"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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and decreases the pressure on personal consciousness – that biology stands as threat
to culture but for the self-same reason it renders the meaning of the cultural more
intense” (209). He adds that Livingstone is present in the poems as both a figure of
culture (as scientist, plain pragmatic man, homespun philosopher, poet, romantic lover
and hero, Quixotic knight errant) and as a biological creature which is part of the
evolutionary process (209). He explores this tension, or contradiction as he calls it, seeing
in it the underlying source of Livingstone’s use of language:
I think it is in the pressure of the contradiction produced by the biological and the
cultural that we can begin to see the sources of Livingstone’s engagement with
language. The contradiction manifests itself in the poems in the form of counter
disciplines. The biological disciplines the cultural by placing it in the long
sequence of time, and the cultural disciplines the biological by lifting it into the
expressive domain. In the biological register generation and extinction are the
primary figures – in the cultural register these reappear as the expression of
individual realization and of loss. The urge to language – of formal rhythmic
language – arises where these two disciplines encounter each other in the poet.
…
It is impossible to know whether Livingstone’s engagement with language rose
to meet his sense of the challenge which the longue durée of the biological
process posed to him, or whether it was a consistently deepening sense of the
power of language which led him to test his talent against the most severe and
demanding of limits. What is, I think, clear, is that the pivot of his work lies where
biology spells extinction and language spells survival. (209-10, my italics)
Morphet thus points to Livingstone’s tentative hope that, through the communicative
power of the language of art, humankind’s ecological destructiveness may be
apprehended, in both senses of the word. In Morphet’s words: “the volume reconstitutes
the language of poetry as prime medium for the realization of the world” (210).
Morphet criticises the sometimes blunt or overexplicit tone, but praises the
collection for its “depth at which the poems provide the poet and his readers with a
measure of a life in this place at this time” (210). Duncan Brown, too, refers to the
importance of place: “The crucial manoeuvre – evident in his previous work, but
becoming explicit and pervasive here – is to refigure the place of humans in the broader
context of biologically conceived, but nevertheless spiritual life” (2002: 98).
In his opening paragraph, Peter Sacks calls A Littoral Zone a superb collection
which is as brilliant, versatile and enthralling as it is sober and menaced (1) and so
immediately points to its underlying tensions. He also writes eloquently of Livingstone’s
ecological preoccupation which is more sharply evident in A Littoral Zone: