Rob Nilsson
Knowers, avoid this book. Your certainties will not be reflected in this collection of songs, rants, raids and runs into the chaos. This is a book for seekers and lovers and no love escapes the pain of its slow demise into fiction, friendship… or fury. This book is dedicated to failure, fault, feeling and the last joy of the survivor. Redemption may not be possible but acceptance is the recommended refuge for the high flyer, and memory the adventurer’s accomplice.
This book is for those who have lived, have taken risks, have strong opinions, high ideals and criminal inclinations. But no crime without poetry. No cruelty without empathy. No reconnaissance into the human hive without contradiction on deck and paradox filling the sails. The human animal is a tumultuous beast, requiring both the rule of law, and the law of unruly freedom to thrive. But those who seek freedom find that they don’t fit in a world where conformity is mistaken for kindness and security based on a fear to offend.
A refugee is someone who is driven out or doesn’t fit. By necessity, choice or by nature, the dissenter questions and is skeptical of the answers. The pilgrim may not know what he is looking for, but is unwilling to accept less than he seeks. The voice in these poems wanders from mood to mode, vivid, grandiose or vulgar, enchanted as angry, boisterous and timid in turn. The explorer doesn’t try to cover his tracks. He tries to leave footprints in his own mud so that an imperfect person pushing through the underbrush is revealed.
The people of Tristan da Cunha, the most remote inhabited archipelago on earth, left their island in 1961 when a long dormant volcano exploded and buried their land in a paroxysm of molten lava. Exiled in Britain, speaking an archaic version of English, they were unable to adjust, and eventually returned to their barren island in the South Atlantic. Their exodus, out and back, serves as the starting point for this exploration of a life in song. If it is useful to you, all it asks in return is a farewell embrace, a wave down at the bend in the road, and headlights disappearing into the unknown.
Cover: Self-Portrait by Rob Nilsson, Acrylic
A poet before he became a painter, and better known as a filmmaker, Rob Nilsson has also written social commentary and film criticism for Res Magazine and other publications. His first feature film, NORTHERN LIGHTS, co-directed with John Hanson, won the Camera d’Or for Best First Feature at the Cannes Film Festival and he directed and played the lead role in HEAT AND SUNLIGHT, which won the Grand Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. From 1991 to 2005 Nilsson ran the Tenderloin Action Group and later the Tenderloin yGroup, an open actor’s workshop in San Francisco for homeless, street people, inner city residents, professional actors and all- comers. During that time he directed 10 feature films featuring the Tenderloin yGroup Player’s Ensemble including CHALK and the 9 @ Night Film Cycle, 9 dramatic films which start at 9:00 PM featuring 30-40 fictional characters from America’ rough edges. Along with producer, cinematographer and editor, Chikara Motomura he produced the 5 feature film Direct Action World Cinema series shot in Jordan, Japan, South Africa, Berkeley, and Kansas City. Working with cinematographer and long time collaborator, Mickey Freeman, Nilsson also directed A TOWN HAS TURNED TO DUST for the USA Network, from a script by Rod Serling, and PRESQUE ISLE, his screenplay co-produced by his newly formed company, Citizen Cinema, and the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking. Nilsson graduated from Harvard cum laude, lived in West Africa for three years, was a Boston cab driver for another three and has been living in Berkeley for the last 20 years. His daughter, Robindira Unsworth, is a successful jewelry designer.
FROM A REFUGEE OF TRISTAN DA CUNHA
What news, what clippings, what word from home
Compiled in this jungle of nerves, my heart,
For I remember limbs concise as scissors
Spreading, I remember your brilliant demise,
And the red clover looming in the shadow
The dark, cloven shadow, looming. Your thighs
Broken, suddenly broken, and all the island free!
The small calves lowing, drowning in the strange red milk
Bituminous flowers after, from the charred socket,
Such flowers as the children would not understand.
Such brute power! A force to match our simplicity
From the deep earth, the only foe we knew.
We waited until the last moment,
Till the very sky blossomed, winging petals of fire,
Sulfuric dew on the rooftops. The women wept
And the children watched, wide eyes moons and stars.
On the high cliffs we saw a horse,
Honey-flanked in the savage light,
Take fire and fall, an arrow of red flesh,
Plunged to the sea near our bobbing boats.
Gulls spit and screamed, the cattle fell berserk
To their knees.
But our initial loss, the screaming thrust
Which burst in her bowels like a God
Was nothing, nothing compared to this systematic
Rape, this organized butchery, this England.
Such a race which will belabor the flesh,
Keep the channels open with whips, only that
The return road might not be quite forgotten,
Kept alive by a few, far from the glare of Buckingham.
Never seen are these priests, only this scabrous crowd,
No criminals, but those raised to be practiced upon,
Aping their keepers.
There was an innocence whose power we could recognize.
Here where the white cliffs despoil us,
Where the markets spew a language deadlier far
Than quaint old English, out of date,
We cannot see it.
Yes, we would return, all of us,
To Tristan, where she lies,
A cold corpse in the South Atlantic.
Our cattle wander the lava meadows
Grown wild, lacking the soft hands of the children.
We who have been deserted here
Would return to her, whom we have so deserted.
And I remember, swallowed by the sea,
Looking back on Tristan, her dark lesion
Spurting crimson on the boiling sea,
Remembered still, ah, the smooth, inner fronds of skin
There in the cloven forest which we explored,
How it trembled in the deep earth’s hand.
Had we ever known her, truly loved her?
For never, never, before, those brown thighs
Never had they so trembled at our caress,
Moved to meet our unpracticed, avid hands.
I see from this that none of us were lovers.
None of us had known or loved enough.
