"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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Livingstone postulates that human consciousness exists, and continues to exist, eternally
in another dimension “between atoms” (line 24).
The final part explores human faith and doubt as part of the cosmic pattern or
Creative Principle, the “felt but unseen spirit” (line 30). Human consciousness and the
Creative Principle are, he says, reciprocally linked in “each governing the other, /
balancing life” (lines 31-2). The poem then ends with a return to the heart metaphor
through the “bivalve shell”, a minute sea organism which “may” contain “the focus / of
the universe” (lines 32-3). Livingstone uses the bivalve shell as a metaphor for faith and
as a reference to Charles Darwin’s contention that the universe was not designed by an
intelligent being. Darwin wrote:
The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed
to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been
discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a
bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door
by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and
in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. (1958:
87, my italics)
“Reciprocals” implies rather that there is a design or Creative Principle at work in nature.
The poem moves from the macrocosm to the microcosm, from the “great heart” of
the Earth to the “minute bivalve” of this unidentified organism. In doing so the poem
shows a containment of the organic within the cosmic. There is an echo of William
Blake’s “minute particulars” here. The world is contained in “a grain of sand” (“Auguries
of Innocence” line 1, in Keynes 431); in ecological terms, the forces which govern the
cosmic and the organic are the same. But it requires an act of imagination to see this.
Livingstone implies that to comprehend the give-and-take of life’s patterns is to
understand the workings of both the Earth and our consciousness.
In conclusion, the state which I have termed ecological equilibrium is, in Livingstone’s
poetry, not portrayed as sustainable. But, for him, it does ‘exist’ and requires spiritual
acuity or an at-oneness with the rhythmic pattern of nature. This is a romanticised view of
nature which does inform some of Livingstone’s poems and goes some way towards
explaining his postulation of a Creative Principle. He is not alone amongst scientists in
holding such a view. Edward O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia also serves to explain this