"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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These animal poems link social responsibility and ecology because
Livingstone’s imaginative identification with the animals points to a deeper
understanding of the ecological matrix. I quote at length from J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives
of Animals because his character Elizabeth Costello’s explanation of the “bodying forth”
of Ted Hughes’ jaguar finds a parallel function in Livingstone’s animal poems:
‘… writers teach us more than they are aware of. By bodying forth the jaguar,
Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals – by the process called poetic
invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and no
one ever will. He shows us how to bring the living body into being within
ourselves. When we read the jaguar poem, when we recollect it afterwards in
tranquillity, we are for a brief while the jaguar.
…
‘It is also the kind of poetry with which hunters and the people I call ecologymanagers
can feel comfortable. When Hughes the poet stands before the jaguar
cage, he looks at an individual jaguar and is possessed by that individual jaguar
life. It has to be that way. Jaguars in general, the subspecies jaguar, the idea of a
jaguar, will fail to move him because we cannot experience abstractions.
Nevertheless, the poem that Hughes writes is about the jaguar, about jaguarness
embodied in this jaguar.
…
‘…In the dance, each organism has a role: it is these multiple roles, rather than the
particular beings who play them, that participate in the dance. As for the actual
role-players, as long as they are self-renewing, as long as they keep coming
forward, we need pay them no heed.
‘I called this Platonic and I do so again. Our eye is on the creature itself, but our
mind is on the system of interactions of which it is the earthly, material
embodiment.
‘The irony is a terrible one. An ecological philosophy that tells us to live side by
side with other creatures justifies itself by appealing to an idea, an idea of a higher
order than any living creature. An idea, finally – and this is the crushing twist to
the irony – which no creature except Man is capable of comprehending…’ (1999:
53-4)
Coetzee, through Elizabeth Costello, places ecological responsibility firmly in the human
court. The failing in Coetzee’s argument is that, while he allows for imaginative
identification with ‘the lives of animals’, he views this purely as a function of mind. He
gives no credence in his Platonic system of the function of the human heart and the
workings of sympathy or empathy. It is the human capacity for love and the concomitant
power of compassion which he does not explore and which, I submit, is a necessary
partner to wisdom. Coetzee’s irony would, therefore, be compounded: man is not only the
only creature capable of comprehending this ecological philosophy but is also capable of
feeling reverence at its miraculous intricacy. That humankind on the whole refuses to feel