"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

194
opening, and repeated, phrase “Without you”. His alienation and feeling of
dislocation are made palpable: the sand on the beach is no longer solid underfoot, the sun
burns him, the rocks look menacing, and the sound of the waves is like the knell of doom
(stanza one). The second stanza describes the speaker’s unbalanced and “homeless” (line
10) state. The two stanzas mirror one another through an almost matching rhyme scheme
(abcde fbcde) and the final lines of each stanza (“waves interrupting” and “the torn
homeless sea corrupting”) refer explicitly to his emotional dislocation through the image
of a discordant sea. Without the object of his love he cannot find atunement or ecological
equilibrium. “An African Loving” and “Subjectivities” show that love which
concentrates solely on a human object is found to be lacking once the object of love is
gone. The following poems examine another, more comprehensive, form of love.
Part of the implication of “Beachfront Hotel at Station 5” (19) is that the cosmic
force is greater than political repression. And, Livingstone implies, love is part of this
cosmic force. The poem takes the form of nine stanzas, or “nine steps” (line 1), towards
the final stanza which offers a resolution through love:
Yet love vaults unbidden from memory’s dungeon,
its lyricism whirled from the seabed of this world
to bounce off heedless constellations, to be hurled
back some day when the undraped sun salves ridden men
– hangers on the land’s crucifix.
The lyricism of love represents a form of hope. This love springs from primordial
memory, described as “memory’s dungeon” and “the seabed of this world”. There is a
movement from an image of imprisonment to a loosening, or freeing, of the poet’s
imagination in the words “whirled”, “bounce” and “hurled”. The dungeon transforms into
the seabed. The phrase “the seabed of this world”, while referring again to the
evolutionary theory that the sea was the medium which spawned life, contains more than
scientific evolutionary theory. The “seabed” is also, metaphorically, a unifying principle
which feeds the imagination. Livingstone’s glimpse of a possible resolution through hope
has come from a deeply-buried place which contains love. Jonathan Bate says: “The
dream of deep ecology will never be realized upon the earth, but our survival as a species
may be dependent on our capacity to dream it in the work of our imagination” (37-8).
This is, I believe, exactly what Livingstone says in the final stanza of this poem where
“love vaults unbidden” and the “sun salves ridden men”.