High and Low

Yesterday was unexpectedly productive. Finished my last film from last week, Kuroshawa's High and Low, an intriguing crime flick about a police team chasing a kidnapper. The story goes that the kidnapper had snatched the son of a millionaire's chauffeur, thinking that the boy was the millionaire's son. After discovering the mistake, he still demands the ransom, and the millionaire spends one agonising night and day wondering about whether he should save his chauffeur's son. In the end, he pays the ransom, in the process ruining himself.

The deviousness of the kidnapper's plot, the craftiness of the situation, reminds me of Michael Mann's Heat. Certainly, there is a similar examination of how the cop, innocent bystander and kidnapper all descend into their own versions of depravity, whether in the pursuit of good or evil. How else to account for the kidnapper's perverse delight at his own mistake, when he thinks that the millionaire will inadvertently murder the child by refusing to pay a ransom for someone else's kid? Or how the millionaire careens wildly between furious refusal to furnish the ransom and stoic resignation to losing his money for no rhyme or reason? Or how the cop allows the kidnapper to murder a drug addict as part of his plan to make him receive the death sentence for a kidnapping, which would otherwise have only warranted jail time?

All this is set amongst the scaffolding of Japanese social conventions, and so we see dramatic eruptions of grief, and equally agonising feats of unnatural self-control. It all contributes to making the waters even murkier, and so one is not sure what each character is motivated by. Indeed, at the end of the movie, when the condemned kidnapper meets with the millionaire in the prison, the feeling that one comes away with is that fundamentally, the happenings were the product of a whim, and not a directed sort of malice. The kidnapper tries to put on a face of bravado, trying to efface any possibility of reading his trembling as regret or fear; but in the end, he is dragged from the cell amidst blood-curdling screams and writhing with superhuman violence. If there is any meaning behind the crime, it is lost amidst the wild cries of the condemned.

*

After that, went down to town to run some errands, splashing my way through a thunderstorm that loomed ponderously overhead and broke just as I stepped out of the door. Spent a good few hours wandering around Sim Lim Square, and discovered that the deals really do get better as you go up the building. On the sixth floor, after two hours of scouting, found precisely what I was looking for: a components seller who was offering 160GB of storage for a bit over 50 cents a gigabyte. It's amazing that, nowadays, we can talk of enough memory to hold whole libraries of books as being worth about half a canned drink. But after all, memory is cheap; comprehension is the valuable bit.

Dropped off the movies at the National Library, with a mind to borrow The Iliad there. It's the required reading for the first classes at Columbia, and I'm told that Columbia's alumni has bought a copy for all new students. But seeing how long it took to get single-page documents out of the US, I doubt it would reach in time. And yet, among all the versions that the National Library holds, it doesn't have the Lattimore translation. So, instead of taking home the book that inspired the movie Troy, I found a commentary on Lattimore's translation instead. Spent an hour reading the introduction of that commentary; for someone who has up to now shied away from literature originating before the 16th century, it was useful to have some pointers about literary and social conventions on the classical Greek period.

In the end, of course, it becomes clear that The Iliad isn't really a historical account but a dramatic poem. Indeed, what the writer (it could be that "Homer" actually refers to a club of writers rather than one man, apparently) was more interested to preserve were not the historical facts, but the sensation of having lived in and borne witness to deeds and times of extraordinary import. And as such, what had sounded to me to be an archaic sort of philosophical study is actually closer to literature (though that is not to say that literature doesn't also offer a gateway to, or indeed carry in itself, a bit of philosophy).

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Incidentally, discovered that our recent upgrade to the Starhub set-top box has made the History Channel available to us, and watched a documentary on the structure of the Universe on Sunday night. It seems that, with the theory on dark matter and dark energy, the Universe itself is organised along postmodernist lines. How else does one interpret the presence of a separate kind of substance, more massive than all the stuff in the universe combined, and yet almost completely imperceptible to us? How does one interpret the existence of a sort of force that originates from vacuum, as it becomes clear that the emptiness itself pushes matter apart, and in the process creates more emptiness which then increases the repulsive effect?

It seems, therefore, that the Universe is condemned to expand at a runaway rate, and the little islands of normal matter that we exist on will become hopelessly isolated amidst a hostile void that, far from being a dispassionate onlooker, is itself complicit in sealing our isolation. One of the scientists quoted Frost's Fire and Ice; and it seems that the world will, actually, end in ice after all.

*

And last night, on the verge of falling asleep, I pondered on the date - and suddenly realised that I was missing one week. Or rather, the last week had passed in such a haze of monochrome celluloid, good conversations and fantastic food that I, having had no need to keep track of the time, had lost track of the date. And so, like suddenly discovering that one has reached the end of the book with nothing but a cliffhanger, I realised with a jolt that on Sunday, I will not be in the country anymore.

I guess I should mention something about the Vietnam trip now. As it turns out, Joel, KHwee and I are actually going to do that trip that we had talked about on and off since the Army days - or at least, we would be doing part of it. For, due to scheduling constraints, our grand two-week sojourn of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia has been truncated to a four-day stay in Saigon, which I hope is enough time to get to know the city a bit. We have plane tickets and accommodation; all that there is left to do now is to change some US dollars and Vietnamese Dong, and to pack the backpack once again.

And so, one more trip before August, which, now that I look at it, is really very close. Suddenly, for the first time since finishing my internship at URA, I feel like I'm short of time. It is a sobering thought. Nonetheless, one last backpacking stint, then, but this time with company. I have to admit that, thinking of Penang and Borneo, I am a bit wary of traveling with company. On the one hand, I should really be looking forward to this, because these are good people and great friends that I am going with. But on the other hand, I also realise that great friends may not make good travelmates, and that very few people actually look for the same things as I do when I travel, and precisely because they are great friends, I don't wish that something that may happen on the trip may come to spoil the status quo.

But then again, such self-conscious double-thought is in itself toxic to our friendship. Part of why it has grown to be so good, why it has lasted so long, is precisely because we throw it headlong into ridiculous risks, so confident are we in its longevity.

Aaanyway. Was applying for the overseas notification as per NS regulations, and thought that I may as well also apply for the exit permit and disruption of NS for my studies. That basically means that I won't be called up for reservist duty for the next four years, lest they catch me in the middle of exams or, heaven forbid, having fun in New York. But going through the website applying for the permit, and reading all the caveats, warnings and legal threats, it makes me feel as if I owe it to them to stay in Singapore, that it is in fact very selfish of me to be pursuing my education elsewhere, so that I won't be here to defend the nation for the next four years. Indeed, it feels as if I had loaned my own body from the government. How's that for patriotism, eh?

But the deed is done, and so, theoretically, I am my own man for the next four years. Which, as it turns out, is just about to start.