"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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personified “outraged Zambezi”, or nature itself, is angry at the technological
interference brought about by the dam construction.
The sea is generally accepted as the place of origin of life on Earth. Gillian Beer
explains this poetically: “Evolutionary theory implied a new myth of the past: instead of
the garden at the beginning, there was the sea and the swamp” (118); and James Lovelock
cautiously says it is “reasonably certain” that life on the planet began in the sea (1987:
87). The quirky poem “One Time” (S 44) describes an attempt to have sex while scuba
diving in the sea and examines the impossibility of returning to this oceanic evolutionary
past. It also examines human hubris and pokes fun at people who ‘go against’ nature and
court danger when they attempt to copulate in deep water. The third section of the poem
reflects a yearning to return to the primeval waters of humankind’s evolutionary origins
when the speaker delights in “emulations of the passions / of dolphins” (lines 18-19). But
then his partner loses consciousness and nearly drowns. This poem’s broad implication is
that we can only imagine our evolutionary past, not relive it. Because there is no return to
the aquatic stage of human evolution, too ‘deep’ a view of our place in nature leads to
practical problems.
Livingstone often uses the sea as trope for the Creative Principle: “I believe the
Creative Principle of the universe has more female characteristics than male! The earth,
sea, moon, stars, virtue, science and poetry all strike me as female; only the sun and
philosophy appear to be male” (in Fazzini 1990: 140). The interview includes a poem,
“Giovanni Jacopo Meditates (on the Creator’s Gender)”, which contains the phrase “In
Nature, guised as Mother-Earth” where the Earth, which includes the oceans, is shown to
be the nurturing matrix. For Livingstone the sea is also a source of inspiration. In A
Rosary of Bone the sea is a dominant setting and is directly linked with love in “To Make
You” (1), “A Morning” (2), “Compass” (28), “Giovanni Jacopo Meditates (on Drifting)”
(9) and “A Consequence of the Violation”(27). In the poem “Loving” (analysed in the
section on ecological equilibrium, see p 105), the sea is powerfully portrayed as
analogous to male-female human love.
Only a few of the poems in the earlier work deal directly with evolutionary theory, but it
will become a dominant theme in A Littoral Zone. Both “The Skull in the Mud” and
“Spinal Column” demonstrate that recognition of our biological beginnings offers one