Tommy Tiernan

The human zoo

Itold the father one time that I wanted to be a philosopher. I was always telling him what I wanted to be. It varied from week to week. A protestant, a professional pool player, a nurse, a phucking eejit. These were all deeply held inclinations that I had.

A protestant so that I could become a priest and still get married; a pool player because it was the only thing that I was good at; a nurse cos I love drugs and chatting; and a phucking eejit cos I wanted to be realistic too.

He took all of them all with a pinch of salt and did his best to shoot them down immediately. It felt like he was trying all the time to narrow my options until the day I’d come in and say, “I give up Dad, I give up. This whole trying to be my own person thing just isn’t working out. You’re a much better man than I am, just tell me what to do and where to do it.” Every father’s dream.

All philosophers

“We’re all philosophers, Tom,” he replied, and that was that fantasy dealt with. He went back to washing the dishes in the sink, staring out the back window and farting his way through the 1980s. I went back to wandering around the house looking for encouragement. I may have as well have been looking for cartoons in the Koran.

I had notions of going to college in Dublin, you see, to think about thinking. I’d smoke a pipe made out of my own beard and hang out with people who were made entirely out of ideas. It’s all I ever wanted to do, to figure things out.

Maybe I thought that I needed Daddy’s imprimatur to go ahead with it. I certainly needed his money. But to him, saying that I wanted to be a philosopher was as daft as saying that I wanted to be a breather or a digester. Philosophy, he wanted me to know, is unavoidable

— we’re all at it morning, noon, and night.

I’m not sure that I would been able for it anyway. Academic philosophy that is. Kant, Heidegger, Nietzsche. They all sound like ingredients you’d read on the side of a jar in Aldi to me. I’m not a man for complicated thought or the competitiveness of exams. I’m slow and obvious.

But Papa was right, we’re all philosophers, Tom, and here are the things I’ve been wondering about this week. Without imposition or behaviour, what are you? If you did nothing, accepted no code, moral or civic, what is your essence?

Without exercise, meditation, family, cannabis, whiskey, television, shopping and work, what are you?

Do other animals suffer from the option of nothingness? If this dilemma only happens to the craturs in the zoo, does that mean that us humans are in a zoo, cut off from the instinctual life, having traded our freedom for central heating and obesity?

And if we are in a zoo, who’s looking at us? Where are the bars, how do we escape?

But there’s wisdom in everything. There’s a reason things are the way they are. We are never safe from ourselves, and, you never know, but maybe modern life and culture is as good as it gets.

Chaos everywhere

Of course there are eruptions of chaos everywhere. Suicides and war, psychosis and dysfunction, but for the most part, most of the time, it’s tolerable. That is, until the chaos happens to you, then the charade of order is revealed as a pretence. A game we play to fool ourselves into thinking that the madness is under control. So be it. But what of freedom?

I don’t feel as if there’s an answer to these questions. The only wisdom that you come to understand is the futility of the investigation in the first place. I mean, it passes the time, and that’s important, but it’s not really necessary.

I think the cat is wise, sleeping on the window seat with the sun keeping him warm. I think my kids are wise, out playing ball for hours on end. And perhaps you’ll know that I am wise when, eventually, after many years of bluster and bluff, I finally shut up.

Perhaps I’ll be washing dishes in the sink, staring out the back window…

“He went back to staring out the window and farting his way through the 1980s”