Читать книгу Notes from a Coma - Mike McCormack - Страница 11

GERARD FALLON

The altar boy from hell?—yes, I remember that. Don’t ask me who put it on him but from what I remember it was on him the first day he came to this school. The funny thing about it is that he never really was an altar boy. That day he went on fire and was nearly destroyed—that was his last day ever in a church as far as I know. But that’s how it is in a small town like this, an incident like that can mark you in more ways than one.

I’d say in thirty years of teaching JJ O’Malley was the brightest young fella I’ve ever come across; the brightest by some distance. This school’s never had a student with his abilities across the whole curriculum—our very own genius. Of course we’d seen those exam results of his and marvelled at them but it was one thing seeing them and another thing entirely coming face to face with the lad himself. There was nothing he wasn’t good at, no subject he wasn’t better at than any of his peers. Maths, physics, geography, literature, you name it, there was nothing he couldn’t turn his mind to. He flew through any exam he ever sat without breaking sweat: brains to burn as they say.

But of course not everything interested him. The science subjects, maths, physics, chemistry—he had little enough interest in anything built on formulas or that argued towards definite conclusions. It was the discursive ones that drew him out and got him excited. English, history, religious instruction, civics—anything that led to argument and debate and multiple interpretation—that’s where he was in his element. And of course he was the bookish sort too who liked flourishing big jawbreakers of words. Ontological for instance— you won’t hear too many fifteen-year-olds coming out with that one. No, nor secondary school civics teachers either. I remember going to the dictionary for that one and I remember as well being none the wiser after I found it.

“There is an ontological and ethical priority established in the first paragraph,” JJ repeated nervously.

“I’ll take your word for it, JJ. But could you render that into plain English for the rest of us?”

He leaned forward on his elbows then, his hands clasped on the desk. This was a bad sign; JJ was about to get up on one of his hobby horses. If past form was anything to go by the class would pass in a blizzard of words and ideas and most of it would be lost on everyone around him. Still though, it was always worth seeing JJ vexed with the world and in full flow.

“The problem is that the constitution contradicts itself in the preamble, the opening paragraph. It recognises not itself but God as the Supreme Authority, the source of all laws including itself. The phrase . . .”

“I don’t see the problem, JJ. The constitution is the bedrock of civil law in this country, just as it is in liberal democracies the world over.”

“No, it is not and that is exactly the point. God is the foundation of civil law in this country.”

He was clasping his hands under the table now to stop himself trembling. You could see he loved these discussions but you could see also that he was almost afraid of himself. He told me once he suffered from a kind of mind-racing— what he called his mindrot meditations. Sometimes ideas would come to him in the middle of the night and keep him awake till all hours, chasing after them to wherever they led him—up blind alleys and down dead ends as he put it himself. This sounded like one of them.

“Granted so that is the case, JJ. Go on. You’re coming to the crux of your argument.”

“Supposing someone was to stand up here in this classroom or somewhere else and claim that he was God and that he had evidence to prove that this was indeed the case. Then there would be a problem.”

“Only if he disagreed with some article of the constitution.”

“Exactly, suppose he did disagree. Suppose he woke up one morning vexed for some reason or hung-over from a feed of drink and he said give me another look at that constitution. So he reads through the whole thing and somewhere along the way, it doesn’t matter where, he says stall the digger this has to be changed, I can’t stand over this. So he takes out a pen and strikes through an article and rewrites it. Now in that case there wouldn’t be a thing anyone could do about it, it’s his constitution as it says itself. It wouldn’t even have to go to the people.”¹

“JJ, if God were to appear here in the half-parish of Kilgeever He would have more things on his mind than amending the constitution. And as for sinking pints up in Thornton’s . . . ”

The class collapsed in guffaws.

“Spirits would be His drink, wouldn’t it, sir?” someone called from the back of the class. “Top shelf.”

“No,” someone else said. “Wine would be His drink, wouldn’t it, sir, that cheap Italian stuff? Or that stuff monks brew in monasteries. I’d say you couldn’t keep it drawn to Him if He got started.”

JJ looked down at his desk. I waited for the laughter to die down.

“JJ, if God were to sit down and rewrite the constitution there wouldn’t be a problem. By definition God is all good and virtuous so anything He wrote would be on the side of good, both private and public, and hence unarguable. It would be interesting, however, to find out just how near or far our constitution diverged from the Divine Law. De Valera would be interested; he’d be up out of his grave in a shot.”

“There wouldn’t be a problem if God was true to your definition of Him . . . ”

“You don’t accept the definition? God is God, JJ.”

“I’ll go along with it for the sake of argument. The real problem arises if there is no God. Supposing someone was to stand up with definite proof that He did not exist—then the arse and foundation would fall out of the whole thing. All laws in this country would be groundless. No one would be bound by them any more.”

“That doesn’t follow. In that situation all we would be left with was the law of the land without divine source.”

“No, this is an interim constitution. It is predicated on God’s existence. It gets its authority from God and is directed towards God: it begins and ends in God. Now if God is absent then it collapses and has to be written again. We’d have to start from the beginning.”

“Interim or not, JJ, it has served the country since 1937 . . . ”

“With twenty-eight amendments.”

“OK, twenty-eight amendments. That doesn’t discredit it. Constitutional amendment is part of an evolving democracy. Even if I accept your argument the onus is still on you to prove that God does not exist and that is where you’re stuck.”

JJ shook his head. “My point is that there is a denial of intellectual conscience in the constitution. The opening sentence, article six, it runs right through the whole document. The faithless are blackballed from the off and that is a denial of the very freedom and dignity it purports to uphold. It does not legislate for the faithless. Under its own terms they are quite literally unconstitutional or, to use Cearbhall O’Dalaigh’s phrase, repugnant to the constitution. They can hardly be classed as citizens.”

The bell went and the rest of the class began gathering up their books. Not for the first time they’d found themselves lost in the wake of JJ’s reasoning. I needed a breath of fresh air myself.

“Time out, JJ,” I said. “We’ll continue this another day. Is this another of these mindrot meditations?”

“It was just an idea,” he said, “just an idea I had.”

“I’m impressed. You don’t believe in God or the constitution?”

“It’s not that I don’t believe in them, it’s just that I have no faith in them.” His face brightened suddenly. “Suppose . . . ”

I opened the door. “No, JJ. Suppose and suppose and suppose. Some other day.”

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