"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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even, in its deployment of scientific jargon to undercut political jargon. But
science turns out, finally, to be simply a metaphor, and a politically loaded one at
that:
A living body is of course subject to certain immutable laws. A body
divided against itself, as someone I’m sure said, dies – as in various types
of cancer for instance, where some cells, not content with their orderly
dissimilarities yet underlying unity of purpose with the blokes over the
road, differ yet again from their associates, and in trying to impose their
ways on the others, destroy the whole world they occupy. Dying too in the
process, of course: the inexorable final goal of which they are no doubt
mindlessly unaware while the heady process of Antigone-like insurrection
ensues. (143)
Livingstone’s allegory of insurrection reaches back to Elizabethan notions of the
body politic. The immutable law is both biological and socio-political. The
implication is that social insurrection, like bodily insurrection, is a cancer. (1990:
289)
I would argue that this is not at all an allegory of socio-political insurrection, but a
Darwinian view of survival and extinction which has only a weak metaphorical link with
“Elizabethan notions of the body politic”. It is to do with ecological destruction and the
need for symbiotic relationship.
Livingstone’s ecological preoccupation and the philosophical thinking which
informs this view are more pertinent to an interpretation of his poetry than his so-called
political incorrectness (Chapman 2002: xxiii). In an interview with Michael Chapman,
published in Leadership in 1985, Livingstone said: “I have noticed that mixing art and
politics usually decomposes, vitiates both.” And: “I’m in a kind of limbo, a limbo of
political unimportance. Yet if everything is indeed political, does it matter if ‘politics’ are
found in my work or not?” (110). This statement points to a vision which goes beyond
the turbulence of South Africa’s Apartheid years. Tony Morphet said: “He loathed
politics. He thought politics was power thinly disguised as virtue” (see Isaacson’s press
obituary, Appendix B).
What, then, is Livingstone’s Weltanschauung? There is no short answer to this
question. It is clear that he is a truth-seeker who believes in the efficacy of both science
and poetry. My claim that Livingstone can be called a Romantic materialist is made with
due reservation but is I think more accurate than Michael Chapman’s claim that he is a
romantic symbolist (1984: 81 and 96). Chapman does allude to the materialism in
Livingstone’s poetry: “But if, at the one extreme, there is Livingstone’s anti-poetic need