"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

I conclude this chapter with an examination of two poems which can best be
called psychic quests for personal symbiosis.
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The surreal as a gateway to a clearer understanding of the real
Why does Livingstone venture into the bizarre world of the surreal, and what, if any, are
the ecological implications of these psychic quests? With this question in mind, this
section examines “The Wall Beyond Station X” and “Traffic Interlude: Descent from the
Tower”. It is significant that the first poem is set at station x, a surreal or imaginary
sampling station. The second poem, as a ‘traffic interlude’, is one of Livingstone’s three
road reveries, the other notably ecological one being “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Black Snake”.
Michael Chapman notes that “Livingstone does often successfully venture into
unusual, sometimes daring areas of experience. An element of the hallucinatory has
figured in his poetry from the beginning” (1981:153). He adds:
Bizarre elements have of course featured importantly in twentieth-century
literature. A failure of rationalism, a loss of faith, coupled with advances in
psychology, have influenced movements such as Surrealism, which attempts to
express the workings of the unconscious… Livingstone, too, attempts to shape his
bizarre subject-matter into exact images and disciplined forms, as in ‘The Voice
of the Experiment’[AU] (p.30):
Scribbling at shutters and screens,
lamenting under locked doors,
the cold skeletal notes keen
whistling through wire vocal chords.
forty years ago, this wind
found in a place of stasis
its tongue, to sing tonight in
spectral Hebraic accents (ibid.)
This wind is also a predominant image in “The Wall Beyond Station X” where it signifies
personal loss rather than the horror of the Nazi death-camps. Further, “The Wall” is one
of the poems which “attempts to express the workings of the unconscious” (ibid.).
In “The Wall Beyond Station X” (27) both the speaker and the hearer are
Livingstone himself. He addresses himself as “you”, a self-dislocating ironising technical
quirk also used in “A Darwinian Preface”, “Road Back” and many other poems. The
poem traces an attempt to reconcile the scientist and the writer, signified by “one plume