"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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The above ‘conventional’ love poems (“An African Loving” and
“Subjectivities”) deal with the aftermath of passion, rather than with compassion. Are
passion and compassion both part of love? Or is passion – with its concentration on the
object of love – a doppelgänger which offers no real succour? “A Tide in the Affairs of
Station 18” (46) convolutedly examines this question. Here passion is reduced to the
man’s “ditherings, his slime” (or ejaculations) (line 12). True existence is glimpsed
through an imaginative identification with the subject and rests in the “woman beloved”
(line 2), who is presented as an incarnation of the Creative Principle. The poem explores
the possibility of the attainment of nondualism through a bodily reconnection with the
Creative Principle. The catalyst is love which, it is implied, is a latent faculty in the
human psyche. Through the poem’s Jekyll and Hyde image, this ‘true existence’ is
juxtaposed with man as “hunter-killer” (line 13), who is intent on ownership of “selfpossessed
coasts” (line 11). Even though man is “the clown of creation” (line 10), he
does also possess the “power” (line 21) to attain ecological equilibrium.
The second stanza ponders man’s odd position. He is neither beast nor angel and
has no clearly defined place. He is a both a fool with delusions of grandeur and a
visionary who has the humility to “bow and scrape” (line 14). Given these conflicts and
man’s marginalized position as the “clown of creation”, how can he attain ecological
equilibrium? If he is lucky – through love. Or, as the poem has it, through communion
with “his destiny’s bride” (line 3). She holds the key to life, courage, emotional
interconnection and consciousness, for she “livens spine, plexus, mind” (line 4). This
woman is a trope for the feminine principle and represents the underlying substance or
essence of life itself (the hypostasis of line 14). Despite the poem’s references to “a
woman” (line 2) and “a man” (lines 8 and 20), it is more an examination of humankind’s
confused position on Earth than it is about the segregation of the feminine and the
masculine. Humankind is shown to be miraculously complex, neither wholly an animal
(“this hunter-killer”) nor quite an angel capable of “sublimities” (line 13) and “tak[ing]
on the stars” (line 17).
The poem explores an ecological necessity: we as humans must unfreeze and tap
into those “solidified seas” buried “inside a man’s skull” (lines 1 and 2). We must take
cognisance of our evolutionary position and heritage if we are to find our proper place.
The “seas” of the brain are metaphorically connected to the rhythms of nature through the