"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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with a duiker doe – the visitor – licking the salt on the speaker’s wrist: “These frail
shared seconds halt the debate” (line 41). The poem deals with enormous concepts: will,
imagination, God, intellect, science, reason and the mental processes or consciousness of
the poet who tries to work out how these all fit together. Of course he cannot and, as the
poem demonstrates, need not, because the quiddity of experience overrides
(momentarily) this questioning. He calls the duiker’s visit a “holy event” (line 26). The
final stanza recounts a sublime moment which is both Romantic and ecological. As Peter
Sacks notes: “For Livingstone, this may be as close as we come to the sacred” (4). Julia
Martin refers to this as “another order of awareness” (1999: 237).
In trying to unravel the various threads of the “old latent argument”, Livingstone
takes us through a potted history of the development of human intellect and examines
different philosophers’ views of its nub or “the source” (line 16). Livingstone as speaker
grapples with whether philosophy can reveal this underlying latency and concludes that it
cannot. It is the heart, not the mind, which holds the key. (See also the discussion on
“Loving” where love unlocks the latency of existence, p 105.)
“A Visitor” examines the effects of a dualistic world view where the splitting of
reason and imagination results in confusion and, arguably, leads ultimately to ecological
destructiveness. This view precludes what Julia Martin calls “the possibility of
nondualism” (130), a holistic perspective which might lead to a state of ecological
equilibrium. Livingstone explicitly refers to this split in: “A modern will, sundered from
its twin / – imagination – has had God killed.” (lines 7-8). The will, or conscious
intention, and the imagination are (ideally?) twinned, for it is through imagining that we
are able to anticipate the consequences of our actions. The above line carries an unstated
correlation between God and the imagination: it is not clear whether the phrasing implies
that they are one and the same, or that God is a (necessary?) figment of the imagination.
What the line does explicitly stress is the importance of the imagination.
The different typefaces represent Livingstone’s present physical position on the
one hand and his concomitant “mentation” (line 35) or internal mental debate (set in
italics) on the other. The presence of the duiker is a grounding point of reference. It is,
ironically, the duiker and not his philosophic contemplation of the sweep of religious and
anti-religious thought which brings psychic succour.