"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

Life I know as
a boundless search for
things greater than
life to add to life.
The mud stained hunt
in me, looking for
a few crystal lines,
is quite cheerful,
unavailing
yet, but prospective:
still expectant.
This expectancy and implied hope become, on the whole, more muted and are replaced
by despair at humankind’s abusive attitude in Livingstone’s next (and fifth) collection,
The Anvil’s Undertone, and are carried into A Littoral Zone.
4. Ecological destruction
Those of Livingstone’s poems which explore ecological destruction show that “the
balance” referred to by Livingstone (see above) has not been redressed. Edward O.
Wilson refers to “the juggernaut theory of human nature, which holds that people are
programmed by their genetic heritage to be so selfish that a sense of global responsibility
will come too late” (186). He claims that humans are genetically programmed to plan
ahead for no more than two generations and tend to underestimate the impact of natural
cataclysms. This leads directly to human-induced destruction of the ecology. Is this
“myopic fog” (186) inescapable? Livingstone often seems to think it is.
Ecological destruction is a predominant theme in Sjambok and Other Poems from
Africa and The Anvil’s Undertone and is not as obviously or repeatedly explored in the
other collections. “Discovery” (S 48) reflects Livingstone’s despair. His “discovery” is
an ecological one: humankind is shown to be an intruder on the Earth and a mad selfkiller.
The speaker is distanced by the use of the second-person pronoun “you”. He acts
both as speaker and as representative of humankind in general. The man walking and
hunting in the night is shown to be a blundering, noisy fool whose prowling is deafening
to the small creatures. In the fourth stanza he is compared to a rat, or the vermin of the
animal world. But, it is implied, unlike the rodent whose scavenging has an ecological
purpose, humankind cannot even claim this: “But you, ratlike in certain respects /
certainly, have got an appointment next / door to nowhere” (lines 10-12). In short,
110