"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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this reverence is an even greater, twisting irony. Livingstone’s poems, analysed
above, show that a lack of compassion for the suffering of animals leads to a lack of
comprehension. Earlier in The Lives of Animals Costello does valorise sympathy but does
not explore the idea of empathy (see p 193).
Two further poems from A Littoral Zone, “Children at Station 16” and “Eland
About Station 17” explore the idea of social responsibility or reciprocity from a human to
human point of view. I include them under the theme of ecological abuse because both
poems paint bleak pictures of human destructiveness and – in contrast – both use the
process of nature as a metaphor for a state of interconnectedness.
“Children at Station 16” (42) is a complex poem which demonstrates the
viciousness of humans towards each other and towards the ‘near-perfection’ of nature.
The mutated starfish – with its six points instead of the normal five – is the base image of
this poem. Through transmutation and mental alchemy, Livingstone transforms the
starfish so that it comes to represent – imaginatively – the Star of David (itself a complex
and loaded image) and abandoned children. This leads to an examination of both
evolutionary theory and, if not faith, then at least human caring or mutuality in the final
stanza. The poem asks its readers to confront the workings of nature and our own
imperfections. It moves, with big leaps, from a dead starfish to an uncaring society.
The beached starfish with its extra limb or point is a mutant. Mutation is a change
in genetic material which can result in heritable variations in offspring (OED) or
“evolutionary novelty” (Gould 2002: 431). In calling this starfish an “artefact” (line 9)
Livingstone offers it (and the poem itself) as a product of craftsmanship and thus implies
that natural selection is a crafting force. The "near-perfectness" of the natural process is
contrasted with the imperfectness of an artificial social system, or the vagaries of human
society. The starfish “evokes / images” (lines 23-4) of abandoned children who have
been robbed of their childhood by a non-functional social system. The natural world and
humankind’s artificial or cultural world are contrasted in this poem which shows the
divide between the biological and the cultural. Read on another level, the mutant starfish
and the orphaned children are paralleled through the orphaned status of both. The now
dead starfish has been discarded by nature or the biological, while the human children are
cultural discards. The starfish, now beached and dead, is out of its natural element, the
sea. The nurturing agency of the ocean and nature itself is conveyed in “great menstruum,