Isabelle Lorion | Orange is the Colour of Wisdom

 

Apes in the Orange Grove
Henry Rousseau, 1910
(Private Collection)

Orange Is the Colour of Wisdom

He was driving on a black road through orange fields in the north of Portugal. He had just escaped from the jail of his mind, where he had been confined for months, years perhaps. He remembers the oranges his lover brought him when they met on Sundays. He had crammed those oranges onto the kitchen table. He was playing with them, rolling them under the paws of his black cat or tossing them in the garden for his orange dog to retrieve for rubs. He would juggle his oranges or hurl them against the glass partition separating him from his lover. And then, let them rot until he could collect the dust of their skin to mix with oil for smudging onto his drawings.

Orange is the new black.

He had left town for the South of France, Spain, and now, Portugal. The sun grew softer and softer, its amazing flashes playing on the fruits of the orange trees. Plenty of oranges fell on the grass under the trees and rotted. No one seemed to care. No one came to pick them up. The whole area seemed deserted. Silence thick as a flock of black birds permeated the grounds and skies. He picked some oranges, peeled them, squeezed them.

The juice flew through his throat like the juice of life, like the juice of freedom, the juice of traveling far away from all that rot.

Their juice was sweet and bitter like the new dreams that bounced inside his chest and opened their wings, knocking down his pale and cold heart, down on the knees of hope.

He would keep driving south. Forever south. And the road in front of him opened her arms, opened a new space in the sky. And his chest filled with air and strength. His lungs opened wide to a new vivid breath.

His body blew up like an orange balloon, and he thrived.

South, to the end of Africa! To the Cape of Good Hope, to the old legends of sailors and ancient heroes! There he would embark on a boat with orange sails and head further south to the very south, to the very heart of the South Pole. Slowly on a dreamy trip through the mist of the Milky Way, the whiteness of ice and the darkness of night, the softness of the waters and the harshness of the grounds. Wasn’t Earth a blue orange? He would peel it. The sky was blue. The road was straight and black. It was rolling out its strip as a story full of promises.

He tucked his knees underneath himself and rolled down further than far. There he would forget all his wounds. At last! And be joyful as light, like the skin of an orange peeled by a happy monkey. He would cut his body in sections and prepare an orange cake, slices of which he would offer to the orange orangutan to eat, as a gift of himself to another being. At last, he would be rid of himself, free from the old jails. From what had been the ever-present prisons of his mind and ego. 

The orangutans would swallow him, and they would laugh.

They would tell one another that he tasted like an orange, sweet and bitter. Unfortunately, he would be born again, the same, same but different. 

And reborn, he wears the orange dress in Guantanamo. And the story resumes. He manages to escape. The sky is red and orange as the sunset on Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood’s sign glittering over the hills of fame and shame. He turns in Orange County and starts running toward the night of LA, through the night that gets down on the Western World. The obscurity of his lost desires estrange their reasons and blur their visions.

Orange spots, orange dots, and orange flashes sizzle under his eyelids, blurring his vision, and he loses his reason. He gets lost in the deserted alleys of a giant supermarket, all white and steel. He runs on the moving platform of a wide and empty subway station, ripe oranges rolling between his feet. He stumbles upon a moan of a lonely lane while in the distance the groan of the train vanishes. Strange curtains float in the wind, and the dust of minds falls on the mirror of a floor.

His spirit spreads out toward the uncharted territories of space.

If he turns back again to contemplate the gutters, he will be changed to a salt statue.

He won’t come back!

This time he won’t come back. The black mountain of wisdom stands out in the orange sunset; long files of monks swarm on the little paths, heading for the summit, their orange robes floating in the wind like flags. 

He disappears through the cotton of  clouds.

His body splashes as an orange stain in the ocean of the memory of his words. He won’t come back.

This time, he won’t come back.

______________________________

I was born in the mid-1950s in the suburbs of Paris.
I ran away. I traveled. And I wrote and played music.
I love walking.
I’ve been working with children.
I go to poetry scenes.
I love horses. And all animals.
I am an anarchist.