"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

Conclusion
The coming together of the artificial (constructed through human rationality) and the
natural (which resides in the human intuition) can, in Shakespeare’s words, be expressed
as “an art / That nature makes”. The quotation centres around the gardener’s use of
hybridisation to create new plants (or forms):
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art,
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature – change it rather – but
The art itself is nature.
(The Winter’s Tale IV:iv 89-96)
But Livingstone should have the last word. In “Libation to the Geoid, Station 23” (56)
he intimates that literature (art) is the butt of a cosmic joke and argues that man’s
fumblings are puny and insignificant in the face of natural forces. The poem is a eulogy
to the power of the sea or, metaphorically, the Creative Principle. The poet offers a
libation to this power, here represented as the Geoid 48 or the levelling force of the sea. As
the hypothetical and metaphorical figure which imaginatively transforms the Earth to sea
level (or flattens the earth and therefore puts it at risk of being swamped by the sea), the
Geoid has power over the tenuous stability of the Earth. It is therefore another version of
the Gaia figure. In comparison, man’s preoccupation with “the self” (lines 4 and 7) and
his cultural attempts “to remake the world” (line 5) are ridiculous. And so he toasts the
Geoid:
Here’s to the sea in its restive quest
intent on drowning land;
even the saddest poem’s a jest
writ on the ebb-tide’s sand.
48 A geoid is the earth’s figure; a hypothetical solid figure the surface of which corresponds to mean sea
level (and its imagined extension under land) and is perpendicular to the direction of gravity at all points.
(OED).
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