Tommy Tiernan

The battle with the self

It runs in the blood, this philosophising. Tiernans can often be found staring vacantly into space — our family crest is a question mark. My father once asked me if he was passing through time, or if time was passing through him. He was looking out the window in the kitchen. I was only a child; I didn’t know the answer.

I said, “It’s 10 to eight”, and left the room immediately, and decided that it was probably psychologically safer to hang with Mother for the evening. It wasn’t. She was enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke in the sitting room, talking to Gail Tilsley from Coronation Street.

“These people are my only friends, Tom,” she said, pointing at the TV. I got out of there fairly rapidly, too.

Anyway, is effortless transformation possible? I’ve never really been capable of trying too hard. I got a report card home from school once, which said, “Tommy has obviously decided that the Irish education system has nothing to offer him”.

I was 12. I must have been an awful pain in the hole to deal with. I appeared, to all intents and purposes, to be intelligent, so how come I was failing all my exams? When my headmaster was handing me my Inter Cert results, he said, “I hope this teaches you a lesson.” I replied, “Au contraire, Dr Murphy. I hope it teaches you a lesson. I have no interest in this,” and I turned on my heels and casually strolled out of the school.

Well, maybe it didn’t happen exactly like that, but the jist of it is true, and when I rerun it in my head, that’s what happens.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking today about effort and transformation. What I wonder about is metamorphosis. Not the slow change of getting older. What I’m after is the caterpillar-into-butterfly miracle. Enlightenment; the Kingdom of God. Metamorphosis from self-obsessed, self-serving individual, into gentle, loving dote.

Joining the priesthood

What are the odds? Slim, unfortunately, but not impossible, thankfully. Is it too much to hope for? Well, I’ve always been an extremist. My father once called me a martyr without a cause. I think it was because I was refusing to do my homework because of apartheid. How was I supposed to concentrate on the intricacies of glacier formation while Nelson Mandela was still in jail? It’s a wonder I got out of bed in the mornings at all with the worry of it. Funny, I didn’t think about him too much during the summer holidays, but there you go.

I remember the time I nearly joined the priesthood. I went off to the Cluain Mhuire Redemptorist Centre on retreat. Some kindly monk showed me to my cell. A single bed, a chair and a Bible were all that were in it. Well, I nearly swooned with the austerity of it! ’Twas pure drama. “This is all you need, boy; now start praying.”

I didn’t last too long, in fairness. I got talking to another lad, he was about 19 years of age, with rosy-red cheeks and black hair. He told me that he had a special devotion to Our Lady — he kind of looked like her. I got the immediate feeling that I was in the wrong hotel. If he’d have said Sade, I would have stayed. They also wanted me to repeat my Leaving Cert in order to go to college and get a degree in theology. Too much work for me, I’m afraid — and anyway, didn’t the Lord himself hang out with thick phuckers?

Transformation has more to do with letting things go than with picking things up. I’ve never been really good at ‘trying’, and any time that I do, I always screw it up. Evolution is effortless.

Real human development has more to do with release than with grab. We must stop looking for constant entertainment, and have the courage to walk through what initially appears to be the badlands of boredom, but is, in fact, the Garden of Eden...

I tried to get rid of one of the TVs in the house recently, and my 11-year-old daughter leapt up from the couch and, with more passion and conviction than I’ve seen for a long time, declared, “No, absolutely not. Tell him he can go live in a tree if he wants, but he’s not taking our TV away!”

So the quest for me is to try to find a room in the house with no entertainment possibilities, and live there. A panic room for Dad, to help him be like Jesus.

Alas, you cannot win a battle with the self, you’re just giving it more power by fighting it. It’d be like trying to get your reflection to stop looking at you. What you can do, though, is walk away from the mirror.

I’ll be in the toilet under the stairs…