"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

49
conflict: “I don’t think anything … is incompatible with poetry. I think they are all
interconnected with all aspects of literature and aspects of science. They are aspects of
man on this earth” (1985: 112). His ecological sensibility is obvious in not only this
quotation but in much of the published biographical and autobiographical material on
Douglas Livingstone. He dubbed himself as “The Black Knight” (The Anvil’s Undertone
26; hereafter referred to as AU) who is “apocalyptic for the Earth”, but he might better be
called a green knight who fights, in vain, to communicate his ecological sensibility. This
awareness is based on material scientific fact and he communicates this through his
poetry. He (grudgingly) admits this in the Chapman interview: “Maybe I am trying,
rather egotistically, to bridge a gap, unobtrusively to bring in science in my work, to
make science more ‘accessible’” (1985:114).
Another of Livingstone’s preoccupations was the pursuit of truth. He said his aim
in writing poetry was to entertain, but, without losing sight of the ‘truth’: “I would rather
say a poet tends to interpret the truth … But Plato is also correct: a poet … certainly uses
fictions to convey the truth. Poets should, I maintain, try to remain entertaining” (Fazzini
1990: 141). He was aware of the elusiveness of truth: “Both science and poetry
constitute hard work towards the truth. The truth is very difficult to get at, but everybody
carries it with him” (Livingstone 1990: 59). The published paper “Science and Truth” 13 ,
demonstrates D.J. Livingstone’s search for an ontological and physical explanation of life
on Earth. The paper is a careful analysis of views on truth by various intellectuals. He
questions the existence of “objective” truth and says: “There appears to be a growing
school of thinking which maintains that (my oversimplification follows here):
imaginatively expanded cognitive modes can transcend the purely subjective” (1986:
101). He says that the contemporary ontologist M. Whiteman, along with “such daring
originals” as J.E. Lovelock, Lewis Thomas and Nicholas Humphrey, “afford us
glimmerings of the whole as one… The corpus appears to be not so much the life on, but
the life of the Earth; and the singularities of such a vision must consequently ‘provide the
13 The Livingstone papers housed at NELM (National English Literary Museum) indicate that “Science and
Truth” was not written lightly or easily. Its original draft is titled “Mundane Introspections on Science and
Truth” (dated February 1986). The papers include annotated and edited drafts and are interleaved with
articles by the thinkers he quotes in the article. There are also notes on ontology.