"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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Because he suffers from, or is, this disease, man’s mind cannot develop: “it [negatio
bacillus] is known to arrest psychogenesis” (verse i).
In the second verse, the myth of Eden and the theory of evolution are used to trace
humankind’s separation from the Creative Principle. In the early stages of our evolution,
when “one man stood up”, we still “enjoyed some unification” between emotion and
intellect. But then a stronger or more intelligent man “held the [creative] principle off
from the world” and “His stance caused unnatural disturbances”. Human evolution
resulted in a separation from the Earth. In the third verse this separation process
continues. It is signified by man’s use of stilts, a trope for his self-elevation or egotistical
and, therefore, unecological endeavours. Heaven and earth “had to” withdraw into
quarantine, presumably to protect ‘themselves’ from negatio bacillus or diseased
humanity.
The fourth verse examines those who have “natural immunity” to the disease.
These are the innocent or saintly: animals, small children, certain women, primitive (or
uncontaminated) people and “some saints and prophets”. While there is no known cure
for the disease, it can be alleviated through close contact with the earth. This is a trope for
ecological atunement with the Earth.
The fifth verse connects humanity with aggression. Aggression is a symptom of
the disease and is used to diagnose it. Negatio bacillus brings emotional severance from
the Creative Principle (“when heaven is gone forever”) and intellectual antipathy toward
the Earth (“earth gathers itself to / flinch from the patient’s foot”). Livingstone bases this
poem on the premise that humanity has consciousness and has misused its intellect.
Instead of thinking of himself as part of the Earth, man has intellectualised himself into
alienation from the Earth. The poem implies that the saving grace is emotion, the more
instinctual aspect of human consciousness. Through emotion, “heaven”, or more
specifically the idea of heaven on earth (Eden), can be apprehended.
The sixth verse gives a case history of a sufferer of the disease. The man in the
case history dies in the spirit and enters a bizarre world of meaninglessness. He loses
linkage with “whatever piece of earth he was on” because “his mind questioned the task
of linkage”. The rational human faculty on its own is inadequate to sustain a meaningful
existence. The man thus enters a state of death in life as a “corpse” or automaton in the
bureaucratic or business world of “corporations”. At the beginning of the verse the man