It’s evening on World Environment Day. It’s damp and windless, and I’m taking the opportunity to incinerate some old papers and other detritus that need not end up in the already overwhelmed and ill-managed city dump. I also sense waves of another burn somewhere – perhaps the distant dump itself – more toxic than mine, making my eyes sting. A neighbour starts up a car, then sits idling while conducting a lengthy conversation, a miasma of carbon monoxide washing over my cottage. Closing the windows is little help. Then I pack another black plastic bag with yet more rubbish, unburnable and unusable and unrecyclable, to be taken to the aforementioned dump. Some of this trash is ancient, hauled out of the forest below me, where decades earlier an auto-mechanic’s business here had simply shoved down the hill all its residue, from whole car wrecks to beer bottles. Then I go inside, take juice from the humming fridge, turn on a couple of lights, put the kettle on, fire up this laptop. Each step – though I’m partially independent of the grid – consuming a little more power supplied by invisible coal- and oil-fired generators. So we go, each of hundreds of millions of us, contributing to the destruction of our beautiful and only planet and home.
Enough self-flagellation, which is as useless as doing nothing. It seems overwhelming, but we do what we can. Some can do a bit more than others. I am led here to reconsider the work of our own fine poet, Douglas Livingstone, who saw all this coming thirty and forty years ago. Born in Malaya in 1932, he qualified as a microbiologist. After a stint in the government laboratories in Salisbury, in the then Rhodesia, he forged a long career measuring pollution levels at a series of coastal stations off the KZN coast. All the while he was writing poetry, dense and accomplished and voluminous, as attested by the now-standard collection, the 560-page A Ruthless Fidelity (edited by Makhanda’s own Malcolm Hacksley and the late Don Maclennan). That title, culled from one of his poems, neatly encapsulates the incisive, truth-seeking attention he paid to the world around him and to the craft of poetry. For this he was seen as easily South Africa’s most substantive poet, winning the CNA Prize for his Selected Poems in 1984. The range of subjects, verse-forms and voices is formidable, his output hugely respected if not universally liked. Lean, tanned and forthright, he exuded a swashbuckling air of sinewy machoism; some feminist readers have detected a certain misogyny lurking in his oft-expressed adoration of women. He died suddenly of stomach cancer in 1996.
In his final volume, A Littoral Zone, Livingstone wrote poems based on the string of “stations” down KZN’s South Coast where he spent years monitoring pollution levels along the shoreline. It was, he admitted, a Quixotic quest, but he felt he had to do it as part of healing the environment in the face of relentless human assaults. The assaults he unsparingly describes range from the gratuitous injury to individual animals – a turtle, a dolphin – to the pervasive scattering of trash. In the poem, “Reflections at Sunkist”, the poet is numbed by the scale of it:
Among the paper
cups, the empty tins,
glittering on
the sand; a silver slice
of broken mirror
probes my brain with ice.
The shard placed
in one of the refuse-bins
among Monday’s
debris from Sunday’s crowd.
I try to face
the shattered sea uncowed.
Debris recurs at a literally
industrial scale, as at an abandoned whaling station, now “ship-wrecked:/
corrugated roofs, zinc walls flaking;/ most of the cataracted panes smashed,/
.... the sand still tarry.” Floods from inland bring down more junk: “debris
heaped higher than two men/ ...whole swathes of riverbank,/ shreds of homemade
dwellings, furniture, sheets of tin ... Donkey carcasses”: all “choking the
coast for leagues.” This poem, “Scourings at Station 19”, then focuses on one
“roughed up bantam”, shouting defiant life from a peak of rubbish, a reflection
no doubt of Livingstone’s own rage, insisting on his “fractious challenge” and
quixotic persistence against daunting odds: “life/ triumphs even on no longer
trusted planets”. In contrast, in “The Christmas Chefs of Station 1A”, the
“mess on the sand” left by people is “incredible”, forcing the poet close to
despair:
The
approximation to justice,
the
perfectibility of man,
the
conservation of beauty,
the final
attainment of truth
are salients
that ever evade us.
Perhaps nothing is more poignant
than a poem, not published in Livingstone’s lifetime, describing a human foetus
washed down to the sea through the sewers, probably destined to become shark
food. A vast cultural crisis lies behind that one little lost life. Indeed, sewage constitutes one
of the worst-managed and most intractable aspects of the national reckoning with
self-pollution. Livingstone doesn’t shy away from this grimy topic, though in
“Guess Who?” he masks it in sardonic humour:
On
an ivory throne this thoughtful species
Sits
reading Origin of the Faeces,
Singing
‘Take me somewhere East of sewage
Where
the best is like the worst,
Where
there ain’t no flippin’ Water Act –
Just
free beer to quench my thirst.’
That “thoughtful” is of course
deeply sarcastic: this pooping character is doing what most of us do, which is precisely
to avoid thinking about the issue, resort to escapism, remain content with
immediate pleasures. Humans, Livingstone intimates, may be clever in some ways
– he valorises science as one route to the greatest truths – but this is
tempered by the thought that it is precisely our cleverness, especially with
technology, that has spawned the current mess: “It is as if intellect is the
ultimate/ polluter” (“Under Sentence”).
If floods wash bodies down the
rivers to the beaches, the sea also delivers up anonymous corpses. In “Cells at
Station 11”, Livingstone queasily notes that the sample he collects in his little
bottle might well contain cells from a “blackened corpse” floating offshore.
This provokes a rumination on how everything is interconnected at the level of
cell components, from mitochondria to galactic dust; each of us is hardly a
“self” at all, but a constellation of millions:
Billion-year
invaders
-
the silent mitochondria –
propel
our mobile towers, shared cells
sparking,
colonised by vandals:
a
fifth column of DNA
in
interstellar sequences ...
Or, as he described less
scientifically in “Problems of Soul”, an imagined Chinese lad’s “last spring
onion ... contained an atom of Chaka’s,/ two from Ben Jonson and one whole
molecule/ that had vibrated unseen in three generations/ of plumply biceped
Moscow charladies.”
Livingstone is jokey here, but time
and again he returned to this sense of “shared cells” and interconnection,
which means a shared destiny on a planetary scale. Though some hardy scientists
express doubts, Livingstone embraced James Lovelock’s depiction of our isolated
world as an all-but-conscious self-regulating organism that actively, or in
effect, promotes conditions for life to flourish. He called this ‘organism’
Gaia, after the Greek goddess, a move that appealed to Livingstone’s desire to
marry science, poetry and myth. That humanity has willy-nilly worked its way
into threatening the very fabric of those life-systems is terrifying. Livingstone painted a grim picture of our
destiny:
We’re presiding
over our own destruction. We spew into our atmosphere the climate-altering
pollutant, CO2. The consequences? We’ll see increases in extreme
weather conditions, more allergens, decreases in food production, increases in
food- and water-related diseases, decreases in coarse-grained crops. Added to
climate change, we have other human-related impacts on the planetary ecosystem.
Deforestation. A combination of acidification of the oceans and the warming of
seawater will lead to a loss of fish, coral reefs and biodiversity. ...[A]ll
this will lead to displaced populations, conflict over scarce resources and
wide-scale social breakdown. ... I can visualise a world of isolated fortresses
of scientists, medics, antibiotic factories, blood transfusions, transplanted
organs, the pursuit of immortality, special foods and so on. Well-armed
fortresses, protected by lasers, or worse, and vast plains between the
fortresses of struggling, copulating, breathing, choking, starving, dying,
diseased human beings, launching their futile attacks on these privileged
excrescences.
Darwinian and hyperbolic, perhaps,
but also prescient. Depressingly, forty years later, the warnings from
scientists remain much the same, and Livingstone’s scenario is unfolding before
our very eyes.
He foresaw, too, our accelerating
drive to conquer even other planets. In a poem grimly entitled “Beware of Man”,
written “Lest we forget and lose our human shame” – our destructiveness
exemplified by the Nazi Holocaust – he warned:
Now
swift we stride towards the lonely star,
Our
rocketry strives outwards and the race
Is
proud for planets and new worlds afar
And
Science speeds her deadly steely pace
While
missiles watch, each poised, a lethal spar.
The
Bane of Earth now strops his knives for space.
Enter Elon Musk, Kim Jung Un and
Co. Nuclear holocaust looms – again.
In
banks of radioactive dust I lie
To
dream of Earth that was not always arched
By
pendant ash-vaults, pylons warped and starched,
And Man’s brave
artefacts twisted awry.
Now silence
stalks beneath a shut-down sky.
In several less fantasial poems he
envisaged bleak and damaged futures in the here-and-now. The levelling of a
forest by merciless men described in the poem “A Death of Green” stands as
exemplary of a mindset by which “A web of humankind [will] but accrue/ A legacy
of dust, and no more green” (“Premonition”).
Not only do we unthinkingly pollute
our ecosystems and blindly kill off other creatures, some of us go so far as to deliberately kill those who try to protect those life-systems. I want to slip in here a
lament and tribute to the late Jeff Budaza, who was recently assassinated on
his own Makhanda doorstep. Communitarian and parks manager for years, Budaza
and I met only tangentially a couple of times, momentarily remarked on our
common Rhodes University experience and issues on the Commonage, but he struck
me as eminently pleasant, committed and sane. But being a good person, and in
particular a compassionate protector of our environments, can be tantamount to
a death sentence. Not just here: it afflicts community protectors from our own
threatened Wild Coast to the Amazon, from journalists in Palestine to feminists
in Mexico. So much myopic hatred everywhere, only making it worse for everyone.
I want to write a poem addressed “To an Assassin”, but suspect it would be
unprintable. RIP Mr Budaza.
Livingstone was onto this surfeit
of hate, too, but also had a method to cope, exemplified in his work:
first,
the detection of ills which becomes
life-long
non-progressive
find
& measure the ills first, others
can
heal with stature, exhortation,
engineering
...
One has to hope. The paradox is that humans also care;
somehow evolution has also opened up compassion. Livingstone cared, revelled in
life, and worked to protect it. This partly why Makhanda’s own Mariss Stevens,
in her excellent MA thesis on Livingstone’s ecology, calls him a “Romantic
materialist”. So must we all care, or be lost. At any rate, Livingstone
elsewhere recognises, or hopes, that Life – Gaia, Nature – will in the long run
outlast and survive us:
The planet counter-attacks.
Its choice is
plain: kill or be killed.
Ours too:
symbiosis or death
at the hands of
a bright blue cell
- the only
living thing in known space.
*****
For more books and art, go to www.netsoka.co.za