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

Tag: write

  • law of inertia

    According to Newton’s law of motion, inertia refers to a condition when a mass of an object determines a resistance to change. The bigger a thing is, the harder it is to be moved. What a splendid discovery when such truth has always existed! That is a difference between someone like Newton and other mortals who have seen it but cared more or less about it. The gist of my proposition is that inertia fits the state of my mind at present; the more I exert my cognitive facilities on articulating my thoughts, the harder they seem to operate the abilities with all their souls, with all their hearts, and with all their might.

    Today I looked into the statistics of my blog posts, realizing my literary fruits were turning sour with the leaves of the knowledge of tree desiccated in the arid land of pitiful ignorance. T.S. Eliot must have felt the same when he yeared for a benevolent pool of knowledge on the barren land of his mind, which is hardly likely to think about because – well, for what he is. No matter how much I try to use a craft of writing that I used to possess until three months ago, I realize the powers are gone with the wind to the ether and then to the blackest black hole in the universe. The words become weightless, and the images are as bleak as the Persian night. It’s like being in the middle of an adumbrating labyrinth with Ariadne’s ball thread missing or forfeited by whimsical divinity. Nothing scintillates, nothing promises, not even with a bluebird that used to guide me into avenues of hope. So whereas I still delve into reading voraciously, the words are flushed into a great abyss of darkness, a slough of despond, leaving me weeping and then crying alone. I wonder if this state of inertia can also be related to the dark night of the soul that St. John of the Cross experienced before his spiritual epiphany. Or I can identify the feeling to the sudden listlessness of Albert Speer, the mild-mannered, brilliant Hitler’s architect friend, during his long-term incarceration in the Spandau prison after the fall of the Third Reich.

    I have always professed to write for the sake of my sanity, the justice to myself with a tenacious grasp on a sense of purpose that I am not going to disappear without a trace of my existence on earth. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Lucy Maud Montgomery all endured the vicissitudes of life in dealing with the demands of daily life while cherishing their literary ambition and endeavoring to prove themselves as gorgeous writers whose credo was allegiance to truth and nature, using the ideal to make the real perfect and kind that God forgot to bestow upon them. They are my spiritual sisters whom I daresay can relate to due to my circumstances and kindred disposition.

    I write not to canvass celebrities for being a top-rated blogger. But then I want people to know that I write however imperfectly or abstrusely. I write because I like it, just as people like to take their selfies and post them on Instagram or make vlogs on YouTube. So while the cold receptions still vex me to my publishing of writing in my blog, my spirit resists giving it all up, which rebels against the law of inertia. Come to think of it, the witch in training Kiki in ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ laments about her suddenly losing the ability to fly her broomstick as she stumbled into a vertigo of existentialist distress, part of growing pain before blossoming into a wonderful full-pledged witch. Maybe I am going through the same thing, too. I like to think that way.

  • Samuel Johnson Rambles on the practicality of knowledge – essay

    Ignorance is the timorous and indolent plight from fear because knowledge is considered to be remotely extensive and inscrutable to be comprehended. It retards the progress of the mind and numbs the sense. Samuel Johnson avers in his weekly essay ‘The Rambler, No. 137’ avers that one remains unenlightened unless he is diligent to search for the origin of wonder with a pause of reason, a sudden cessation of mental progress when confronting the unknown to him. The need for general knowledge, the knowledge that confers Citizenship of the World, is an essential element of human characteristics, and an easy task to fulfill in search of meaning in life.

    Johnson’s idea of knowledge is simplicity. It is jettisoned from a concatenation of needless abstrusely sophisticated theories and ideologies. It also chimes the bell with the Renaissance virtuoso Leonard da Vinci’s adage that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication in all principles. However intimidating or formidable the unknown is, the essential feature is simple to understand by way of ‘Divide and Conquer,” a principle that complication is a confederacy of the abstruse that can be broken into parts marked by the gradations from the first agent to the last consequence. The force that breaks the shackle of fear for conquering the unknown huddle is patient diligence armored in confidence. The labor of inquiry for wonder follows natural curiosity and confidence that eclipses the soul’s darkness. It comes to fruition by ceaseless efforts to ascertain the origin of the wonder in simple ways. The English philosopher who also advocated democratic pedagogy, John Locke, affirms that the surest way of thorough comprehension knowledge is to attempt little by way of repetition. For the widest excursions of the mind result from short flights of mental imagery and instant thoughts triggered by neurons fired in our cerebral cortex, which can be transformed into an organization of ideas firmly engraved in the mind.

    However, knowledge loses its purpose if it dissipates into the possessor’s cerebral ether or is locked in the mind’s cabinet. It becomes useful and purposeful when put into practice. That is why Johnson gives heed to those who pride themselves in the impressive educational backgrounds and belittle others whose mental capacities they arbitrarily judge ignorable or even ordinary. Knowledge is for share, and it is a duty of a scholar who has a wider variety of knowledge through years of academic endeavors for the common benefits of the world he lives in. As Francis Bacon fittingly concurs, books can never teach the use of books. Generally speaking, it is common for intellectuals, despite their ostensible calls for democracy and justice for all, to live out of touch with the practical realities of life and often regard such matters as trifles. But what is worthy of their glorious learning if it does not accommodate the purpose of life? Johnson criticizes such lofty arrogance of the rarified subset of the general population because they lose their days in unsocial silence and live in the crowd of life without a touch of humanity. It also reminds me of Bacon’s utterance of loneliness in a group as such: “Magna Civitas, Magna solitudo.” In this regard, George Orwell is together with Johnson because they saw the educated’s superciliousness, the intellectuals, who often conferred their knowledge to their honor in the voluntary seclusion.

    Upon reading Johnson’s essay, I could not help but wholeheartedly agree with the purpose of knowledge and the idea of sharing it with others for the world’s common good. I was also glad to learn that I was not the only one who thought that people with academic credentials were frequently dismissive of the opinions of what they regarded as the mortals of the ordinary among whom I am. Therefore, I hope that the reader who reads this essay of mine should not belittle the soul attempting to obtain the sunshine of the light of letters to understand the world in a perspicuous way to declare to the world that I also can think and express it cogently. That is my essay on knowledge for the purpose of life.