Tommy Tiernan

On doing nothing

There is a time in your life when what’s given is enough. It’s usually when you’re small, sitting on the floor, marvelling at the carpet or a coloured wooden block. Then someone’s face, perhaps, comes into view, and it’s intoxicating. You vibrate with delight.

We know that however far and wide we travel in space, we’ll be hard pushed to find a planet as splendidly suitable and overwhelming as this one. There’s a reason we live here and not out there.

We know that no matter what we invent, no matter how great our technological advances are and they are great we’ll never invent anything as amazing as ourselves. Every time a baby is born, we give birth to the most complex thing in the universe us.

It’s not often in adulthood that we get a feeling of gratitude for what is, but I had it last Tuesday. About half-eleven in the morning. I was in the car. A feeling where this ordinary world was enough. I had just taken the turn off the motorway, toward Shannon Airport; Leonard Cohen was singing A Thousand Kisses Deep; rain was falling on the windscreen, but the clouds in the sky were light. The inter-lane hedgerows and trees were dripping with water, and, for an instant, I felt blessed to be alive, and the feeling has lasted. I’m meditating again. I went to see the latest Planet of the

Apes movie with the kids the other day, and what impressed me most about the monkeys was their ability to sit down every now and again and just stare into space. Heavy, solid sitting. I’ve seen it before on jungle documentaries; so assured and strong. Planted where they sat, breathing. We’ve lost lots of things since being ushered out of Eden, and it seems to me that perhaps because you never really know but perhaps, with consciousness, came haste. Busy, busy, busy. Trying to outrun ourselves. Oh, to be an ape. Powerful and still, in with the trees, gazing.

I came across the notion recently that we are born for stillness, the interior journey. Carl Jung, John Moriarty and a million little Buddhas might all say the same thing: look out and you see a lot, look in and you see it all.

The current theocracy of cash, capitalism, demands industry at all times, personal as well as corporate. Busy, busy, busy. It doesn’t like meditation, unless it’s being used as a tool to increase productivity. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to conform to that. It’s just not in my nature. I am, by design, a daydreamer. I believe in boredom and the unfilled hour. I like watching.

Sam Shepard was asked what it was that he liked to do when he was at home on the ranch, and he said something along the lines of, “Oh, you know, just look out the window staring at clouds”.

A man after my own heart. I wish there was a box set of clouds to watch on Netflix. I could do with a dose of it every evening before sleep. There’s too much riding and murder on TV these days. Where are the images that heal? Out your window, in all probability.

Words that heal

Where are the words that heal? Up on stage I don’t hear them coming out of my mouth, anyway. I try. Each night: go on, Tom; try and push it that way. Edge it toward the flowers. The struggle continues. The spoken word is a physical encounter, a vibration that passes from chest to chest. And every word creates a world that listener and speaker inhabit. So it’s nicer to listen to some rather than others.

They remake the experience of living; they broaden it. Every time you speak, the world is up for grabs, and those that reduce it do us no favours at all. And I’m as guilty as any gruesome, needlessly violent, gratuitously graphic death-fest on the box. All the kursing and kunting that comes out of me! Good lord. Still, when you venture under the arclight, like I do most nights, you wouldn’t be entirely in control of yourself, which perhaps is the point of it all. If it’s in you, it’ll be out. Instinctual and cheap, sometimes full of love and well witted. Aye.

I may be composed of clay, but I am also looking at the sky. Gratefully.

“I am, by nature, a daydreamer. I believe in boredom and the unfilled hour; I like watching”