A love story and a "hipster" bike
1. A Hardened Heart Does Not Obey God
Rijula and I walk to the hardware store, she in heels and red lipstick. It’s a hot summer afternoon.
“My bike lock is jammed and I need to cut my bike free,” I tell three people in turn. Each of them passes me on to another, more helpful person standing behind. It is like a matryoshka doll of help. I envy them all. Part of me wants to quit everything I am doing and work in a hardware megastore.
The most helpful man leads me to an aisle of heavy-duty cutting implements. When I tell him what kind of lock it is, he winces.
“That’ll be a tough one,” he says. This is something he helps people with all the time. He seems to be an expert on cutting away bike locks.
“The best would be these.” He gestures to a $90, metre-long pair of bolt cutters.
“Those are quite big,” I say. “I don’t really want to buy those.” Maybe he imagines my bike is fancy and fast and nice. It isn’t. I am 35 years old and I rattle through the city on a rusting bike I bought for $200. Nobody would want to steal it. The brakes barely work. I don’t love my bike enough to buy the $90 industrial bolt cutters my brain has already rounded up to $100. He can tell.
“These would be your next option,” he says. He turns to a shelf of smaller, snazzier wire choppers. Beneath this pair of $45 super strength ones is a $30 pair of not-so-bad looking ones.
I buy the $30 loppers and Rijula and I are off again, back into the sun. We cut through the church parking lot and back in the direction of the lowly bike. We have just been to a talk about love. How do we write about love? And why bother? Love, everyone agreed, is something that can’t be trusted. More often than not, love is thrust on the unsuspecting and suffered through. Now everyone I see on the street seems intensely connected by this fragility.
Rijula’s heels clack on the concrete. Our conversation shifts erratically across topics: whether we will look like criminals when we liberate my bike; how Rijula is drowning under the heft of editing a book she has written and no longer loves; my own intermittent heart, which has been trying and failing to fall out of love.
“I have white-lady privilege. So people won’t assume I’m stealing it. It will look like the bike is mine.” I swing the choppers loosely beside me, enjoying the weight of them.
“I’m not white but I have bright red lipstick on. So, I think nobody will look at us. And you have glasses. You will look trustworthy.”
Rijula thinks I am naïve. All people cheat. This is inevitable, she says. But she tries to sandwich the positive into her criticism: “You are so good at being in love with unavailable women. It impresses me so much that you have this capacity to love someone in this way.”
I disagree.
Rijula repeats that it is inevitable. “If you have this feeling with someone, either it will fizzle away and die, or something will happen. You will sleep together. These are the options. I think, why should you let something fizzle away? You should explore it.”
I tell Rijula about my fears and concerns. My belief that the truth will always emerge and can never be hidden. That, as a rule, I don’t sleep with people who are sleeping with other people.
I am afraid of being caught on the street on a Sunday afternoon stealing a bike that is already mine. Afraid of being caught out carrying my own misplaced affections. Of coveting. One of the commandments most easily broken. And an interesting one.
Most sins are actions.
A crime is the combination of action and intent: Mens rea, actus reus. You must have both to make it a crime in law. But the biblical commandment against coveting is a commandment against the heart. Against desire. It is the one commandment amongst the 10 that has no performative action - actus reus - to violate it.
Question: "What are the causes and solutions for a hardened heart?"
Answer: To better understand the causes and solutions for a hardened heart, it’s important to understand the broad biblical meaning of the word 'heart'.
The Bible considers the heart to be the hub of human personality, producing the things we would ordinarily ascribe to the 'mind'. For example, Scripture informs us that grief (John 14:1); desires (Matthew 5:28); joy (Ephesians 5:19); understanding (Isaiah 6:10; Matthew 13:15); thoughts and reasoning (Genesis 6:5; Hebrews 4:12; Mark 2:8); and, most importantly, faith and belief (Hebrews 3:12; Romans 10:10; Mark 11:23) are all products of the heart.
We arrive at my bike, still locked in its place outside the Lido café. A couple sits at an outdoor table, watching us. I hand Rijula the loppers and try my bike lock one last time. It remains stuck. Mostly this attempt is a just a piece of theatre for the people watching.
“Where do I cut?” She swings her studded handbag behind one shoulder and noses her way at the wire, ready to sever it. The young French waitress who served us emerges from the Lido and squints at us.
“Ladies, are you OK?”
I smile and explain. Rijula says nothing, focused and determined, glaring at my cable lock, so eager to chop it in two.
The problem is that I don’t love her. And what good or use is that to anyone?
Hardening is a term I use in my work. Hardening is what happens when you review the attack surface of IT equipment or an IT system and find ways to make that surface smaller. You close unnecessary ports so that communications can’t pass over them. You remove default passwords and replace them with long, strong, complicated ones. You prevent the escalation of privileges. You set up firewalls and implement routing rules.
For a long time, I thought of this word as a verb to describe the hardening of systems - as if they were rocks or substances that could become impermeable. Then I read that hardening is really the process of making it harder for an attacker to get in. Read this way, the word hardening describes the experience of the intruder, not the properties and qualities of the device you are defending. What an ambiguity. But of course, something can’t be objectively hard. It’s hard in relation to the thing it presses hard against.
Rijula squeezes on the loppers and bites her lower lip. I hold the cable still and glare in satisfaction. Slowly we twist and examine it; the threaded wires are coming apart. For a moment it hangs on by a small strand of residual wire.
“That’s it.” I say. “That’s really working. I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“So easy!” says Rijula. The lock falls away. We are both satisfied for a moment.
“It’s a weapon. You can carry this with you everywhere now.” Rijula is swinging the heavy wire choppers above her head in exhilaration.
“I could steal a better bike,” I add, looking around as though one might present itself. A man passes by us and smiles. The couple at the café table carry on with their conversation, unmoved.
The moment over, I begin to push my bike up the street alongside Rijula as she walks to the bus stop.
- A Hardened Heart Remains Hardened Even under Severe Pain
I have a sort-of girlfriend. On the first day we discuss the problem I push my bike up the hill in a sweat and arrive at her house. She is in the sun, hanging her laundry and angry at me. I am a ball of sweat and nursing a hangover. The first thing I do is throw down my red bike helmet and fall dramatically onto the lawn, where I lay still and face down for a moment, expecting a kind of empty sympathy. Late. Hungover. Unable to function. I have ruined the day. There is no sympathy. She glares past the pegs toward the horizon, her lips tight as a zip. It smells of grass and cherry blossoms and linen. I can’t make her laugh, lying here on the ground groaning. And it’s not that I mean, then, to end things with her. I don’t intend to. I want to hear her laugh in that little, guttural giggle she sometimes does. But the problem is that I don’t love her. And what good or use is that to anyone? Once I start to discuss this point there is no way of stopping the words from falling out.
I pull small chunks of lawn from the ground, thinking if only she would laugh at something I have said and let me off the hook. All I tell her is that I don’t feel the feeling. That I am sorry. That I am confused. We agree to end it. She cries. I say I am sorry and I am. I stand around in confusion. I push my bike home, the Wellington street so high and so steep that I am too afraid to ride down it. I feel monstrous in my big green jacket.
The second time we discuss it is in her steamy car after a movie. We are friends. I tell her everything this time. I can’t love her because I think I love someone else. Nothing has happened between this other person and I, but it’s dishonourable for me to be with anyone at all at the moment. With the engine off, the car is getting colder. The windows fog with our breath. I begin to shake with cold. Can we keep sleeping together, she suggests? Without love?
We try this.
It does not go well.
The third time we talk about it is on the couch at her house. I lie down and put my feet against her thigh. She sits at a square angle to me, her hair down and eyes red. She is beautiful. Pressing hard at trying to gauge why it is that no matter how funny, or smart, or beautiful she is, I have still betrayed her. In summary, she does not want to see me again. In summary, I am awful. In summary, she pities the position I am in and hopes I will recover. The mistake I make is thinking that all the pain is exclusively hers. She has the licence on pain. I have the licence on guilt.
In the weeks after this I cycle around the city dwelling on my human badness. The truth is I am tired of psychology and good behaviour. I talk to my friends about it.
One says: “You love unavailable women because they have already rejected you. This is just a form of self-preservation because you are afraid of being rejected.”
“Of course it is.” I say. “Of course!”
Another says: “You pretend you don’t enjoy drama, but you quietly do. You are playing with fire. You cut very close to the edge of it.”
I disagree.
I run into my now ex-girlfriend on the street, in my gym clothes. Over my clothes is a winter coat. I am wearing pink running shoes. The bus is late.
“What are you doing here?”
She is at a book launch. She gestures in that direction and my eyes follow her hand. This is the point when we might discuss our continued shared interests and form a semblance of friendship. But we don’t. The bus arrives. I don’t hear from her again after that, except to return some books she once lent me. When late one night, after seeing her in the crowd at a show, I send a message asking how she is, she replies with the cruellest and hardest response: nothing other than a link to the Caly Rae Jepsen song Let’s Be Friends. It is so cold I am viscerally shocked. But what did you expect? All this time we believe we are hardening ourselves when we are also participating in an arms race of the heart: each heart hardening another in turn.
- A Hardened Heart Blames the Messenger Instead of Recognising Its Condition
Rijula sees me through the window of a bookstore as she is passing by on a bus. She sends me a message: “Nodding vigorously in book launches with a book under your armpit suits you well.”
“Why won’t you come in!” I reply. But it is already too late and the bus has turned a corner.
I look up from my phone and see the now-ex-girlfriend sipping wine on the other side of the room. While I am walking in her direction I run into another acquaintance.
“So nice to see you! Last time I saw you, you were expecting a baby!” I say. My one eye is still looking over her shoulder and past her.
“Yes. And I’ve had it. And now I am separated.”
“I’m sorry.” I say, my focus pulled. And I am. Not because there is anything I can do or say. Only because I know that this small sentence, waiting at the back of her mouth, felt like a loaded gun before she said it. We stand in the residue and the ricochet of it. Startled.
- A Hardened Heart Does Not Recognise Its Chaos
One Friday morning I pull into the green cycleway box next to a man in full cycle gear.
“Where did you get your bike?” he asks me.
“On TradeMe. Couple of hundred bucks, but she does the trick.” I smile at him.
“It’s a very good-looking bike!” and then, mercifully, the lights turn green and he is off.
When I first got my bike, friends made comments like “everyone I know who cycles in Wellington has had an accident”. An accident feels inevitable. But I keep getting on the bike. It’s not a good-looking bike. It is rusty and blue and it greases up my jeans. I once told a girl I was dating that I rode a hipster bike. I said it was chipper and blue and quaint. We walked from a bar to the place where my bike was parked, and she looked at it and laughed.
“It’s not hipster … it’s just … old …” she said.
I kissed her in the doorway outside her work and broke up with her a week later. Not because she’d offended me about my bike, but because I knew from the tone of her voice, and from how she looked away from me when talking, that she was still in love with someone else.
Far away from the prospect of guilt or offence, I research my predicament with deep intellectual vigour by listening to podcast interpretations of the book of Exodus
Just as I am entering the deepest state of my infatuation with the woman who is with someone else, the Covid-19 pandemic sends the whole country home. I am locked away for six weeks – kept well apart from the person I believe myself to be in love with. Far away from the prospect of guilt or offence, I research my predicament with deep intellectual vigour by listening to podcast interpretations of the book of Exodus. I blast whole sermons into my ears. I listen to religious call-in shows with cheerful pastors and disciplined rabbis. I dwell on the story of the plague. I lay still and alone on the carpet in my bedroom, stationary between my chest of drawers and my bed, and I look at the ceiling and photographs of locusts. I message her.
Are you awake? What are you doing?
Then comes the leap in my heart and her suggestive ellipses.
...
Sometimes I am without will.
There is a lot of debate surrounding the hardened heart. In the story of Exodus, the central biblical myth of the Pentateuch, Moses begs Pharaoh to let the Israelites free from Egypt. According to scripture, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and he will not be persuaded to change his position and free the people: "And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments” (Exodus 7:3-4)
A rational reader must pause to ask, why are we blaming Pharaoh here? If it was God who hardened his heart all along, how is Pharaoh – whose villainy is central to the whole origin myth of the book of Exodus – morally responsible for his actions? The hardened heart is not a conscious choice but instead, a narrative inevitability for Pharaoh. It is forced upon him so that God can use Pharaoh’s stubborn antics as a narrative device to facilitate God’s own performance of great judgments.
But some biblical scholars less inclined to narrative theory have another argument: Even as the 10 plagues harass the people of Egypt (water turning to blood, frogs, lice, flies, sick livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, killing of firstborn) Pharaoh denies Moses’ requests.
Over and over again.
See, Pharaoh is repeatedly presented with an opportunity to repent, but his heart is hardened to the people’s pleas and he refuses at every chance he gets.
We might say that most of The Bible’s heroes are tested and they pass, but the villain, Pharaoh, is tested by God, and he fails miserably. According to this interpretation, we must remain constantly alert to the possibility that we are being presented with a choice. In life, opportunities to display the human tenets of goodness and a softened, empathetic heart will present themselves one bloody river after another. It is not God or fate that dictates how we respond. We have the capacity to make our own choices. Pharaoh’s failure sits in his inability to pay close scrutiny to the choices presented to him, and his failure to soften his heart through his own capacity to show empathy, curiosity, and respect.
The hardened heart, then, is central to debates about what it means to simultaneously exercise the muscles of faith in God, and belief in free will. The hardened heart is a manifestation of the Judeo-Christian complexity of simultaneously holding two inconsistent beliefs at once: first, that God is all powerful and all-knowing and has a plan for you, and second that you have free will and agency to determine how you act in the world.
So, I am entertaining the concept that I can sustain two mental positions at once: the first is embodied by my agency to make choices about how I act in relation to the people I choose to love. The second is that love happens to us. Without consent. Without agency. Without agreement. With a sensation of fate that feels outside all control. Love, on this latter count, is chaos – a totally unpredictable latching on to somebody else.
- The Hardened Heart May Even Say the Right Words
But before then, in the summer before lockdown - after my Carly Rae Jepsen breakup - she and I went to a bar and drank and talked all night. Her partner was out of town. It was an uncommonly still and warm night when we said goodbye, standing beside our mutual bikes. We hugged on the empty street, I smelled the beer on her breath as she put her nose to my neck. Her hand brushed mine in an invitation. The crossing lights changed to green, then red, and to green again. But we are good people and have already decided how to behave on nights like this. I said goodbye and cycled home, head thunking. I careened through the Mount Vic tunnel, past the blasts and hoots, my own heart blasting.
I rolled through the quiet Hataitai village shops - past the 24-hour bakery with its bell dinging as the doors swung open. My tawdry red bike light blinked, reflecting off the glass from the shop windows and strobing like my desperate, pulsating, breathless affection.
I plowed up the final hill, making silly deals with the universe:
If I can make it to the top of this hill without stopping everything will be fine.
If I can make it to the top of this hill, somehow the bargain with the universe is that I can go on loving her without hurt or complication, in total innocence and with no need for redemption. This is the way the thinking brain begs for an end to free will. This is how we attempt to relinquish moral obligation. We harden by closing every possibility that we might have a choice in how we relate to the people around us. Stop movement and time. Plug up the moving parts and make everything always already determined.
One night we went to dinner. I left her hand on my leg under the table all night.
I love you. She texted later.
Though seemingly nothing could be done about it.
What they don’t tell you is that it’s not just one small choice you make and can be done with. The choices just keep coming. I know it’s grandiose to say Pharaoh was sent not one plague but 10, but what is The Bible except an exploration of human predicaments expressed as mythical narratives of an individual‘s unique endurance through a series of seemingly fruitless trials? One love begets another. One son, another. This is how to escape, I think, the notion that we are hardened. Instead, we are moving. We are pitching, swishing, pedalling uphill – knowing the daily exercise of choice is the softest way to be. An accident is inevitable, as is heartbreak. Fiona's essay was commissioned by Wellington writer Rijula Das, who is curating ReadingRoom all week. Tomorrow: Catherine Robertson on the pleasures of middlebrow fiction for women.
