I WANT to buy an island.

Okay, I'm back from checking my bank-account balance, and I'll revise the above statement: I want to buy a patch of land to build a mansion/ beach house/shed (delete where unaffordable) on any godforsaken island.

My craving for freehold land ownership started a few weeks ago. I think my desire has something to do with visiting Bethany, physician and feminist Nalla Tan's former home in Binjai Park, to view an art exhibition held there, six days before her family vacated it for good and the place was demolished. Dr Tan, now 88, suffers from Alzheimer's disease.

I love my flat, but it has dawned on me that, after the lease runs out in about 90 years, my poor descendants will have the unenviable task of carting the junk I accumulated - in a lifetime of shopping addiction and sentimental, pack-rack tendencies - out its door.

But the thing is, I don't want them to.

Of late, I have realised that much of literary and cinematic culture is preoccupied with figuring out the black hole of memory that most people's mothers inevitably become.

There's Please Look After Mom, South Korean author Shin Kyung Sook's latest novel, which has been critically acclaimed since its United States publication this year.

In it, a mother gets lost at a Seoul train station. Her four adult children try to find her frantically, realising guiltily how little they really know of her in the process.

Then, there's South Korean director Lee Chang Dong's award-winning Poetry (2010), a film focusing on the secret inner life of a mother and grandmother in her 60s, and her quest for some beauty in a bleak situation. But by the film's end, she has literally disappeared, rendered invisible by those who make demands on, yet ignore, her.

Last week, the Singapore Art Museum screened a double bill of Singapore director Royston Tan's 2002 short film Mother, and United States director Jonathan Caouette's 2003 documentary Tarnation.

I had convinced my elder son Julian, five, to let me leave the house to watch it by saying it was "very boring", and that it'd be awful for him to have to sit through it (a trick that works, without fail).

It turns out that I was right in a way I didn't imagine. New York-based actor-director Caouette's film is a blend of old home movies, a PowerPoint presentation of painful family history, confession and psychotherapy sessions.

Focusing mainly on his relationship with his mentally ill mother, Renee, Tarnation is an obsessive account of a son trying to find out about a mother who has, sadly, become forever unknowable, because of her lithium- damaged brain.

Similarly, Tan's Mother uses found footage of random families, with a Mandarin voice-over narrating a son's regret for neglecting his mother, ending with the lament that he "could no longer see" her.

The idea of this invisible mother - there, but not there - intrigues me. Why this constant fascination with the mum who can no longer be reached?

It indicates, partly, the spoilt, self-entitled attitude of the young, who insist that none of the secrets of the woman who bore them can be off-limits to them. Say what you want about psychoanalysts ala Freud and Lacan, but their dated theories must still be valid, given how possessive grown children can be about their mothers even today.

This brings me back to my point about owning a bit of earth. It is so that, when I am dead and gone, there will still be a place to store my belongings.

And if my children decide that they want to sift through my stuff to get to grips with me, it'd all be there.

Narcissistic? Maybe. But if they go on to make a great work of mother-related art, they'd thank me.

clarac@sph.com.sg

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