"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

185
This poem describes the first stop in Livingstone’s “mythical sampling run”
(LZ 62) along the Natal coastline. Its prayerful or meditative tone is immediately
conveyed by the opening word “Attended”. The first stanza describes the meeting of the
river and sea and the misty effect of the “dawn’s condensation” (line 2). This symbolises
the speaker’s passage into a new, visionary awareness. In the second stanza Hildegard’s
spirit, an elusive “form of a woman / the wraith of all women”, appears through the
“mists” (lines 12-14). Her life as child oblate, Benedictine nun and Abbess of the Order is
eulogised in the remainder of the second stanza, although she is only named at the start of
the next and final stanza. Here the eulogy gains a powerful momentum as her
achievements are listed and emphasised through the linking rhyme of “songstress”,
“enchantress”, “scientist” and “Abbess” (lines 23-6). These rhymes also beautifully
encapsulate her multi-facetedness. Like Livingstone, she was both poet and scientist.
Matthew Fox goes so far as to claim that Hildegard of Bingen holds the key to healing
the dangerous Western dualism between nature and history, creation and salvation,
mysticism and prophecy (15):
Hildegard brings together the holy trinity of art, science, and religion. She was so
in love with nature, so taken by the revelation of the divine in creation, that she
sought out the finest scientific minds of her day, made encyclopedias of their
knowledge … followed the scientific speculations on the shapes and elements of
the universe, and wedded these to her own prayer, her own imagery, her own
spirituality and art. (14)
Hildegard made her prophecies more than 800 years ago. Livingstone’s poem is a
riverine journey back into this time, yet it is written in the present tense. For the poet the
spirit or “wraith” of Hildegard is still present. She did not, as far as I know, predict our
current ecological climacteric. What she did offer in the following extract from The Book
of Divine Works (2, 18) was the means to avoid it:
If meanwhile, we give up the green vitality of these virtues and surrender to the
drought of our indolence, so that we do not have the sap of life and the greening
power of good deeds, then the power of our very soul will begin to fade and dry
up. (quoted in Bowie 32)
Had humanity taken note of her teachings – both practical and spiritual – we would be
living more harmoniously with the Earth. The poem’s use of the future tense in the last
lines reflects a hope for change and an appeal to both Hildegard and her order. (The poem
ends with no concluding fullstop.)