"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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A brief comparison between “A Visitor at Station 21” and an earlier poem in
the collection, “The Chargers at Station 7” (23), shows a shift in Livingstone’s
treatment of the irreconcilable tension between reason and passion. In “Chargers” Apollo
(reason) and Dionysus (passion) are “bound for sundering, / bound for exploding” (lines
13-14) whereas in “A Visitor” a fleeting glimpse of “unsundered creation” (Morphet 206)
is attained. This is attained through imaginative identification and Livingstone’s uncanny
(inexplicable) ability to physically touch and psychically commune with a wild animal.
An organic state beyond “mentation” (line 35) is apprehended during the poet’s physical
and psychic encounter with the duiker. This momentarily frees him from his tangled
philosophical agonising over the apparently irreconcilable contraries of the will and the
imagination. Is this poem, then, intimating that humankind should best forego thinking
and return to a more physical state of being in the world? This is not possible and, even if
it were, it would not be sustainable.
The power of art
Art, as an imaginative process, is one of the saving graces which may help heal the
“sundered” psyche of humankind. If Livingstone’s aim is to make us know our place, or
see our true position within the natural framework of the Earth, how can the artificial
construct of art serve this aim? An analysis of the treatment of art in four of the poems in
A Littoral Zone will hopefully go some way towards answering this conundrum.
“Haunted Estuary” (11) lauds Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the medieval
nun and visionary, who produced divinely inspired writings and illuminations. Her
prophecies and work live on through her art. In the final lines of the poem Livingstone
beseeches her (or, more accurately, her art) to “cosset” what remains of humanity’s
atunement with the cycles of nature: “this residuum of the moon’s”. Scholars suggest that
Hildegard of Bingen was deeply ecological, hundreds of years before the concept was
formalised. She used the term viriditas, translated as ‘moisture in greenness’, in her
writings. The following extract is from her Scivias II (5, 46):
I have the green land under my control. Did I give that to you, man, so that you
could make whatever crop you wanted germinate? And if you sow seed upon it
surely you cannot induce it to fruit? No. For you can neither provide dew, nor
produce rain, nor bestow moisture in greenness, nor draw heat with the glow of
the sun – of which are required for producing a crop. (quoted in Bowie 76)