"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

180
which informs Livingstone’s counsel that an organic or nondual position is essential
if humanity is to survive.
In “A Visitor at Station 21” (53) Livingstone ‘twins’ the will and the
imagination, where the will is taken to mean conscious intention which is engineered
through the working of reason. He thus recognises the need for a return to synthesis
between imagination and reason. In an article titled “Imagination as Value”, the
American poet, Wallace Stevens, conflates the two processes:
A single, strong imagination is like a single, strong reason in this, that the extreme
good of each is a spiritual good. It is not possible to say, as between the two,
which is paramount. For that matter it is not always possible to say that they are
two. (735)
A few pages later Stevens places more value on the imagination than on reason: “The
truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has
established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination”
(738). Like Coleridge, Stevens sees the imagination as the power which enables us to
perceive (737). Stevens, however, uses romantic in its descriptive sense and discounts
the idea that the romantic and the imagination are necessarily coupled: “we must
somehow cleanse the imagination of the romantic”. He sees the romantic as a form of
sentimentality which “belittles” the imagination (727) and explains:
The imagination is the liberty of the mind. The romantic is a failure to make use
of that liberty. It is to the imagination what sentimentality is to feeling. It is a
failure of the imagination precisely as sentimentality is a failure of feeling. The
imagination is the only genius. (728)
Curiously, Stevens here reflects the philosophy of the Romantics. The article’s
underlying premise is that the imagination has been undervalued or, in Livingstone’s
word, “sundered” so that humanity’s conscious actions are no longer tempered by its
spiritualising and psychic power.
“A Visitor at Station 21” emphasises mutuality between reason and imagination
and shows that apprehension of this mutuality is necessary for symbiosis. In this
manifesto or ‘coming of age’ poem, an organic glimpse of his place in the world stills
“the old latent argument” (line 2) and gives him perspective. The “old latent argument”
encompasses the pondering on the existence of God (including William Paley’s argument
from design) and – more obliquely – questions like: What is life? Why are we here?
What does it mean to be human? After complex philosophical ponderings, the poem ends