The Orange of Sunshine and Blood

[ with thanks to John Shaw Neilson for 'The Orange Tree']

Blue cranes, blue wrens, green days and cherries. I had been reading John Shaw Neilson, singer of the colours. His poems were full of the sort of things I saw around the farm. More than dull gum trees and twiggy straw. He had grown up on a block which I imagined was like mine. I had planted a thousand trees on the block. I had tried to get all sorts of fruiting plants to grow. His lines were observations of the same Victorian bush landscapes as mine. Where his quintessential eternity of fruition had become poems, I had dreamed of finding that special fruit.

When I first went up there I thought I'd be able to get any thing to grow. I dreamed of tropical fruit like date palms, avocadoes and mangoes. In the first winter even the passionfruit died. So I fixed on growing citrus as the ultimate attainable ambition. Limes froze. Oranges turned black. Grapefruit died. Only the lemons survived with dwarfed shoots and stiff cold-pruned leaves. They produced browned-off stunted flowers which turned into misbegotten lemons which dropped off while they were still green. The citrus were a dead loss. They were more bitter than bitterness for me. I kept trying. In wind screens. Under glass. On northern aspects. Those made my worst seven years. I failed. Had fallen in shame. Drawn in ironies. I had once given up becoming an environmental consultant to 'nurture the earth' myself. I had to go back to a primary school of weather. Bitter climes took the edge off what I thought was an all-weather dream.

I had seen the weather girl on TV on the first of June announce: "Today is the first day of winter". And I thought God no! Who does she think she is? The siren of the official season? Pretty little autumn gone? I didn't want to be reminded of winter. It annoyed me that the weather girl sat in her air-conditioned studio on plush suede couches and looked down in all friendliness at a camera, with artificial spotlights on her makeup, and told me it was winter! Oh! how I envied that monumental ersatz!

The only thing I resented more than a fact which belied my senses was a fact which belied my hopes. The last thing I needed was an early winter. June One was sunny. Every day of June had been sunny so far! It proved how wrong they were! That it was winter was an official lie! I was damned if I'd hear that lie. I knew winter was imminent and I didn't need to be goaded into believing it! I had seen too many of my trees blackened by frost. Winter kept killing dreams on which I had based my life!

I knew by then that nature made its own calendars. She had no politics and no pretty green theories. Autumn often kept on until the midyear solstice. The last years the autumn leaves on the miles of oaks in the Avenue of Honour planted in memory of war veterans in Hillanook had hung on yellow, red and brown right through until July. So what if the sunny days started white with frost? The rains and clouds of winter had not begun!

But I'd gotten down. I was sick of the bush. The native forest was drab and the world had lost all sense of brightness and colour in my eyes. The gumleaves hung like shabby pennants. Thick flaps of downward flags the shape of long teardrops. They put me in a sense of being in a never-falling shower of khaki drizzle, like we get up there for the winter half year. Drooping, drooping, the indifference of the bush had put a droop in me. I could hardly bear to look up from my work, because the bush was all the horizon I had to envision.

I had to get out of there that morning. I woke early, scraped the ice off the windscreen and left for a day in Melbourne. As I drove I recited my favourite Shaw Neilson poem: The Orange Tree.
"The young girl stood beside me. I
Saw not what her young eyes could see:
-A light, she said, not of the sky
Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.

I had been working with my neighbour Hans, building his sandstone house, while living in a kit shed myself. We had just finished preparing and pouring the concrete slab in those cold blue days. We would even rock up to lay reinforcing mesh in the frost. The pressed iron hut we camped in was lonely. I had only got to see people and cheer myself up with a bit of local colour when I drove past the highschool kids waiting for the bus along the five gravel miles in to Hillanook for milk, 'The Age' newspaper or some nails.

-Is it I said, of east or west?
The heartbeat of a luminous boy
Who with his faltering flute confessed
Only the edges of his joy?

I believed so much in planting trees that I got thingo. Possessive. I became uptight about it. I started making rules about how they had to be planted, watered, sheltered. I knew I knew how best. I was a sixty acre tyrant on my home ground. Sally left me two years ago. I just about had a seizure of self-righteousness. She couldn't hack the hardships I said. But that day I was glad to get out of the gluey clay and off the ochrey building site myself. I longed to be somewhere where every footstep was free of glug. I could break my own rules with impunity! I was driving for a flight, so full of expectation that I found myself getting to be elated as I came off the range. I think that I dreamed of being in love again.

Was he, I said, borne of the blue
In a mad escapade of Spring
Ere he could make a fond adieu
To his love in the blossoming?

The sky ahead of me was cloudless. The sun rose up over the Pretty Sally ridges to the east. Blossoming! The day was warm and friendly. Murray Greys in green paddocks mooched happily into the cocksfoot grass. Packing on beef. Two magpies dived and banked in the clear air above the highway, dropping into the sugargums. What a day it was!

I was going at a hundred Ks on humming wheels. I was going to see crowds in the Victoria market, see lights and differences and colours. I wanted to sit in a warm cinema and be transported into the make believe of "The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen". I hoped to catch up with Julie, a tutor at the Uni. I'd always had a soft spot for her.

-Listen! the young girl said. There calls
No voice, no music beats on me:
But it is almost sound: it falls
This evening on the Orange Tree.

The lines were like a drug to me. They made me feel wonderful even though I didn't understand exactly what she was talking about. The ute whistled wind songs as she flew along. Down in the distance the city towers rose to view through a low mist, angular, but in a soft screen, like lyrical glass castles in a child's picture storybook.

I had been so keen to escape the city once. There, I had been in a sort of neurotic state where I saw everything around me, as if it was a battle of demoniac spirits against humanity. Quelling my need to be fruitful. I used to walk around, only seeing the evil, in a spectral world of polished slabs of granite, verticals of marble, cloisters of mirrorglass through which bought people looked down at the hoi polloi.

I had had a chance of being one of the city bought people. But that being seemed to exist on video to me. I felt like a ghost who only had existence when the acetate I was in had light beamed through it onto the big screen of daily commerce. Unreal. I saw myself in a bought life that starved my soul. I saw myself as a power-being who only caught up with themself when somebody caught me out picking my nose in the executive lift. I saw the city full of anorexic people like me whose skin was a prop which held me up to the world. The fruits of power are green! People jostle and hurry, like I did, to be a part of an existence that they took to be quite normal in spiritual darkness. The force of that daily vision had nearly overwhelmed me. I had left to go up country. I wanted more for myself.

-Does he, I said, so fear the Spring
Ere the white sap too far can climb?
See in the full gold evening
All happenings of the olden time?

The dawn had been alight with a thin rind of apricot around the horizon. Then, far in the distance, the blue banks of the Dandenongs raised receding arms of beckoning up veiled valleys towards where the orange sun rose. The world seemed so wide and open to me. I was free. Travelling. Going to arrive somewhere wonderful.

When the highway turned into a freeway I began to feel at one with the people commuting in to the city. Cars in front of me, behind me, beside me, were, for me, all part of the celebration of that day. I guessed Mr Toyota was going to a meeting. Chairman Opal was going to clinch a deal. Mrs Holden was going shopping. Everything seemed purposeful and good to me. The flyover bridged across the valley below, where I saw market gardeners out on the Maribyrnong river flats, tending good greens for the people. I crossed the viaduct over the river. Everything flowed together.

Is he so goaded by the green?
Does the compulsion of the dew
Make him unknowable but keen
Asking with beauty of the blue?

The wind rustled in the ute's roof-gutters. A jumbo jet flashed silvery against the sun as it took off for an overseas destination from Tullamarine airport. I was coming down from the cold mountains, rolling out into civilisation on to the Port Phillip Plain. Ready for a rich experience. I imagined nothing that could ruffle my day. The vehicle-wind brush-stroked the roadside foliage.

A man is sane as long as he feels free to act within the bounds of his own self-corrections. How long did I have to argue to convince myself that I was satisfactory? But was I still sane when the attraction of innocence made me vulnerable to whimsical obsessions? My obsession for real fruit scared me. That poem had gotten in to the very core of what my life hunger was.
-Listen! the young girl said. For all
Your hapless talk you fail to see
There is a light, a step, a call
This evening on the Orange Tree.

I saw myself as the man in the poem. What was the step that I was failing to take -to see through this haplessness? Hapless? This was morning, not evening. I was okay. Yearning yes. My life was routine. Hapless meant... not happening? What did hapless mean?

I looked at the way the light was falling on the autumn leaves in Strathmore. I was reminded of the house I grew up in. I could see my mother as she used to be when she was at her best, out in her garden. She'd look up through the russet orange and yellow leaves with a saw in her hand to where a treetop had been broken by a storm and quote St Paul lovingly: 'All things work together for good to those who love God'. And she cut the broken branch away.

Her view of the world was simple. Be open, honest, and always think the best of people. Mind you she loved a good prune in the garden. Hacking, it was. She used the space to plant something new.
-Is it, I said, a waste of love
Imperishably old in pain,
Moving as an affrighted dove
Under the sunlight or the rain?

Outside Julie's house the leaves on the overhanging elm all rattling with a shake of wind. Yellow leaves confettiing, billowing up on the eddies of traffic. No ones wedding. The knock I gave the door bought out a twentysomething woman in her Japanese house gown.

"Julie?" I said.

"Yeh?"

"Looking for Julie," I repeated

"Julie's in Sydney. She's gone for a year on a staff exchange plan."

"Howard Jammer?" I said.

"Wanda. She never mentioned no Howard no."

The leaves all shaking so much I found myself looking up from the defended threshhold into the swirl. This Wanda noticed the water in my eyes but said nothing. I felt too embarrassed to stay.

"Say hello then," I said from the gate.

Browsers Bookshop! I needed inspiration. The film didn't start till the evening. So I walked across Carlton toying with an old thread that hung loose from my sloppy-joe. I had wanted to get hold of a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden' to stimulate some optimism in my life. He made something of a row of beans. I could browse through the natural history books and read some poetry for a few hours.

Is it a fluttering heart that gave
Too willingly and was reviled?
Is it the stammering at a grave
The last word of a little child?

How could I be called hapless? I was a landowner. I was building a house! My life carried weight. I was making things happen. The bookshop was one of my favourite places in Melbourne. Two floors of an old terrace house with works of literature, history, ideas; books from all around the world which could transport me to other places. The shop was closed. A sign on the door read: 'Due to a death in the business...'

I rebounded away from the bookshop with all the force of my attraction. I had fallen into closed doors. I stopped on the kerb, wondering what I was doing. I scratched my head and looked about me in a daze. I found myself jaywalking across tramtracks, heading for a little park. I sat like the morning homeless on a bench seat in the sun. Escape to the Uni Library was only a block away.

The dictionary said. 'Hapless: luckless, unfortunate, unlucky.' Unfortunate indeed? 'For all your hapless talk you fail to see' Was that me? I turned out of there and walked back towards the ute. I would go down to the Yarra River bank. I wanted an eternal, reliable, destination. How could I see what I fail to see? Luckless talk! Books that I've read and blind? As I drove I had a great sense of darkness come over me. I felt a heaviness in my eyes. A weight was balling up and rising in my belly.

I drove southwards towards the city. I glanced over my left shoulder as I passed a mirror building to see the ute reflected obtusely in the glass. What if my whole way of seeing was warped? I turned east onto Victoria Street to take the city bypass. I moved into the rightmost of four lanes, following an old cream round-cabined Bedford truck.

My right index finger tapped on the steering wheel, like it was pointing out my need for light to give me definition, to put full stops into the chaos of my belly. I felt that my eyes were looking backwards into myself, and searching sideways for what I didn't know.

On the very back of the truck was a single row of waxed cardboard cartons containing oranges. The cartons were higgled apart on the buckled splintery wooden floor of the tray. I could see the oranges on the seventh carton where the top layer had been jostled from the pack. The roundness of the oranges was like a colourful landscape of valleys and hills against the backdrop of the raised carton flap. The truck hit the uneven road where a watermain gully-trap broke the surface. The tray bounced and one orange was jolted up to rest precariously on the loose jostle of fruit below. I fixed on that orange with an inexplicable fascination. Was that the very orange I had always dreamed of growing? I coloured better in seeing the deep orange skin. I memorised the full roundness of the fruit. I imagined it was the tastiest orange I had ever seen.

I became like a father to that fruit. Doting. I worried about the orange. Any bump could send it onto the road. The truck had no sides. I let myself become annoyed. No tailgate. The oranges had been stacked too carelessly. All my sense of wonder went out to make that orange precious. The truckie didn't seem to realize how fragile his load might be. My need for innocence was projected into that orange. I thought I might toot or pass and let the driver know. But the ninethirty morning traffic was still peakish. Trucks, cars, and taxis filled every lanespace. No one else but me had any thought for the orange.

While stopped at the lights I looked closer at my orange. For I thought of it as mine by then. I saw that the navel had close pores on the skin which made me think of Sally's chin. Funny how you telescope things you miss so much, like that content of grace and closeness you find where you study your wife's pores while nuzzling after making love and before a further kiss. When I nosed up close I could read the labels printed on the end of the cartons. 'NAVEL ORANGES MILDURA CITRUS CO-OP Nangiloc Depot.' While I was up close reading the labels I suddenly got a sense that the orange might fall. I eased back as we took off and I left space behind the truck in case I had to dodge to save the orange.

I met Sally in Mildura. I had gone there during the year I postponed study to make a bit of money for another year at Uni. Mildura was a revelation to me. A green foodbasket in the desert. The Chaffey Brothers founded an oasis of irrigation. The climate is Mediterranean. Winter there is sunny. It's the warmest place in Victoria. I remember groves and groves of dense-green orange trees so covered with bright oranges they made me think of lights on a Christmas Tree. Nearby vineyards of harvested sweet and purple grapes were aglow with dropping yellowed leaves.

Sally was suntanned after picking for months. She took to me right off. I remember us swimming in the Murray River, rubbing along each other like dolphins in the water. She was honey blonde and the brown in her eyes was speckled with sparkles like they had orange gems in them. She was winter sunshine for me.

One time we went walking out away from the oasis into the Raak Plains, mallee and desert scrub. We walked letting our longings out. Mildura seemed to have just the right balance of civilisation and wilderness. Fruit to eat and desert for our spirits to expand into.

The truck was like a little bit of Mildura travelling through Melbourne. The traffic was roaring off over St Vincents Hill. The Urvan behind me was revving forward like I was too slow. The car next to me was trying to nudge into the gap between me and the truck. I accelerated to close the gap. Traffic hedged me in the righthand lane. Then a taxi tried to cut in from the left. I looked in the rearview mirror as I sped up. I glanced ahead to see the truck bounce on a bump. The orange was in mid-air. I swerved as the orange hit the road.

A red Toyota planted its horn. Brakes squealed behind me. I was sure I had straddled the orange. I couldn't stop. A car veered away from me. I believed I had missed it. No cars crashed. I swerved into the turn lane and kept going through the lights with a turn arrow. I tried to see the orange in the rearview mirror. Nothing. I accelerated with the traffic.

Couldn't go on. I'd be a coward. I owed something back there. I slowed beside a giant Moreton-Bay Figtree, pulled left into a empty space. Twenty minutes still on the meter. My search for the orange found grace.

I walked back up Lansdowne street. I stepped out across the citybound lanes of Victoria street. I angled across the elmtree avenue of the road-island. I scanned across the pavements in front of me. Tram tracks and chip-packets, but no orange. Then I realized my mistake. In my daze I had taken the tramway for the eastbound lanes of Victoria Street.

Was I crazy? Why bother with one lost orange? I didn't need a free orange anymore than I needed to be made free. I had money for cases of oranges. But I was set on that one particular orange. I crossed tramtracks and the footpath to the bluestone kerb. I expected to see the orange lodged in the gutter, caught against a projecting bluestone. My wild orange had to have come through! The one that had broken free from the pack. There was nothing but fallen autumn leaves in the gutter by the right-turn lane.

I trod on the bluestones of the gutter, going uphill. Bobbing down to look under parked cars. Stepping between vehicles. There was an overdressed man sitting behind the wheel of a blue Mercedes. Watching me. I must have looked ridiculous. I thought about asking him if he had seen my orange. I dared not. Secretly I laughed to think of him wondering what I was up to. "I'm looking for an orange off the back of a truck." I imagined explaining it to him, and his suspicion of me. I looked out of his eyes and burst, laughing out loud at myself. I was in a kind of ecstasy to be liberated from care about what he thought. I was in a delight to be a character acting before a more pedestrian audience. But ha I was the pedestrian. I slapped my legs laughing. I was thrilled in my obsession.

I felt wonderful right then. I began to realize that I might not have to find the orange to have my wonder. I was mad enough to look for something that preciously insignificant! I searched eighty metres of gutter and parking spaces. I stood to look out on the road further toward the city.

Ten metres away the bitumen was wet in three splats. I saw half my orange squashed in two sections. I stared at the wetness a few seconds. I didn't want the orange to be mine then. I wanted to pretend that I had forgotten something and go back the way I came, maybe whistling 'Amazing Grace' as I hurried away on pretence of some business.

I found the ball of knots was back in my belly. Then I was sitting on the bluestone kerb crying my damn eyes out. Great howls of sobbing came out of me. The traffic wheeled fourtyred passed. I wanted to act like nothing had happened. But what had? One of the bits of orange lay between the traffic lanes. I could see it through the wet, bright orange. My tears made a screen through which I saw the human traffic all at sea. I wept for I don't know what. I felt inconsolable. I kept saying these words that came from nowhere: "Orange is halfway between sunshine and blood. Orange is ... sunshine and blood. Orange ...half... sunshine ... blood." My words were cries.

I had seen the beams of green light shine down through my tears and I heard yet another oncoming wave of traffic pass beside me. I stood like an old man and tottered away from the road towards the ute.

In my mind I saw my orange run over repeatedly by many tyres. There were pores in the close up skin. The orange grew from the orb of skin till it was whole and orange again. Then one bit I could eat and taste the value of was in the gutter. I picked the dirty orange third from the bluestones. Hardly able to grasp it. I was beside myself. Flayed orange wounds dripped. I split it open with my fumbling hands and plunged my teeth into the delicious flesh, sucking out the sweet tangy juice. A light not of the sky shone inside me.

I had broken off from the tree of my own threshold of dreams. I found a yielding within me. I didn't know what was best! It might have been me did the damage! I wanted to believe in what might be. The world wasn't just what was there. The Fitzroy Gardens, and the pathside bench I sat on, was only the substance which grew out of real stance. Stance and sub-stance. The present was falling passed me like it was in freefall. I felt connected outside any moment. Old timers were asking about what I saw happening now. It was me who fleshed out the spirit anew. The huge elm tree I sat under dropped leaves into a big pool of browning yellow under the tree. The sun shone until clouds moved under it. And shone again.

Hope found me there. I said 'Orange is sunshine and blood' aloud as if eternity depended on it. Melba with her clipped poodle on a leash walked by. I nodded to her as if I would soon know her, but she turned her head away. She didn't have to see me. The light in the swirl of autumn leaves sang about the shining it was going to do after I was dead. Lord Melbourne in his beige overcoat passed me with a copy of the Sun News Pictorial under his arm. The headline read: "Better Times in 33". I looked him in the eye but he looked woodenly ahead. I saw his boys coming at a great distance. They were agitating for their lost vitality in full sunshine. A gardener went by carrying a fibreglass pond-dragging net on its pole.

My eyes followed the gardener as he took the elm avenue into the depths of the park. I just knew he was someone of special ilk. I got up to follow him but the old brick building moved out of history to block me. What was it? Not a tiolet block? No. A shelter shed like we had in primary school? No. A kiosk? The garage width doors were bolted and padlocked. I moved around the block.

Green painted seats, with awning verandahs to cover them, were fixed to three sides of the rectangular building. On the fourth side two queues of strangely confident men shifted quietly towards some open hatches, like minute kiosk serveries, which divided the wall. The sun streamed onto my side as I realized it was a soup kitchen. The men were dressed in dirty blue old-fashioned suits above many layers of cardigans. They talked among themselves in a tone of agreeable acceptance. Most of them didn't see me as I went back towards the end of the queue.
One man nodded to me and I connected with his eyes. I knew immeadiatly that he had once eaten one like my orange.

"Jock Neilson!" he said. " And you'd be Howard Jammer, right!"
"The Orange Tree !" I said.

"For you Howard, just 'The Orange' will do." he said. " But come!"

He turned me aside from the queue.

"You see! The gardener's gone for breakfast fish." he said. "The company will need good followers. We lived a time, but time must continue to be lived."

"How come I'm here, Jock?" I asked.

"When few will weep, few can be happy," he said. "Joys long dead climb out upon a tear."

"But what is this?" I asked.

"They call it the sweetening of the year," Jock said. "The flesh resists spirit being born out of it. But flesh finds no sweetness until then."

He turned to speak to his queuemates and I saw the brotherhood of faith that these men had wrought out of time. Seeds of renewing mind sprouted. Sight unseen I saw. I saw through between the men and realized the second queue were men and women. These were marked with the scars of the lash of earlier times. They all appeared like a distant view between far trees.

Suddenly, as I knew these people, at last the sense of belonging I had always desired, a true family of mine , got thin and opaque in the sunlight. I turned to ask Jock what was going on. He was nearly not there. So thin.

"Eat your orange and seed it in the people" he said. "Your flesh is now."

They were all gone with him. The hatches on the building were closed. I could still smell the aroma of pea soup. I ran out with my arms ready to catch the poet himself. But I was the only one there. I became conscious that the traffic was still going. I turned and saw the gardener approaching. He had a big fish in the net. It was a different gardener. This unexpected man came over to me. His other hand was full of watercress.

"Brown Trout?" he asked, as if I knew the answer. I looked quizzical.

"Good one." I could hardly believe what was happening.

"We need to eat," he said. "Share with me."

The gardener lead me over to the electric barbeque. He sliced the fish into cutlets with a sheath knife through the scattered coins of the copper spots on its skin. The flesh was orange. He sizzled it in melted butter on the hotplate.

"They call it brown," he said, winking. "But we both know they understate things. Really absorbed reverie is an orange study."

He knifed fish cutlets covered in watercress onto my spread palms.

"Sunshine and blood?" I said as if he might have a clue.

"You never know your luck in a small town," he said. "Like embers watching ashes boasting of the fire, the heat needs rekindling."

We sat and ate the fish deliciously. He knew I'd been beside myself till then. I walked with him and he taught me how I could catch myself out. I limped in pain like my insides had new blood pumping out the bitter juices. I was so taken with the convergent times I lost track of where I was.
-Silence! the young girl said. Oh, why,
Why will you talk to weary me?
Plague me no longer now, for I
Am listening like the Orange Tree.

Blood sunshine was flowing visions through me. I could kindle people into the tree. Stoke the fire! I had to set myself off on a blaze of glory. Be fruitful myself on the burning bush! It was me that could be an orange.

When I realized the gardener was gone the sun had welled over and faded. I had been taken in as if under a pervading charm of real sentiment for deep emotions, become a part of a whole, absorbed. And I could feel my flesh burning up with being.


1990 © Wayne David Knoll