Tommy Tiernan
On nudity
The curiosity of nudity. The ordinary miracle of it. To see another human being buck-naked is so mundane on one level, and so stupendous on the other. Nurses, now, would find it fairly workaday, but a nun could be left speechless by it.
Our nudity has many phases. To see the kids bouncing around the house in the nip is pleasing to the eye. A two-year-old or three-year-old traipsing, skipping and laughing in the clothes God gave them is a fleshy delight; like watching apples dance. There is a marvellously charged innocence to it, an energised wonder; ’tis pure pure like. Sprinting from room to room giggling. Goodness is a tonic, and they bubble with it. The impertinence of toddler bottoms. You get healed by holding them.
A few years later, and the air is charged with a different kind of intent. A naked teenager strolling around the place? God between us and all harm; there is unpredictability afoot. The air vibrates with danger; spirits have been summoned and they haven’t been house-trained. Their nakedness has the quality of raw poitin or uncooked carrots.
It’s around this age too, or not long after, than your nakedness becomes a crime. What once made people smile, is now an arrestable offence. You cannot stroll down the street in the prime of your pelt, because other people can be offended by it. Offended more by a man than a woman, because a naked man in public is a declaration of the possibility of the violence inherent in all male sexual activity, even in those who are psychologically incapable of a violent sexual act (a big sentence there alright; I might have to read it again). A naked woman on High St, sure who’d be threatened by that? She’d probably get applauded in some places.
Further on down the road from that again, and a naked 54-year-old man in the kitchen at breakfast is disturbing in an almost post-sexual way. This kind of nudity is traumatic to behold, it has a depressed ‘midlands psychiatric hospital’ quality to it. It is a heap of defeated but not quite broken flesh; fruit that you could eat, but really ought to put in the bin. It is to see the hymn of the human body turn into the worst kind of country music .
The body has a pungent air that only those with similarly composting soil would dare to go near. But that’s the saving grace of personhood, you know, that no matter how collapsed and heaped you might be, somebody will ride you. Someone, somewhere will look at you and say, “Yeah, that’d do me”.
And then there is the wreck of the aged. The grey, drooping tragedy of it. Seen in women, it arouses the desire to protect and shelter; in men, the urge to flee and forget. You could bloom in sympathy for a naked aul’ wan, but you’d be haunted by her unclothed husband, because he himself looks haunted.
A ghost of flesh hung upon a shake of bones. And what about the donkey kock and pendulous bells behind them? The Angelus of that humanity is not a tune you’d want to hear. The whole thing could fall to pieces in front of you.
Are we really supposed to live much beyond the age of 30? It is hard to think of any other creature that endures so long past its sell-by date. I suppose the thing to do would be: accept whatever age you’re at, and go along with the flow of it. Some old people have a gorgeous easiness to them, as if life has worn the hardness out of them, and what’s left is gentle and loving. And others are pure craw. Nothing left of them but knuckle and the hard word. And others, then, just lose the run of themselves altogether. I read recently that the highest incidence of sexually transmitted diseases in America was in retirement villages.
Is there no end to the indignity of being a human being? Does the shame just go on and on? I’m a prime candidate for that, you know, because I’ve always fancied people my own age. So if the wife and I make it in to our 90s, I could probably think of nothing more wonderful to do of a wet Wednesday afternoon in November than to strip down to our nudes and chase one another from room to room, giggling.
“You cannot stroll down the street in the prime of your pelt, because other people can be offended by it”