"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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The poem arguably alludes to Don Quixote through “armour”, “heroisms”,
“anticipating love” and “best buckle to”, and thus to an imaginative capacity for eccentric
belief and chivalric compassion which could bridge the gap between the mind and the
heart.
This prefatory poem reflects Livingstone’s preoccupation with the littoral zone
where the physical and the psychic can come together. In “Perhaps the sea indeed did
suckle you” (my italics) he is alluding, while retaining some doubt, to the mystery of
life’s First Cause and, by implication, the theme of fear associated with not knowing
one’s origin or teleology. Humankind’s possible provenance in the sea 30 has bred – along
with the crab – the possibility of our “strange” future with our spiritual sense of
blessedness, our “diurnal” hopes as well as our “nocturnal” fears.
This prefatory poem anticipates the following lines from the collection’s final
poem, “Road Back” (60):
Today, the sea
– your old ally against psychic apathy,
who saves your soul from atrophy –
was up to her ancient tricks and teased:
“Child of my loins, conceived and born
in solitude, here’s comfort for your grave substance.”
There’s her obverse face: a negligence verging
without cruelty on maternal indifference.
No other course before such wiles
– usually limned by the sun or the moon –
but to accept the gage and buckle to…
In these final stanzas of “Road Back” the “maternal” sea image evokes humankind’s
primordial past. The phrase “buckle to” is reiterated, emphasising the human need for
purpose, despite nature’s indifference and the contingency of existence. Julia Martin too
notes that the collection’s “last poem recalls the initiatives of the first” (1999: 238). She
offers an astute and “curiously comforting” (ibid.) interpretation of Livingstone’s view of
the human race’s position on Earth:
30 In The Descent of Man Charles Darwin concluded that humanity is descended from an aquatic animal:
In the dim obscurity of the past we can see that the early progenitor of all Vertebrata must have
been an aquatic animal provided with branchiae, with the two sexes united in the same individual,
and with the most important organs of the body (such as the brain and heart) imperfectly or not at
all developed. (in Appleman 199).