"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

This famous phrase is often stripped of the force with which it describes as a
‘fallacy’ the attempt to centre the natural world upon man’s sensibility. (45)
A phenomenological reading would suggest that in personifying nature, Livingstone is
conveying his perception of what he calls the Creative Principle. Nature, or the Earth, as
the embodiment of the Creative Principle is given the power of a biological designer,
hence an ontological force which can create and, by implication, destroy life.
Livingstone’s thesis is that we ignore the Creative Principle at our peril. If we do not
revere nature it will retaliate and destroy the human race. A perception that humanity is
mostly unaware of this force and is actively destroying the Earth’s biodiversity and
natural habitats leads Livingstone into a position of ecological despair.
The ecological themes identified in this chapter are all evident in “A Natural
History of the Negatio Bacillus” (one of the ratiocinative poems from The Anvil’s
Undertone 56), which portrays humankind as a destructive bacterium. I offer the
following analysis as a summary of Livingstone’s ecological preoccupation. In the poem
Ecological destruction is wrought by humankind, which is portrayed as the “negatio
bacillus” or destructive, disease-causing organism. There is “no known cure” (verse iv).
The only balancing hope for this destructive force is that a select few, people who are
“wholly of the earth” (verse iv), are immune to it. The implication of the poem, then, is
that ecological awareness and therefore a symbiotic relationship between humans and
their home, the Earth, would resist the spread of destruction. This, it is implied, would
demand a return to innocence or an Eden-like state: “In the beginning was a world quite
naturally in contact with the principle of its creation” (verse ii). Like the seven days of
creation in Genesis, this poem contains seven verses and the final verse may be
interpreted as: on the seventh day of destruction, the poet rested.
The poem uses scientific classification to explore the metaphysical. The tension is
between heaven and earth (representative of emotion and intellect; of idealism and
realism; of the imagined and the material; or the metaphysical and the physical). The
poem ends with an appeal to both: “’O father in heaven and my mother earth’” (verse
vii). It is only through a synthesis of intellect and emotion that the disease may be
arrested. The disease of negatio bacillus is defined in the first verse. Its “pathogenesis”
(verse i) or development occurs when emotion and intellect are separated. Emotion is
regarded as metaphysical, from “heaven”, and intellect as physical, from “earth”.
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