"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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has a soul. His mind then interferes and he loses all “linkage” with the emotional
aspect of himself.
The seventh and final verse, “Prophylaxis: ‘Contra-Negatio’ mantra” is offered
as a mantra to the Creative Principle and the speaker seeks preventative measures through
a synthesis between heaven and earth. The Creative Principle is addressed as both the
father and the mother, God and Nature. Man is portrayed as the child. He asks that God
and Nature “love each other”. What he is seeking, I think, is a merging of theology and
paganism or, in mythological terms, a coming together of Apollo and Dionysius.
Portrayed as a child, humankind is stripped of its attempt at power. The prayerful tone of
the final lines, “Divorce not over me, condemn me not to the void between, and let me
not be by nothingness beguiled”, emphasises the powerless position of the man. The
import of the poem is that it will require a synthesis of reason and passion (here called
intellect and emotion) if ecological equilibrium is to be found. When the two are
separated, ecological destruction results. This need for a synthesis of reason and
imagination is the underlying message in Livingstone’s work which gives equal
importance to science and poetry. The ‘equation’ for synthesis may also be described as
the necessity of both the physical and the psychic if man is to re-establish a healthy and
harmonious relationship with nature. Is this tension between the physical and the psychic
resolvable? This question is explored in A Littoral Zone, where Livingstone calls this
zone “the mysterious border that shifts restlessly between land and sea [which] has, to
me, always reflected that blurred and uneasy divide between humanity’s physical and
psychic elements” (LZ 62). The figure of Don Quixote, the misguided and eccentric
chivalric champion who fights for an imagined (or lost) cause, provides an eccentric
meeting point. Quixote is intermittently alluded to in Livingstone’s earlier work and
informs A Littoral Zone through more direct references.
There is compelling evidence of Livingstone’s ecological preoccupation in his
earlier work. The ecological poems do not dominate the body of work as distinctly as in
A Littoral Zone, but the theme is still strongly evident. These works, broadly, reflect
Livingstone’s move from a position of tentative ecological hope to one of predominant
despair in The Anvil’s Undertone.