"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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Livingstone’s originality itself undergirds one of his most unrelenting trials
and gifts – the resistant staking out of kinds of constrained freedom – not of the
ego, but of what we might call the individuated yet creaturely existence of us all.
The poems remind us of what that existence might be, even as they lay out what
complicates or actually threatens it. Admittedly, we’ve seen this in Livingstone’s
earlier work, but there is a new atmosphere and dramatic context to the current
collection, so thoroughly marked and braced as it is by the combined threats of
personal mortality, ecological waste, and historical cruelty. (1)
This is a penetrating comment on the collection’s portrayal of humankind’s position as
both part of and apart from nature. Sacks turns to this theme in his analysis of
“Reflections at Sunkist” where he grapples with the tension between humanity’s
evolutionary heritage and its consciousness which bestows freedom of choice:
[Livingstone] reflects on his long-standing ‘disgust towards all coercion/ – the
brain untameable as any ocean.’ The comparison is crucial to the book at large,
for it extends the Darwinian preface to suggest that our very capacity for freedom
is linked with – perhaps even dependent on – the untamed natural force which is
its origin. The inference follows that by literally serving the ocean, and by
refreshing our deeper creatural memory, this biologist/poet is serving and seeking
to preserve human freedom. (2-3)
Sacks is aware that this human freedom is a double-edged sword. Later he asks:
Does the resolution of the life and death question of free-will depend on
remembering what we were, and the larger life of which we’re still part? And are
we indeed still a part of it, or just apart from it? … Can there be a reconciliation
between our kind and the natural world, or only a memorial tracing, as of vestigial
gills … (3)
Sacks thus identifies Livingstone’s central preoccupation and indicates that the poems in
A Littoral Zone incisively and repeatedly grapple with humankind’s ambivalent (and
destructive) position on this Earth. (This is not the only place in which Sacks uses
questions in his review, pointing to the difficulty of interpreting the poetry.) He describes
Livingstone’s vision: “Deeper and more multiplicit than political orthodoxies allow, more
honest than ideologies can employ, his perspectives are both radical and conservative in
ways that go beyond the conventional political usage of such terms” (3). It is refreshing
to read a critical review which does not insist on finding the political in Livingstone’s
work.
With reference to the littoral zone, Sacks argues: “It’s not improbable that
Livingstone’s monitoring of the zone between man-made and natural worlds thus
includes his patrolling of the equivalent zone at the centre of his own art” (5). He