Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

- Janet Fitch, “White Oleander“

I finally saw “While Oleander” the film on Sunday evening. I had read the novel a few years back (in fact I think I have a copy of it on my bookshelves somewhere) and was rather moved by the story. At it’s core, it is a story about individual identity and human connections woven in a narrative about the human struggle under less than perfect life-conditions. The film unfortunately didn’t rise sufficiently to the challenge, in my view. The prose in the book, as I recall, was lyrical, intricate and full of evocative passages that somehow didn’t quite translate in the film.

The one central theme running through “White Oleader” is loneliness. I was reminded while watching it of another film that had better expounded the idea of loneliness - it was “Damage” which featured Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche. Now that was sublime. I’ve watched it twice, once on the big screen, and on both occassions I was completely mesmerised. The almost zen-like atmospherics of the film hooked my heart and soul and I spiralled, along with the characters, as they descended into the final tragedy that was to be the price to pay for making that illusive human connection.

Which brings me to today’s newspapers, or rather the news of the recent days/weeks - the murder of Noritta Samsudin. I don’t really want to comment on it except to make the following point - the adultery doesn’t bother me at all, and of course, neither does the sodomy, but I’m quite enraged that a man who is in a long-term relationship (marriage) with children should be so reckless and irresponsible as to NOT use condoms while having sex with other partners. I would have been furious if I were his wife - nevermind the adultery, but the risk which he ran by not using condoms was just reckless, stupid and completely unacceptable for someone who is educated and who presumbly had access to information about AIDS and other sexually trasmittable diseases.

But then perhaps, he wasn’t educated “properly”. Maybe Malaysians are just not capable of thinking with universally accepted moral logic. Perhaps they can only be motivated through emotions alone, specifically, with fear. Perhaps if someone had taught him when he was younger that he would be caned 24 times if he had unprotected sex, he would have thought twice. Perhaps to assume that he would have stopped and thought that unprotected sex outside of a long-term partnership was risky-behaviour was expecting too much. Perhaps Malaysians are just incapable of distinguishing between universally accepted right and wrong behaviour, and that any logic that did not involve personal fear was just too presumptuous of our abilities.

p/s somebody save me - I spent the lunch hour drooling over a printed Tupperware catalogue!!!

Posted on June 1st, 2004 by jl
Filed under: Notable: Personal