Living my life as if my head ain't a complete sieve
I am spending the weekend in the pursuit of niece-care, which is day-consuming but not bad at all. My arm which I injured a couple of days ago (no idea what caused it, but I couldn't carry anything heavier than a mug of water or wear anything I had to pull over my head) is healing and I can fortunately still pick her up with the other one, which maintains an important part of our relationship. Yesterday was sheets and sheets of rain that furrowed up on either side of the car like a boat-wake after we picked her up from school; today was autumn sunshine until the evening's thunderstorm which slapped the windows with bits of twigs and leaves. Have some photographs which feature other people and things.
A rather impressive branch which had politely not fallen into my parents' house. I javelined it off the back of the yard into the ravine.
My father photographed this gorgeous sky when we were walking around the reservoir.
I photographed this beautiful fungus.
Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie: my godchild and their rescue box turtle, Mr. Slow, here depicted in his fetching new tea cozy.
The latest movie I have watched with my niece is John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), a film I love to the point of stupidity and have ever since it played the Lexington Flick when I was thirteen: its braided stories, its seals and seagulls, its ledges and gong buoys and limewash and seaweed soup. I always forget that John Lynch's Tadhg Coneelly appears in only two scenes, because he fixed himself at once for me as the film's key, the most liminal of its storytellers, whose contribution to the family history that the ten-year-old protagonist finds herself piecing together reaches back the farthest into time and folklore, into the days when the birds and the seals made room for the first Coneellys on Roan Inish and one of them stole a selkie's skin and even her heart for the length of six children and yet as always in the end she returned to her skin and the sea, leaving only the dark-haired, sea-dreaming strain of her blood in her human descendants, the "dark ones" like Tadhg himself who tells this story while gutting fish, never taking his eyes off the thin, fair-haired cousin watching him somberly and fearlessly in turn, scared off by neither his daft reputation nor his poet's words nor his own sea-changes of temper and humor. He's the one who crucially identifies the seals after whom the island is named as "just . . . another branch of the family," on whose behalf he seems to be speaking when he welcomes her formally at the close of his tale: "Welcome back, Fiona Coneelly. We've been waiting." (There is a strain of this film in more than one story of mine, including something I have been writing for years. I had not rewatched it in more than a decade; I had not realized.) "Poor fellow doesn't know if he's wide awake or dreaming," we hear of him, not unsympathetically but perhaps missing the point. "He's a troubled soul . . . as if he's caught between earth and water," at which my niece said in confident disagreement, "He's a selkie." He is surely the next best thing, shape-shifting, sea-talking. I love the sight of him pushing up his sleeves, catching a fish bare-handed in the open ocean. With his long dark brows and his thick black hair, he's as beautiful as the seal-wife he's a throwback to, which is only fair since her human form is played by his sister, Susan Lynch. His world of dreams come to waking life is the one the rest of the Coneellys will have to enter if things are going to come out right between the sea-side and the land-side of the family. I was banking that my niece would like this film when I gave her a DVD of it for her unbirthday, but it was especially gratifying when she didn't even want to leave it to go to bed last night. Then she asked a lot of questions about the different sides of her family. She was glad to hear that one of them was Irish. It afforded the possibility of seals.
A rather impressive branch which had politely not fallen into my parents' house. I javelined it off the back of the yard into the ravine.
My father photographed this gorgeous sky when we were walking around the reservoir.
I photographed this beautiful fungus.
Courtesy of
selkie: my godchild and their rescue box turtle, Mr. Slow, here depicted in his fetching new tea cozy.The latest movie I have watched with my niece is John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), a film I love to the point of stupidity and have ever since it played the Lexington Flick when I was thirteen: its braided stories, its seals and seagulls, its ledges and gong buoys and limewash and seaweed soup. I always forget that John Lynch's Tadhg Coneelly appears in only two scenes, because he fixed himself at once for me as the film's key, the most liminal of its storytellers, whose contribution to the family history that the ten-year-old protagonist finds herself piecing together reaches back the farthest into time and folklore, into the days when the birds and the seals made room for the first Coneellys on Roan Inish and one of them stole a selkie's skin and even her heart for the length of six children and yet as always in the end she returned to her skin and the sea, leaving only the dark-haired, sea-dreaming strain of her blood in her human descendants, the "dark ones" like Tadhg himself who tells this story while gutting fish, never taking his eyes off the thin, fair-haired cousin watching him somberly and fearlessly in turn, scared off by neither his daft reputation nor his poet's words nor his own sea-changes of temper and humor. He's the one who crucially identifies the seals after whom the island is named as "just . . . another branch of the family," on whose behalf he seems to be speaking when he welcomes her formally at the close of his tale: "Welcome back, Fiona Coneelly. We've been waiting." (There is a strain of this film in more than one story of mine, including something I have been writing for years. I had not rewatched it in more than a decade; I had not realized.) "Poor fellow doesn't know if he's wide awake or dreaming," we hear of him, not unsympathetically but perhaps missing the point. "He's a troubled soul . . . as if he's caught between earth and water," at which my niece said in confident disagreement, "He's a selkie." He is surely the next best thing, shape-shifting, sea-talking. I love the sight of him pushing up his sleeves, catching a fish bare-handed in the open ocean. With his long dark brows and his thick black hair, he's as beautiful as the seal-wife he's a throwback to, which is only fair since her human form is played by his sister, Susan Lynch. His world of dreams come to waking life is the one the rest of the Coneellys will have to enter if things are going to come out right between the sea-side and the land-side of the family. I was banking that my niece would like this film when I gave her a DVD of it for her unbirthday, but it was especially gratifying when she didn't even want to leave it to go to bed last night. Then she asked a lot of questions about the different sides of her family. She was glad to hear that one of them was Irish. It afforded the possibility of seals.
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I'm not a selkie, but having made recent reconnections with a part of my family, I'm coming to believe I may be a changeling!
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I am glad to bring a beautiful fungus into your life!
I'm not a selkie, but having made recent reconnections with a part of my family, I'm coming to believe I may be a changeling!
That's fair.
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It worked for me!
The version of Roan Inish currently streaming on Kanopy, by the way, is last year's digital restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive which turns out to have hosted a retrospective of his films at just about the last minute it would have been possible in 2020, which I couldn't have attended no matter what on account of geography, but I still resent the foreclosed possibility that the program might have traveled to the Brattle or the HFA or somewhere else I could have taken advantage of it. I never have seen more than this one film of his in theaters. (And it stuck.)
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I also am surprised to learn that John Lynch was only in two scenes. I don't think we ever saw it but twice. We could have been in the Flick with you for all we know, and then once on a rented video, but I remember the line you quoted, and the expression on his face when he said it. He is presumably more famous for his role in "In the name of the Father," but this was the one I would pick if someone were only having one.
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That's wonderful. Our one trip to Ireland in 2004, we were mostly in the south and the west.
We could have been in the Flick with you for all we know, and then once on a rented video, but I remember the line you quoted, and the expression on his face when he said it. He is presumably more famous for his role in "In the name of the Father," but this was the one I would pick if someone were only having one.
I have seen him in surprisingly little considering how much I like him, but Tadhg alone would do it.
JL - fun with the IMDb
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I keep meaning to see that. I have seen the 1949 film and the 1987 television film but never this one. I read the book so early, I can't remember the first time.
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Yay.
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I remain glad the javelin wasn’t intrusive.
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One diaspora knows another.
I remain glad the javelin wasn’t intrusive.
Same. There are a lot of last things we need, but a window smashed in my niece's room would have been low on the list.
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Very important.
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That my niece might carry the genetic drift of a selkie. The film made that much of an impression on her. This afternoon, she was making sure that the DVD I had given her was exactly the same as the version on TV.
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Selkies in the Goldene Medine? I don't think we can call it a possibility.
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Thinking about selkies, it's surprising there's not a parallel set of domestic legends for bears*, given all the bear analogies about male humans and the whole baersark thing
* well, there's Goldilocks, I suppose.
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It really looks like a small tree that got lost.
Thinking about selkies, it's surprising there's not a parallel set of domestic legends for bears
Seconding the fairy tales mentioned by
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In trying to source something I remembered in this line, I just discovered there's a statue of "Agnete and the Merman"!
But I do love that movie, and its quiet acknowledgement of the liminality that is a central feature of this world and how we interact with it, whether we recognize it or not.
It's a true thing.
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I have never seen that movie, but now I want to.
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My godchild's coinage!
I have never seen that movie, but now I want to.
I very highly recommend it. Insofar as I ever make lists, it is among my top sea-movies. I believe it to have been my first John Sayles, too.
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And these are a great array of photos! I love the angle of your godchild's eye in that photo--bewitching and foxlike!
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He makes it look effortless, too, which is the best thing.
And very nice that this character and the original selkie are played by siblings.
Even if you don't know it—I can't imagine that I did the first time I saw the film—the resemblance echoes. You can see the seal-line.
I'm glad your niece loves the film too.
I am thinking her next sea-movie should be Tomm Moore's Song of the Sea (2014), where she will now recognize the selkie folklore.
And these are a great array of photos! I love the angle of your godchild's eye in that photo--bewitching and foxlike!
They are something of a shape-changer themselves.
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You have the very best aunt-and-niece and godmother-and-godchild relationships.
Nine
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Earth and sky reflecting.
You have the very best aunt-and-niece and godmother-and-godchild relationships.
I have very good kids to have relationships with.