If you have, tell me about it. 

    Does it look like a heart?

    -Pumping the red streams

    Gushing the river into veins

    Thumping, pounding,

    Speeding fast forward

    The reason of the mind

    Covered with dessicated

    Leaves of the dreams

    Where joy once danced

    Frolicking, humming 

    Like a beautiful butterfly

    In derilious delight. –

    Is this what you have seen

    The shape of love?

  • To Beloved

    Dear Toro and Camille,

    The words I am writing in this letter to you are the voice from my words, and I am addressing your soul’s heart to heart. I know you may not understand the complexities of human language, but my heart and soul are the basics of the words, and I know you will understand what I am trying to say anyway…

    Camille

    I am so sorry that I can’t provide you with the ideal environment for both of you, my sweet darlings, in my present situation. You know that I can’t let you out of our little bedroom whenever you want to go to the living room where the mother stays. She doesn’t like you to be around because she is jealous of my love for you. But she refuses to know that she loves me, not because she never does and has always been unkind to her only daughter. She is not evil but an ill person inside and outside due to her unspoken history of mental illness. I know it, but it’s a taboo that her family wouldn’t disclose. I know this because I am very keen on psychology based on human behaviors. I think you have already sensed it with your supernatural feline senses. What a fate!

    Toro

    When I utter a cry of fate, my soul cries at my fate of being unable to give you the necessary environment to thrive as happy cats. Of course, I always bring you to the doctor when you show symptoms of bodily discomfort, however slight they may be. But when I see my brother’s and cousin’s cats happily and freely roaming around their lovely homes, my heart breaks, and my soul cries inwardly and outwardly. How much I love you guys so much! Toro, you have been with me in every moment of my darkness and occasional lightness. You are always with me when life is unkind to me with the cold shoulders and icy glances. How comforting to stroke your cushy furs through my fingers lying next to me! You are my faithful companion. And Camille, since you came to me, your sweet purrs and meows have consoled my wretched soul. You are such a sweet soul. To people who believe animals have no souls, I defy to see their eyes straightly and speak to them softly that you love them! They know they are loved, and I know my darlings realize it! They know I am sad and happy. They are my only friends in this cold world.

    So, I am asking you to hold on to hope that someday we will live in a lovely home where you can freely and happily roam around, run around all the rooms and floors, cajoling and frolicking to your content and being yourselves. Therefore, I wonder if you want me to accept Brother Joe’s proposal to move to Korea and live in his luxurious apartment with a spacious loft for you and me to live comfortably. What do you think? You think it’s okay?

    Doubt that the stars fall from the sky. Doubt that the sea is blue.
    Doubt night becomes day. But never doubt I love you.

    All my love,
    Stephanie

  • Old People (2022) – Film Essay

    Old People shows the issue of the generation gaps between the young and the old, not in the adolescent revolt against the adult institution, but in the societal and cultural context regarding the weakening familial bond between wife and husband, child and parent, and grandchildren and grandparent.

    Melika is a successful lawyer from a city heading with her children to her sister’s wedding at their childhood home in a village. Upon arrival, Melika finds her once beloved father, who loved her and her children so much, is sent to a nearby nursing home whose environment is no better than a mad asylum in atmosphere and appearance. Seeing her father spiritless and aimless alone in a dark room gives her a pang of leaving him behind for her ambitious future as a city lawyer, but she tries to suppress it by bringing him home just for the wedding day. But that is her self-induced wish to relieve herself of guilt, for her father is so broken with a shattered heart that his daughters deserted him, driven away from their home, their happy life that he still longs for. Such sadness is collected among all the old people in the nursing home, abandoned in dreadful isolation from the community that has put them into such an institutional grave and buried alive. The rest is a prelude to a symphony of carnage burning in the fury of the undead and neglected.

    Although this movie is presented as a horror movie, it really isn’t in terms of its thematic and contextual subject. It is a horror that we as a society have become Logan’s World, where ageism and lookism prevail over humanity and discriminate against those who do not fit in their touchstone of the ideal. And what is old, and how old is old? Are we not all advancing in age? Youth is wasted on the young, as Oscar Wilde cleverly concluded. Being old should not be a curse but a celebration of experience in life and, therefore, must be embraced with respect and dignity. Just because we become old doesn’t mean our feelings are dead, as the grandfather tells his beloved grandson: “Oh, yes! I love you so terribly much!”