A Style of Heart

I like the dawn best here. After night has sucked up the radiant heat of the earth, the air creaking with the sounds of frogs and insects like the music of an old wood stove pinging as it cools, morning comes in colours of chrome and gold and slides through air smoky from the fires of burning refuse in the cities and the rice husks lying in blackened piles in the fields under t-shirt scarecrows, smouldering. (‘Indonesia: land of tiny fires,’ Jon says). The drive to the airport is quiet; even the road seems dimly populated like a cathedral before Holy Mass. The faithful worship seated on Japanese scooters decaled in horrible splashes of pinks, yellows, and blues, their engines thrumming like prayers. The rope-limbed, fruit-leather men belching along with utility carts welded to their ancient motorcycles’ frames, out early like robins on the lawn, seeking strips of metal, earthworms of rusted rebar to pull from the ground and sell for a handful of coins. The Muslim school girls in ugly uniforms like troops of Brownies, their heads covered in soft white cloth, which fails utterly to hide their beauty and only sets it up like a jewel on a cushion when they toss their heads back and laugh open-throttled and skimming the asphalt road like Joy itself. Still like photographs, the farmers stand reflected in the waters of flooded rice fields, woven cone hats like seashells on their heads, watching the road rush by. Palm trees spread green wings to greet the rising sun, lit up with the colours of ripe mango fruit, floating up from the fields like phoenixes on the glow of dawn. The world uncurls again, yawning, stretching, alive like creation on the first day and blinking, with only the scars of yesterday to give such unbelievable innocence the lie.

*

We fly the inland route to Meulaboh, averting our eyes from the damaged coast out of boredom now, rather than horror. Destruction is like Evil – a flashy opening act and then mind-numbingly dull. Creation is far more interesting. Life is always more thrilling than death, despite all the lurid entertainments produced to enthrall us to a different opinion. The news, when I make the mistake of paying it any attention, is full of journalistic grumbling about the paucity of results after so much money was given to rebuild this place. The news, as usual, is particularly focused on the uninteresting. Houses are being built. It’s just that it’s mostly the Acehnese themselves who are building them. On their own, even (gasp!) without our help, the way grass grows up through concrete. Drive by, fly over, and look a little: houses made of old boards pop up overnight on old foundations cleared of rubble, a spontaneous re-population of the littered scene, people splashing about in the piles of broken bricks and dead palm trees. Look further than the TV or you’ll miss the art of creation.

*

I look out the window the airplane and watch the brown river undulate like the ribbon of a dancer through the carpet of untouched jungle to tease the edge of the world. The sun gets caught momentarily in each of the broken-mirror fragments of rice-paddy water below before shaking itself free and skimming again across the unreflecting earth. I am thinking of the line I just read in my book: ‘For us, the living, the problem is of a totally different order: how to harness time in the cultivation of a style of heart – something like that …’ A style of heart. Scott writes and says that I beat myself up too much, but this is why. I do want to love, even help, in the end. I want to be kind, merciful, humble, wise. I want to cultivate that style of heart, and sometimes you must use fists to crack your own crusted habits, the tunnel of your own narrow vision. The world is bigger than that, and Life, and God. You must break the ground. You must really look at things.