"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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and speed overtakes the “tardy stars” (line 31). The ‘commentary’ which follows this
stanza is rather strange, but connects the falcon’s predatory nature with that of a
“famished dinosaur” (line 33). He compares the noise of the storm to the imagined
dinosaur’s poundings on the roof of the car and so directs the reader’s imagination
towards prehistoric life and the possibility of extinction. He and the four women are the
dinosaur’s prey: it “disbelieves this meal’s inedible” (line 34). Later in the poem he states
that “creation’s still the carnivore” (line 42), indicating that the Earth or Gaia finally has
the upper hand. Humanity cannot escape the natural laws which govern existence.
Creation as the carnivore resurfaces in “Road Back”: “The planet counterattacks” (line
34) says Livingstone, and predicts that our fate rests in the “hands of a bright blue cell”
(line 37) or the Earth as a superorganism.
His next act of loving, this time of the water element signified by the Dolphin-
Woman, contains obvious references to swimming through water in “surfing” and
“streaming” (lines 35 and 37). The water imagery returns us to less obvious references to
the evolutionary process which is “arrowing straight for some goal / in a blind horizon”
(lines 38-9), an image which underlines the contingency of the evolutionary process.
Charles Darwin grappled with the possibility that the universe was formed as a result of
“blind chance” (1958: 92 and 162), and Livingstone intimates here that there is no
ultimate future purpose to (or design behind) the evolution of life: the “horizon” is
"blind”. He hints that this “goal” may well be, ironically, the extinction of the human
race.
What is the “exhilarating fiction” which “wins” for Livingstone in the
‘commentary’ which follows the invocation to Dolphin-Woman (lines 40-2)? That the
hypothesis that life on Earth was first formed in the sea (the aquatic stage of evolution)?
Or that contingency is the driving force in the evolutionary process? Or simply that,
given the exhilarating descriptions of swimming with Dolphin-Woman and his earlier
admission to “concupiscence”, the imagined copulation is the “fiction” which “wins”. He
then adds the sobering reminder that humanity, as part of the life on Earth, occupies a
precarious position as prey to a force much greater than itself. (This poem is an odd
mixture of sexual delight and scientific seriousness.)
His final invocation to “Tiger-Woman”, who symbolises the element of earth, is
on one level a description of playfulness (indicated in “tumbling, / rolling” (lines 43-4))