"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

210
I think it is an important poem in the book because of the way its sets an
extended limit to the range of cultural representation. The poem is a highly
specialized cultural dramatization of the conjunction and separation between the
animal and the spiritual in the man. The stage set, with its shades of Arthurianism,
of Yeats, and Graves and others, creaks badly, but the grim core stands as a
horrible manifestation of a cultural world which has broken its ties with animal
creation. It is a poem about ‘sundering’, in which human culture appears as
thanatos. (207)
While I agree with Morphet that the poem is about “sundering”, I think it also contains
reconciliation between, to use his terms, a cultural world and animal creation. The
attainment of this requires a descent from the tower of culture and reason into the healing
waters of the lake and the realm of the animal world and passion.
Livingstone goes in search of the muse but, when he asks her to “make poems
within me” (line 96), she spits at him. The real muse is his intuitive self. It is significant
that he cuts off the tigress’s front paw (his own writing hand) and then later reconnects it:
“presses paw to stump / where it seems to knit” (lines 113-4).
The tower of culture and reason disintegrates and “dies” (line 120). This
disintegration represents the eradication of false reason. The tower is placed on an island
(an isolated piece of land) to signify that reason seen in isolation is dangerous. There is a
danger of becoming lost in the maze of possible allusions contained in the poem. But it is
important to note Livingstone’s address to “the Source” (line 90).
‘God of the Holocaust heaps;
of carcharhinids, carcinomas
in children, floods, quakes;
of grief, Down’s syndrome’, he prays,
‘cruelty in men, leukaemias –
make poems within me’
(lines 91-6)
This is a strangely mixed invocation to the muse and to death. He prays to the god who
brings suffering and death to “make poems within me”. There is a mixture here of
human-induced catastrophe – the Holocaust and cruelty in men – and biological or
natural cataclysms, from man-eating sharks to cancers, from genetic disease to floods and
earthquakes. In short, this invocation contains a mixture of the cultural and the biological.
They both cause death. I disagree with Morphet’s implication that only “human culture