"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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African Loving” and “Subjectivities”); and those which explore the role of
compassion (“Beachfront Hotel”, “A Tide in the Affairs” and “Elementals”). The latter
two poems are also invocations and love poems to Mother Earth herself.
The poems in A Littoral Zone which have not been included in this thesis are:
“Starting Out” (8), “Reflections at Sunkist” (13), “South Beach Transients” (21), “The
Cursing of Darryl Hook” (31), “Libation to the Geoid, Station 23” (56), “Isipingo” (59)
and “Road Back” (60). They deal, in brief summary, with the start of Livingstone’s
journey and an examination of his quixotic purpose; an autobiographical account of his
descent into madness in “Reflections”; the survivors of the Holocaust examined through
the old couple who are the South Beach transients; the power of stories and the role of the
enchantress in the ballad about Darryl Hook; a celebration of nature and a libation to
Gaia; a South African slice of life at Isipingo, and a summing up of the contents of the
collection in “Road Back”.
I realise that in dividing the analysis of the poems into two chapters on,
alternatively, the material and Romantic views (or what Livingstone terms the physical
and the psychic elements) I have perpetuated the “uneasy divide” which A Littoral Zone
seeks to bridge. I chose this framework for reasons of clarity and hope that my analysis of
the poems has shown that ecological destruction is the reality and ecological equilibrium
the ideal. Given this reality, the volume is characterised by a tone of what Livingstone
called “ecological despair”. Yet, he does offer a possibility of hope. This tentative strand
of hope lies buried in the human psyche and may be unlocked through what Martin calls
imaginative identification (172). It is through the imagination and the Romantic concept
of the sublime (or an equivalent reverence of nature implicit in the view of deep ecology)
that humankind may find symbiosis, may sidestep the dualist world view which puts us in
the cusp between creatures who are part of nature and rational beings who have set
ourselves apart from nature.