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

Tag: storytelling

  • Living with a Ghost: Lessons from Loneliness

    I’ve been living with a ghost since I was a child. She doesn’t speak, but sometimes I hear her in the rain tapping on the windows or in the whisper of leaves rustling in the wind. When I gaze at the stars at night, she leans in and murmurs, You are alone. You are meant to be alone.

    Loneliness — that is her name. And she is the only one who has stayed with me all this time. I suspect she doesn’t like it when I make friends or feel happy. That’s when I stop listening to her and try to cast her out, like an evil spirit haunting me. But she seems to like my cats, Toro and Camille. Perhaps it’s because cats, too, are solitary and spiritual creatures.

    Come to think of it, some people don’t like cats — as if there’s virtue in disliking them. But many writers have lived with feline companions. Edgar Allan Poe once said his cat, Catterina, was his muse. Lucy Maud Montgomery was also a devoted cat lover.

    Loneliness doesn’t have to be your enemy. If you get to know her, she can help you notice the quiet details of life that others overlook or take for granted. In those everyday little things, you may find beauty — and a quiet joy in simply being alive to witness them.

    Ready to say hello to loneliness?

  • Laboratory Conditions (2017) – short film

    Some believe in ghosts, a few see spirits, and many deny souls. How odd that this digital age is when it is, in fact, a kind of spectral age in which Alexa with no face exists without being seen!

    Laboratory Conditions is an engaging cinematic short story about a doctor who puts heart before reason. She also has a brilliant mind, but it’s not corrupted but cherished in her faith in the human spirit. It is an odd combination of sentiment and reason seen in someone like her, or so she may seem. Or is she so? Humans are dualistic and ambivalent anyway, so I can’t say she’s all good, but at least she is sensible and sympathetic.

    Her opposite is the head of medical searchers of the hospital by which she is employed, and she is the only Reason with a face despaired of humanity. She measures human worth by status and thinks those found on the low rungs of the social ladders are unworthy of decent treatment. A modern-day eugenist is on a par with a god deciding who will live or not. She is amoral and negates the existence of human souls, or is she deluded to believe so? Anyway, she doesn’t care about it, an iota. Or has she sold her soul to the devil?

    The film is about 17 minutes long and can be watched on YouTube. It also stars a surprisingly famous cast, such as Marissa Tomei and Minnie Driver, who are excellently cast to play the fitting roles. I have read the comments, an electric mix of kudos to the doctor’s humanity and criticism of her cruelty. But they are all missing the real evil wrapped in a human’s guise among the faces.

  • Prompt 206 on mind boggling

    What bothers you and why?

    I am bothered by people and their hypocrisy. Injustice, Avarice, Cruelty, and Ignorance. A lack of charity and understanding. Weakness to all that glitters, power to all that pleads. Aristoteles said we can’t live alone unless we are beasts or gods. But I tell you, humans are angels and demons, the children of Janus with two faces of light and darkness.

    People can move heaven and earth, making a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, so much so that we can make a criminal of an innocent man like a human sacrifice to idols or false deities. For example, I watched a Netflix documentary about Henry Lee Lucas on Friday. He was known as a “Confession Killer,” who claimed to have murdered 600 victims all over the U.S. But did he kill them all? He killed his mother for sure because she was atrociously violent toward her son, beating his head so severely that the portion of his frontal lobe was permanently damaged, let alone his right eyeball that burst out, which was later replaced by a false prosthetic eye. Lucas was said to have an IQ of 87, but he could read, write, speak clearly, and draw quite beautifully. It was his social IQ that put him on a pedestal of the mentally inept.

    While watching the documentary, I could not help but think that Lucas was a victim of circumstances and prejudices. He was coerced into confessing falsely to the killings that he had not committed because the sheriff under whose custody Lucas was fatherly to him with warmth and kindness that he had seldom received. It was painful to see Lucas pleading not guilty to the falsely confessed murders through the cell in front of the hordes of reporters and camerapersons as if he were a freak in the circus. He was crying, and even if he might have lied, you could not/should not bear false witness.

    Nevertheless, those who chanted vehement epithets with no mercy but spite for the murders that he had not committed did not apologize to him as if doing it would be an immoral thing to do. And people continue to be merciless to those lowly in social status or need care out of collective neglect. We champion human rights, equality, and justice while doing the opposite things to those who need the championed values. It’s sickening, and that is what bothers me.

  • prompt 109 from my autobiography

    You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?

    It could have been better. They should have known better. God should have been kinder. All this could have happened if I knew how to stop the wheel of fortune played blindfolded by the Sisters of the Fates, cheered and hooted by the spirits wandering between the worlds, not knowing they are long dead. So, how can it be solely my fault for the life I have lived without knowing about my life? How can you be so quick to label me as a negative loser harping on the unseen that no one wants to hear? My name is written on the water, and my spirit is flitting on the clouds in the azure sky, still longing for life because living is far better than dying. It could have been a beautiful life.

  • prompt 103

    Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?

    The Accused 😅

    Breaking the law springs up a grim faced judge with a wig with a gavel prone to sentence: “Death by hanging.” But no one is immaculately clean, and to err is a human. I broke the following laws, but I am not a hypocrite, as supported by Robert Frost: “Far more violence has been done in obeying the law than in breaking the law.”

    1. Diatary Law – I enacted this law on the first day of 2024 to return to the disciplined dieting I used to keep five years ago. I broke the sections of eating after 6:00 pm, indulging in carb-enriched food articles at home, and consuming a load of junk food. Now that my doctor has ordered me to lose weight until a follow-up visit in three months, I shall abide by the law in full force and effect.

    2. Law of Affirmation – I have violated all of the sections of the law: Imagination, Visualization, and Manifestation, all of which unintentionally – and intentionally. It is unintentional because when things do not go well as I expect them to or life seems unkind to me, my eyes become blind, my ears mute, and my head blank. I become comatose, thus violating the law. Intentional in the sense that when I am lost of all, including the will to live, the law seems needless, just as I am not here.

    The consequences of the violation come not in they do a single spy but in a battalion. Health risks, such as high cholesterol and diabetes, may be foreseeable. Mental health will be put in critical care if they do not adhere to the above laws. Give me a month as a corrective period, and I will reinvent myself.

  • prompt 102

    If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?

    Wandering Ghost without face

    A ghost wandering with the streams of sorrow’s salt fire billowed on her glass heart, shattered, changed forever, has no face because she knows not what face she has. She sees it beautiful, yet severe, bright but dark. No one wants to see her, and everyone decides to ignore her. She has become invisible, and by and by, she loses her face and thus becomes invisible as people want her to be. Just like her star losing the brightness of the fire, her spirit loses the luster of light. Alas, never to acquaint joy, footless to wander evermore.