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

Tag: writers

  • On A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux

    On returning to the quiet joy of reading, one discovers that some stories are not only theirs but yours too. Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story was one of those stories—hers and mine.

    It was one of the days I visited my mom at the convalescent hospital for the elderly when I started reading this story, sitting by her bedside. Call it providence if you are religious or coincidence otherwise, but I wasn’t expecting it to become my story as well about my mom, who had been hospitalized since her stroke in January of this year. It was as though Ernaux was speaking to me as a daughter to daughter about her mom and mine, collapsing time and place and the cultural and social differences between us. No wonder I wanted to finish reading it at one sitting.

    This book is not of a certain literary genre. To call it a biography of her childhood and her mom’s influence on her misses the point of why it took her a year to finish the book. It’s much more than that. The absence of her mom made the author realize her mom’s place in her memory. Her mother was the first witness to Ernaux entering the world naked, and later, to her becoming the woman she is. It’s both a biological and an existential view of the author’s raison d’être. That there is no longer anyone on the other side of the first relationship, which has ended forever. It aches. It lingers. It evanesces. And before all of this will vanish into the ether, Ernaux lives to tell about the presence that was so familiar with her being that not seeing, hearing, and feeling it is painful to bear without letting it take the form of writing because writing is personal yet public, pensive but assertive, and quiet but powerful.

    I can understand the kind of ache the author felt after her mother’s death. Whether you loved her or not, you would never see her in life again. She may live in your vision of the past, but her person as a presence does not exist in this world. And that realization of forever disappearance would throw you into the abyss, stifled, blinded, and muffled—by the ineffable sorrow mixed with mystical longing.

    I think about my mom and me. What if she leaves this world soon—tomorrow, the day after, or anytime soon? Oftentimes, I wake up with indescribable terror at the thought that soon I will lose her to eternity if I breathe, like a panic attack. And it dawns on me that it is this feeling of detachment from the relationship, as the bond between mom and daughter is severed forever.

  • Paul Gauguin: With Sixpences Beneath a Visiting Moon

    The Writings of a Savage by Paul Gauguin

    With sixpences beneath a visiting moon, Gauguin could produce wonder. He was an artist in an endless pursuit of the rising sun at the dawn of a day with a flaming glory in dazzling magnificence. He was an intellectual with a wealth of knowledge drawn from a wide range of reading and classical Jesuit education. Gauguin was a man of irony, with contrasting colors reflected in the soul’s spectrum, from the passionate red to the sanguine blue, hopeful green, and melancholic purple, which is why he left Vincent Van Gogh alone in Arles, in never-ending loneliness. He craved recognition in a grand salon, yet he longed for independence on an island beneath an ancient sun. So, naturally, I wanted to know about Gauguin from his own writings, not from another in the form of a biography. Hence, The Writings of a Savage by Paul Gauguin.

    The book is an attractive compendium of mostly letters to his select few friends and, occasionally, to his wife, as well as essays and articles on the arts and religion, demonstrating Gauguin’s erudition and introspection. While reading the book, I could not help but think that if he had been a professional journalist or an art critic, his artistic talent would have basked in the glorious dawn sun rather than a struggling painter always on the verge of starvation. But most of all, what I wanted to know was if Gauguin had cut off Gogh’s ear, as I heard the rumor. Before reading this book, I had already assumed Gauguin was a man of temper because his image was incompatible with the Dutch painter’s delicate, sophisticated, and sensitive appearance and temperament. But while my prejudice was not entirely faulty, Gauguin proved himself innocent as he talked about it before his impending death away from civilization. Besides, my reading of Gauguin’s writings convinced me that he was not culpable for the injury, even if some like to assemble circumstantial rumors to make the French pariah artist appear jealous and violent toward the suffering Dutch genius. Gauguin might have been passionate, but his passion is directed toward his artistic creation of the worlds he sees in his mind, while the snobbishness of critics and bureaucrats curates the works of painters who know nothing about the arts.

    Imagination, innovation, and independence are the jewels of Gauguin’s prime colors that create his artistic Elysium. Gauguin was liberal in social stance, especially against clericalism, but sovereign in his artistic philosophy that how to draw doesn’t mean an exact copy of the figure because that’s not the purpose of art for art’s sake. As the title suggests, Gauguin was a noble savage who, as a disciple of Rousseau, returned to a primordial state of humanity to escape the over-intellectualized inertia of civilization, which depreciated and ignored his art. I still can’t say the book converted me to the cult of his paintings, which differ from those of Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro. But the book is a medium of looking through the labyrinth Gauguin has built, leading to his secret garden, wondrously vibrant and dazzlingly radiant.

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  • About Writing

    I can’t think of myself just simply vanishing into the passage of time, becoming a tribe of the forgotten. I don’t want to leave this world without a trace of my existence. That is one of the reasons why I have been submitting my work to journals and my first poetry chapbook since last May. Before, writing was my soliloquy in which I wallowed myself away from the cruel reality where God was unkind, let alone people. However, things have shifted for me. Now, it’s different. This is a time of striking hard when the iron is hot. And boy, is my iron so hot that I can’t hold it any longer.

    My first chapbook, “The Glass and the Flame,” consisting of 40 poems, was submitted to a couple of presses last week and this week. One of them required $15.00 for submission, which was quite costly considering that even if my chapbook were not selected, I would still have to pay the sum, just so the editors would read. Still, I decided it was worth it because I wanted to be famous. I want to mark my name in the aisles of bookstores from LA to Rome, to Paris, and wherever literate people live. Not vanity. Justice. My voice deserves to be heard. I write ache, loneliness, sorrow, and desire — with no shame. For whom should I feel shameful about expressing a free spirit in the language of beauty and truth? After all, even scholars have sex. No, my writing is not of Anaïs Nin. Instead, my writing follows the tradition of Anne Ernaux, Duras, and Sappho with the mind of Szymborska. Furthermore, elsewhere across the fields of desire, Plath calls for intelligent lust, which comes in the form of Eros in a purple cloak. And of course, Psyche comes in together. In the secret garden of language.

    I have received rejections from journals that tout themselves as publishers of so-called “intellectual,” “confessional,” “existential,” or “societal” poems that demand social activism. Writers are routinely defined by their social, racial, and cultural backgrounds, as if these alone drive their voices. For example, if you are a Korean-American woman from an immigrant family, you are expected to address prejudice and alienation, tinged with jingoism. The prevailing belief is that my race and gender are the only traits editors value — as if being an “exotic” woman seeking an audience is enough. God, when will they realize that, beyond differences, we share more in common?

    Maybe this is just a writer’s rant. If so, so be it. Nevertheless, I write the most universal human feelings about love and desire, about solitude and sorrow that any woman across all cultures, ages, and classes can understand. Forget the MFA writers. After all, writers do not need master’s degrees to be considered intellectuals whose work takes precedence over writers who have lived rather than studied.

    If this essay moved you, you can support my writing at Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/steph79650

  • Chasing Shadows: The Cycle of Love and Loss

    Ariadne, Dido, and Clytie—

    ancestors of the tribe called Beautiful Losers.

    Their loves were alone, half-met,

    steeped in the clandestine ache of disappointment.

    Spring meets Summer.

    Summer elopes with Fall.

    Fall yearns for Winter.

    Winter chases after Spring.

    The cycle of lovers’ tales.

    Some loves are born to be forever chasing.

    Even beauty cannot possess the souls of the beloved.

    Votives of curse are lit for Hecate.

    Still, Ariadne found herself

    in Dionysus’ arms—god of wine and pleasure.

    Dido let Aeneas touch her aching love in a cave.

    Clytie burned for Helios,

    who left her for a mortal princess.

    But I am chasing the shadow of his past,

    the ghost of a lover no longer himself—

    his eyes, the blue sky—so beautiful, so sorrowful

    they puncture my heart with helpless longing.

    I write his name on papyrus,

    seal it with the candle’s tears,

    and burn it in the quiet flame,

    calling his name within.

    The doors of time close.

    Candlelight flickers in the wind of the hour.

    Wistful images of his face—young, old—

    even those I would forget, I cannot forsake.

  • Movies Digest

    Some indulge in drinking, some gaming, but mine is binge-watching supernatural/suspense movies when I am under dark spells. Hence this past weekend, I wallowed in the below visceral world of make-believe with my cats as guardians perched next to me on both sides like Odin’s two crows, Memory and Thought.

    Vivarium (2019): This is one of the most surreal movies I have seen. Some classify this movie as Si-fi, but it is Horror because it has no hope of escaping from the cycle of repetition with no end to the movie’s end. The young couple’s hopes of finding a new home could be this sinful. I am only asking because the movie’s central theme stems from the globally realistic issue of housing problems in the context of planning and paying. And the question of conformity dominates throughout the movie. Readers familiar with the YouTube sensation of the Backroom series will find a kind of deja vu phenomenon while watching this, but this is scarier because it happens to good people.

    The New Daughter (2009): Kevin Costner plays an affectionate father who wants to bring up his two young children to the best he can as a newly divorced father. It’s refreshing to watch such a movie that portrays a loving single father caring for his children when most movies show only single mothers struggling – of course, loving, with their circumstances. Although the film does not feature my favorite ghostly characters who are purely spiritual, it can be forgiven for the sinister consequences that show no mercy to good people.

    Half Light (2008) – Demi Moore is a novelist in this movie who can’t get over the death of her beloved young son. She blames herself for him to drown to death while she is writing her new novel. The guilt-ridden mother retreats to a coastal village in Scotland, where she experiences supernatural phenomena so tangibly that it all seems too visceral to accept because of the preponderance of the awe. The lighthouse on a deserted island within such a small coastal village serves as a beacon of her spiritual guide, or could it be an alarm for the impending danger? But one thing is confident that the living must let go of the dead because once the soul leaves the body, then the soul belongs to no one, not even in the streams of love’s salty fires. If you really love them, set the departed free.

    Stephen King, whose name befits the sobriquet of King of Horror, once said that fiction is the mirror image of reality, sort of an alter ego of the real world. Horror reflects fear that hopes are only a vanity of imagination or, as Thucydides says, a dangerous daydreaming made of bodacious hubris. What if what we think of or see as real is not real but only the likeness of truth? That is Horror, which is all reflected in these movies.

  • Recollection of the Alhambra

    Alhambra (Alhambra de Granada): image credit from viator.com
    He came down from the throne of the crescent moon
    with the key to the paradise his ancestors gardened
    for eight hundred years of harmony in Saracen haven
    to the hands of the pious proud king and queen posing
    to accept it as the Christian champions emboldened
    by the surrender of the ruler of the Iberian paradise; 

    Yesterdays, yesteryears, and to the last of the time
    crept upon the waters of the palatial fountains thence
    and began to fill the heart of the sultan of the palace
    whose eyes billowed streams of nostalgia’s longings
    on his hallow cheeks and to the back of his horse
    together, leaving the fortress of a thousand memories; 

    And Fate, whose wings did he fly? Now, all’s bygone-
    Those melodies of sweet sojourns beneath visting suns
    in the neverending abundance of warmth and mirth-
    when every regret, every sorrow turned back his looks, 
    Every look shed tears in the shadow of the evening sun,
    lingering in the recollection of the Alhambra Palace.