The Scent of Orange

The Scent of Orange

by Armando Ortiz

Today I remembered those white hands, as I cut these oranges in half. The scent felt like touching fine silk.

You’d wake up in the morning with my hand tracing the contours of your thighs and we made fresh squeezed orange juice. The transparent yellow pulp would float to the top of the glass.

I also remembered the endless rows of orange groves that were hidden from view, off the highway.

My family would drive to Lake Piru and stop the car beside the road and everyone’d get off to pick a few oranges and fill a couple of market bags while cars zoomed bye and paid no heed to the city people that were picking fruit.

A lot of things are hidden from view these days, like your voice, which I carry with me always, and the mornings when we’d have breakfast together on the 17th floor of the building where you lived, hidden from the people outside below.

Somehow your breath is intertwined, like a braid of hair, with earlier memories talking to me in indecipherable languages, and I get lost, like my fingers did when feeling your Hellenic curls.

I squeeze these oranges, to cool my body and absorb its vitamins. The citrus scent you had that night was sweet to the tongue. The taste still lingers.

I recall riding my bike up the Glendale Hills, with my friends, where all the homes had orange trees in their backyards, and we’d stretch our arms and grab two or three, taking them and peeling as we rested. They were sweet and full of water, just like you were that day.

So many images that a simple fruit can conjure up is amazing. What will my future memories be mixed with is a questions that is better left for the present moment I am enjoying

Turquoise and Coral

Turquoise and Coral

by Armando Ortiz

Coming into your focus is my hope,

To exist in your memories the goal

Allow me to enter your world and feel your sorrow

Let’s paint the sky a turquoise blue and shed coral tears of joy.

Let’s go inside the room of silhouettes

Where hopes reveal the path

of coral and turquoise,

The sky dangles from your ears held by silver moon light

And you carry dawn’s aura in your arms

Your eyes are embedded with coral and turquoise,

Your legs feel hot, like the desert air

we bleed sugar cane beads making corral

and turquoise mosaics on beds of bliss

Pink flesh and blue cries

The sky is born from your thighs

And you weep tiny dew drops of ecstasy

We see the true and real

Touching and groping, we traverse dark planes

we are at home with each other.

Dawn is permanently frozen in turquoise and coral

Dreaming of Life: An Essay on Edgar Alan Poe, Walt Whitman and Zhuang Zi

Dreaming of Life: Poe, Whitman, and ZhuangZi

By Armando Ortiz

As I searched for some topic materials for a student I was tutoring, the idea came up of introducing him to a few poems by Edgar Allan Poe, and while looking for two that would be a good fit, I came across A Dream Within A Dream. After reading it I was left feeling that somehow this particular piece went well with a poem by Walt Whitman, though I had trouble remembering which piece that was. After choosing the later and The Raven, the lesson was pretty much set on what the discussion would involve; hope, dreams, and the symbolism of the raven. Later the idea that had been born while examining some of Poe’s works returned like a bird that lands on a branch and perches outside your window, propelling me to write on A Dream Within A Dream, and Whitman’s Facing West from California’s Shores. Though plenty has already been written by both authors, my reinterpretation of their pieces along with personal past experiences will crystallize, in some way, the messages that these two authors attempted to convey. I will then end my brief discussion on these two poets with an older writer, Zhuang Zi, and compare his piece The Butterfly Dream to the ideas gathered from Poe and Whitman.

Both authors stand at the edge of the giant land mass of the North American continent  and look towards the ocean, watching the waves and viewing the horizons of the East and West coasts while the approaching, yet diminishing soapy waves slightly touch their feet, concurrently their different perspectives connect with me on a personal level. My experiences matched the things they talked about, though not in the manner that they wrote. Reading their passages transported me back to the Summer of 2001, to the beach, where my body sat on the sand and looked out towards the ocean, my mind pondering the future; I’d be flying to South Korea soon. Sitting there I thought of the other side of the ocean, and wondered if there were people also sitting and looking toward the ocean facing my direction, as I faced theirs.

In South Korea, I visited Seoraksan National Park, which lies on the East Coast, and on the first day of arrival I explored the fish market that was by the coast and got to see the Pacific Ocean for the first time, from the other end of the world. The ocean was still blue, maybe a slightly deeper blue, and the waves appeared magnificent with their engulfing white noise, and with my back to the fish market, where hundreds of squid hung drying on wires- I stared across the massive body of water, thinking what people on the other side of the ocean were doing.

My eyes had glanced through A Dream within a Dream, but they had yet to decipher the words of Whitman, and still the meanings of both writers were far from becoming internalized in my life, but that’s no longer the case. Ten years later, as I read those passages once again, the past immediately reappeared, like discovering an old random photograph of vivid memories. Whitman stands looking West, pondering life, and all that has happened to mankind and his own life, and takes us back to the times when we traveled alone in a cramped bus or inside a cold train cabin where people asked innumerable questions about our lives and family in a language one was yet unable to register. On a personal level, the things seen and experienced in the past twelve years have been like one endless adventure, like an extended journey of discovery and learning, and yet all of that was expressed and rediscovered within Whitman’s lines. As I read those lines for the first time, I was immediately transported to the places I had once walked through, like the night market of Urumqi, China and as I continued toward the end of this piece it seemed to affirm life’s great gift. It took me through an epic journey where my life joined the life of many strangers that have walked and traveled this earth and have made the present moment their home.

Whitman has several lines that punctuated with realities that I had once experienced, like traveling through the Northern parts of the Himalayas in Sichuan, China and though I’ve yet to claim having traveled around the world, the long road trips and the long train rides seemed to merge with his lines, “Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d,” and there I was now in Santa Monica beach pondering life, and wondering what the future held. With every gain there is a loss and with every action there is a reaction.

Facing West from California’s Shores

Facing west from California’s shores,

Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,

I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity,

             The land of migrations, look far,

Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;

For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,

For Asia, from the north, form the God, the safe, and the hero,

From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,

Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d,

Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous,

(But where is what I started for so long ago?

And why is it yet unfound?)

         -Walt Whitman

Reading Poe pulled me back to the present and made me think of life’s ephemeral experiences that are accented by our present emotional roller coaster rides, and the pace at which nature, though slowly, at a patient and steady pace passes us bye, making us reflect on our unfolding realities that can be traced back to the moments where we made decisions on a whim or due to someone’s random advice. Decisions that took you from climbing a peach tree in the front yard of the house as a child to hiking up the sacred TianShan in China as an adult, and the thought of the undecipherable future comes into focus. “Is all that we see or seem, a dream within a dream”?  His piece is more personal though in the sense that it revives emotions experienced with loss and with the closing of relationships along with the uncertainty of tomorrow’s hope. At the moment it happens all these feelings come alive, like a dry creek bed in the desert that suddenly becomes a raging river with the rabid summer rains that are difficult to control, and yet after an hour of downpours, everything dissipates and things go back to normal. Poe looks at the waves making contact with the coast, and thinks, “Yet if hope has flown away, in a night, or in a day, in a vision, or in none, is it there for the less gone?”

Time passes, and we want to hold on to the precious memories that seem to keep us from getting hurt by the world, but as we head West and we follow the sun to the edge of the continent one comes to the conclusion that at times we just have to let go of the past and move on because time is ceaseless;  “I stand amid the roar of a surf tormented shore, and I hold within my hand grains of golden sand- How few, Yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep,” and in the end we will ask if all this that has been experienced was a dream or “a dream within a dream.”

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow –

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of golden sand –

How few! Yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep – while I weep!

O God! Can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! Can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

         -Edgar Allan Poe

Zhuang Zi

The possibility of Chuang Zi, a Chinese poet and philosopher from the Fourth Century BCE, having visited the ocean and pondered the very same thoughts that we have while looking at the waves and getting caught up in our introspection of life is very likely. In this case though, he writes about dreaming as another being, and gets caught up in his dream, but then stops to wonder if what he dreams is reality or a dream. As time passes and as we come to the realization that we cannot be anyone but ourselves, and reflect on the decisions made, one cannot help but think that if this life is and were a dream then we are living an incredible reality, because it suggest that we are in control of this dream and all possible outcomes are probable, and yet they are not, because in life the future is obscure.

                 

The Butterfly Dream

Once Zhuanzi dreamt he was a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuanzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things. -Zhuang Zi

Life in its entire vicissitudes remains ours to make, like the painting that all writers have claimed life to be. It is ours to set up, sketch out, test out, prepare and paint, and like Gabriel Garcia goes on to describe in his epic novel, One Hundred Days of Solitude, we choose what to do with the life that we are given. 

Farewell to Manzanar: Book Review

Farewell to Manzanar

By Armando Ortiz

            The book Farewell to Manzanar details the life of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, before, during and after World War Two. The book tells the story of her family that lived at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, which is located in Manzanar, California and the different modes of socialization that shaped her life; from family, religion, media and the people she met at camp. It is also about her life as an American that despite being U.S. citizen she was treated differently, and regardless of all the barriers that were confronted, hopes and dreams, as well as independence were nurtured in her family.

            I was surprised to find out how quickly Japanese-Americans became targets soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the haste with which they were relocated to camps. People took advantage of them by paying pennies for the valuables and property that they owned. Nonetheless, the narrative shed some light into the manner in which people cope with tough circumstances. At Manzanar, a community formed and people adapted to their new environment and made the land theirs, for example a lot of the bungalows started to have small stone monuments in front of every entrance, and the community built a small park to have normality in their lives.

Jeanne’s father was authoritarian and influenced her life and though as time passed she lost respect for him, his disposition in conjunction with an adventurous spirit and independent mind were aspects of his character that greatly socialized her. Having taken the risk of moving to America, and spending time in places like Idaho and Washington made him a man with a full life experience. There is a point in the story where she tells of the time she wanted to convert to Catholicism and he tells her that she was not old enough to think for herself, thus stopping the conversion process. Jeanne describes an instance where Mr. Wakatsuki and her brother, Woody, had a long discussion on the rational and moral consequences of becoming a soldier for the United States. Eventually, Woody, joined the Army and went on to fight in Europe. It was through such examples of giving his children feedback that Jeanne and Woody were raised to think for themselves independently.

While growing up in Inglewood, her access to Japanese culture was limited, but at Manzanar she came to discover socio-cultural similarities between the community that developed there with its traces of Japanese culture, and the American culture she knew outside of camp. At camp, she learned about Japanese traditional dancing, and was exposed to Japanese aesthetics and symbols, like rock gardening. This was well illustrated when she explained the connection between the Japanese National Anthem, also known as “Kimigayo,” and the Japanese belief that even in a barren landscape, like a rock island, hope can exist, which is symbolized by the moss that grows on the rock.

Religion was a socio-cultural force that she kept experiencing throughout her stay at Manzanar. There catholic nuns offered catechism classes to the community, and at one point she decides to convert to Catholicism though she was too young to really understand the choices she was making. Though not explicitly told, her experience at Manzanar accented certain aspects of Japanese culture in her life. Towards the end of the book she states her belief in spirits and ghost, as she explains the sense of respect and silence that gripped her during a visit to Manzanar as an adult, solidifying her belief of Shinto traditions.

Media and mainstream culture were prevalent throughout her life and she connected more with Western and American culture than her Japanese heritage. She knew the different actors in films, and had liked watching television. Extracurricular activities like baseball, and ballet classes were available. Though different forces passively and actively influencing her life, slowly, and progressively an identity of individuality was being forged in Jeanne.