"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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forming force of nature, what Livingstone refers to as the Creative Principle. The
previous chapter argued that despite humanity’s scientific knowledge of the physical
evolutionary animalness of our species, we do not see ourselves as part of nature. This
has led to ecological destruction and the abuse of the environment (and ourselves).
Livingstone intimates that fact and reason are not adequate teachers, and that
Wordsworth’s idea of “Nature’s book” is a Romantic pipe dream unless it is read from a
psychic perspective.
This chapter examines a tentative thread of hope contained in human creativity
which may counter ecological destruction: psychic hope is offered in some of
Livingstone’s poems as a stay against the physical despair depicted in others. The
quotation “seeking life, seeking love” (LZ 26) in the title of the chapter refers to two
undefinable concepts. What is love? And even the biological scientists have failed to
define life (see Lovelock 16 and Silver 321). In “Old Harbour” Livingstone intimates that
the human need to seek out love and life causes men to journey to faraway exotic places
like “Byzantium and Sarmarkand”. I argue in this chapter that it is the psychic quest for
fulfilment which fuels this search and that a sense of belonging is synonymous with a
state of ecological equilibrium, but that this state is as elusive as the search for life and
love. However, Livingstone shows in A Littoral Zone that it is more likely to be found on
home ground (in his case on a Natal beach where he watches a duiker doe, or
contemplates San rock art in an undiscovered cave) than it is across the oceans in
Byzantium. His poetry demonstrates that to know one’s place (or to find atunement
within one’s local environment) is to quell, in part, the dissatisfaction which causes the
men to go adventuring and set sail from the “Old Harbour”.
Livingstone’s Creative Principle is a figurative embodiment of the power of life
and the phrase “The Creative Principle of the universe” occurs in “Traffic interlude:
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Snake” (16). I open the analysis of the ‘psychic’
element in A Littoral Zone with this poem because the snake is a layered metaphor for the
forces of creation and destruction and for humankind’s perception of (or way of looking
at) the Creative Principle. Humanity was given consciousness when, as the myth has it,
Eve chose to taste of the knowledge of good and evil. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Black Snake” explores what humankind has done with this gift of consciousness and how
we abnegate the gift of life. It does not paint a pretty picture. The black snake does not