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.
( The constant burden of making sense. )
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.
( The constant burden of making sense. )
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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