Roan Inish: Setting the Scene

As I said in the last post, The Secret of Roan Inish is my favorite "take heart!" movie, ever. I thought of putting a photo of little Fiona looking out the window, on my desktop, to remind me to be single-minded and childlike. (It seems to work for a lot of things. I'll get back to you on that one.)

One reason Gess and I decided to call these "movies for life" is because snippets of them play through our daily ups and downs: we find ourselves repeating lines; asking, for example, "What would Fiona do?"--and so on. So I'll set the scene for this film with an image: Fiona is patiently lighting a fire on her first trip to the island, using two flinty rocks and some twirly dry moss.

There are two movies that have tinder-lighting images in them that remind me to take heart when I am overwhelmed. One is, in fact, The Edge, though I didn't mention it, in those posts: Charles Morse builds a fire. The other is The Secret of Roan Inish.

To back up: Fiona makes several trips to the Island of the Seals, and hangs out there by herself, while her uncle and her cousin are delivering mail or setting (crab? lobster?) traps, as the case may be. Never mind that no one in the family's "set foot" on this place of bad memories since "the evacuation"; they seem willing to let the little girl knock about there for half a day or so, while they go about their business. Everyone's got a lot of nostalgia--more algia than nost, as it were--for the place, so maybe they were just waiting to be asked.

Fiona's undaunted by the state of disrepair in which she finds the three cottages. Evidently, when she was younger, she lived in one of them. She pokes around. On the second trip, she heads straight for the one that appears to be inhabited. Sure enough, there's kindling lying about, and all she has to do to build a fire is bump a couple rocks together a few times with her chubby hands. A spark flies; the tinder flares; a fire is built. She curls up for a nap, and has a vision that's more important to the plot than the fire is; however, it's the fire that sticks with me: tiny twigs burning and crisping, lighting other tiny twigs....

Perhaps it's the fact that my life seems to keep returning to 'Start,' that makes this image, and its sister image in The Edge (when the men resign themselves to their fate, and gather crisp moss to start their fire) so powerful. Nowadays, when I'm faced with startup woes, startup resistance, startup angst--I see a spark fly and a fire light. It reminds me that home fires are built one crackling twig at a time.

Tink is at work.