"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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The dead snake lies on the beach beyond the littoral zone (“between / the high-water
mark and the dunes”) and forms the shape of a question mark. The water snake is literally
stranded and out of its natural habitat, the sea. It is also metaphorically exiled from
“Eden”. Livingstone cryptically conflates the ocean and Eden, or evolutionary theory
and creationist theory, and shows the snake to be an outcast from both. He asks his
readers to make a quantum mythological leap from the garden to the sea as the place of
origin of life-forms. At the same time he asks us to question our understanding or
apprehension of the nature of paradise and the role of the snake in that paradise. The dead
snake is “Baked dry” and “parched”. This, too, portrays the literal desiccation and
metaphorical dislocation of the figure of the snake. In death, it poses a life question: why
has humanity reviled the snake and refused to see it as part of the web of life? The snake
becomes more than an ironic question mark in the sand; it signifies that humankind has
denigrated and ignored the snake as our original key to knowledge. It is therefore the
human race which is stranded beyond the highwater mark, without recourse to the littoral
zone where the “physical and psychic can come together” (LZ 62). And the final twist is
that there is (and never was) any hope of reconciliation: “Eden was ever too far for the
crawling back”.
Section III’s examination of the lost Eden is followed by another version of the
search for an earthly paradise in section IV, which alludes to the Biblical great flood,
engineered by God to get rid of the evil on Earth. The deluge myth is reworked. The
section uses the narrative of a canoeist’s mini-shipwreck and swim for survival. As the
canoe-less speaker swims to shore he sees a black snake “zig-zagging lithely on the
flood”. The snake survives the flood independently of the ark. If Eden marked
humanity’s fall into the knowledge of good and evil or, narrowly, sin, the flood marks an
unsuccessful attempt to get rid of that sin. I do not use sin in the narrow sense of moral
offence, but as part of human knowledge or consciousness.
Two figures in this poem show a more benign, although still confused, attitude
towards the black snake. Section VIII includes the themes of Eden, innocence and
betrayal. It portrays a child’s distress and helplessness in the face of parental strife as he
watches “a black snake squirm down a crack in the rockery”. The snake is a reflection of
the “voices coiling” in argument. Why does the child seek out the snake? Whether literal
or figurative, the child’s action of sticking his hand into the viper’s nest is anathema, a