"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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The title of the poem alludes to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, and the
political parts echo Eliot’s “heap of broken images”. Eliot’s despair at a lack of synthesis
(“I can connect / Nothing with nothing”) is, however, not Livingstone’s despair.
Livingstone sees interconnection – “a glad profusion … struck from one Mind” (lines
39-40) – but admits that he cannot express it. The heart of the poem is introduced at the
end of section four: “The earth you and I now know is a Karoo / of the mind” (lines 32-
3), a semi-arid state which is in danger of turning into the desert of “murderous oceans of
sand” (line 35). This aridity defines the “now” (line 32), the current, politically
segregated relationship between Livingstone and Bhengu. Section five explores, in
contrast, their poetic and ancient brotherhood. Through an invocation to the ancient
poets, or the ancient art of poiesis, they can return to a dreamtime and “walk” (line 38)
the “strand / older than old the ancient poets keep” (lines 36-7). The power of the Earth is
conveyed through the energy of “Africa’s sun” (line 38) and “the love which Africa has
fanned” (line 44). In this place of the dreamtime it would be possible to “wake those old
ones from their sleep” (line 42) and write poems in praise of the Earth. But these poems
are “not yet begun” (line 43). Livingstone is referring to what Wallace Stevens calls “the
great poem of the earth”:
I speak of the poet because we think of him as the orator of the imagination. And I
say that the world is lost to him, certainly, because, for one thing, the great poems
of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to
be written. (Stevens 730)
Both Livingstone and Stevens imply that it is possible to “hymn the earth”. There is hope.
And, as in “Beachfront Hotel”, this hope for the attainment of a state of ecological
equilibrium may be brought to fruition through the power of love (“the love which Africa
[or the Earth] has fanned”) and the power of art. So, love creeps into these two poems
which concentrate on the power of the written word (in “Beachfront Hotel) and the
ancient power of poetry.
To return to my initial question: can the artificial construct of art lead to a natural
or organic view of the world, a state of ecological equilibrium? The above poems show
that art can make us ‘see’ or imagine this state through opening the doors of perception,
as William Blake put it. Whether this is enough is highly dubious. (A cynic might argue
that Livingstone’s appeal to a “one Mind” or a primal interconnecting force is specious.)
Seeing or understanding humankind’s organic place in the world is one thing, but living it