No 133 - Jill Wylie's "Search" reissued

Search was originally published by Echoing Green Press, a sequel to Jill Wylie's now classic search-dog account, Call: Life with a Basenji. Having run out of stock, it has now been reprinted, updated, and redesigned to match her other books (Call, Wildwoods: the making of a wildlife sanctuary, Barefoot & Pawprint: A Kenya childhood). They can all be purchased singly or as a lovely set (at a discount). 

If you're interested in Dobermans (with tails), search-and-rescue adventures, wildlife rehabilitation, or just the life of an extraordinarily compassionate and courageous woman in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, Search is for you. Jill will take you from laughter to tears to astonishment in a few short pages.

To order, contact Dan Wylie on d.wylie@ru.ac.za, or visit www.netsoka.co.za

Below is the opening page or two of Search:

********
 

“It works!”

The glad cry must have been heard clear across our valley this green

and golden day. Up on the bluff old man baboon replied with his deep,

“Wah-hoo!” Beside me Jack said, “Hmm!” which in engineering terms

means it could probably be fixed, given the right tools, while our young

son, Danny, capered like a colt, calling encouragements.

We were gathered on the lawn with its long views of the Imbeza

Valley in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, great umbrella thorn trees

guarding the thin river, occasional houses peeping between flowering

Jacarandas and Flamboyants, vagrant Australian gums towering over

the indigenous miombo woodland and, up in the far reaches, the dark

green of commercial pine plantations claiming the steep hills.

“It” was an everyday, everydog sort of tail belonging to a small

Dobermann puppy, and therein lay the question: Dobermanns had

always been docked, even root-docked, ever since Herr Luis

Dobermann of Apolda began to develop his new breed way back in the

1890s. What’s more, he seems to have used an interesting mixture of the

old type German Pointer, the Rottweiler, one or more varieties of the

Vorsthhund Pointer and the Weimeraner—all traditionally docked

breeds.1 Now, after all these years and generations, here was a

Dobermann with a tail as long as she was born with. Would it work?

With no instruction manual, no long-tailed mother to advise, would it

somehow remember, dredge up from latent genetic memory how to get

up and talk as a good tail should?

Until this day there’d seemed little hope of that. The whole thing was

far too long for a start. The last inch of it dragged along behind like

half-forgotten history, through dust, puppy puddles, across floors,

leaving a fascinating trail like a lizard’s. When the puppy slept it was

left wherever it happened to fall instead of arranging itself beside her

and was frequently trodden on when she turned around.

Every now and then we stood her before a mirror and wagged her

tail for her between thumb and forefinger so she could see what she was

supposed to do with it. To no avail until just now. She shifted on her

bony little buttocks, smoothed her forehead self-consciously and slowly

raised the end of her tail, the tip quivering with the effort. She turned

her gaze from our faces to look at it and with her head cocked

comically, watched it fall back to earth.

I swept her up in my arms. “You clever little thing!” I laughed. “Now

we’re getting somewhere!” and prayed she’d keep it up, more ways than

one, because there was a Plan to all this and a tail was absolutely

essential.

******

No 132 - William Blake's therianthropes

For obscure reasons – some slightly masochistic yen for intellectual puzzlement – I decided to return to William Blake. Not the (relatively) straightforward world of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Songs of Innocence and Experience, which had comprised my teaching syllabus in a bygone era. No, I decided to revisit Jerusalem, his last (1827) great sprawling work of spiritual enlightenment, narrating the difficult but ultimate attainment of what he called the “Poetic Genius”. Exactly 100 plates of dense text, laboriously etched back-to-front on copper sheets, printed (just one copy) and intricately hand-coloured.  I’m not sure there’s a human being on this planet who fully understands it. The contortions some critics tie themselves into, just trying to formulate a method of approach to reading it, can be quite amusing. Jerusalem feels like a concatenation of interlocking wormholes governed by chaos theory. Between passages or lines of startling clarity and verve swarm a multitude of invented ‘characters’ pursuing obscure and turbulent agendas across a wild stage that flails between the cosmic and the homely geography of England. Blake claimed that every dot and letter was in its proper and appointed place, but you can forgive those of his contemporaries (and many later readers) who have regarded much of it as just plain bonkers.

            Anyway, I hauled out my set of wonderful facsimile volumes of Blake’s Illuminated Books, put out by the Tate Gallery. Full-colour reproductions of the complete plates, amplified by all the learned notes the aficionado could desire. What has struck me forcibly on this revisiting is not so much the text, though, as some of the vividly coloured, intricately lined, and wildly inventive illustrations. In anyone’s artistic universe they have to register as quite extraordinary.

            Several illustrations in particular. 

            On the very title page, announcing “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion”, appear a number of winged-but-humanoid figures. Now we’re familiar with dove-winged angels and bat-winged devils from centuries of Christian iconography; one such conventional figure appears on the left, and indeed elsewhere in innumerable variations throughout Blake’s works. The other figures are more interesting. At the top, a locust’s wings appear attached to a human body that shows just one slender foot and perhaps the suggestion of a face; or almost certainly it’s a soul emerging from a chrysalis, a fairly conventional symbol of emergence into freedom, which of course is what the whole poem is about. On the right, human arms seem to hold a sea-whelk within an arched arrangement of fleshy wings or flanges, adorned with a moon-symbol. And the figure at the bottom, stretched out in an attitude at once relaxed, vulnerable and ecstatic, seems to emanate almost seamlessly from a blend of colourful butterfly’s wings, leaves, and some strange veined sea-creature. What are these human-nonhuman composites doing there?

 

Because there are more.

On Plate 11 appears a human woman with a long, drooping swan’s neck, head, and wings. Depressed, or just dipping to feed on the floating material suggested before her? Note the fish just behind her, as well as down the right-hand margin of the page. (There’s a minor variant, in forbidding dark red, on Plate 71.) Explanatory theories abound, none very convincing. The neighbouring text appears to offer no clues at all.

Another bird-related composite appears on Plate 78: a naked human figure, thoughtfully posed à la Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ – topped by a slightly comical chicken’s head. Some commentators have tried to suggest it was meant to be an eagle, or it’s a cockerel with a comb but a raptor’s bill. But it seems to me quite plainly a chicken, waking up and about to announce the dawn. Which is both homely and unusual since, unlike many other non-human creatures, chickens don’t feature much anywhere in Blake’s works. But there it is.

There are plant-related composites, too. The first page of Chapter Two, Plate 28, is adorned with entwined lovers emerging from or nestled within a lotus flower, itself floating on water – which in turn appears populated by little snail-like creatures, starfish, and scallops, at least one appearing to have a human arm, scattered down the right-hand margin. The motif is echoed at the head of Chapter Three, Plate 53, with a pensive or sad female figure placed on a sunflower and enveloped in strange wings (or, I’d like to think, elephant’s ears), adorned again with stars and moons.

A notably vigorous, even rough-sketched picture boils at the bottom of Plate 75. A male and a female human figure are all but indistinguishably co-existent with a nest of toothy and horned snakes, or perhaps a multi-headed snake – happily so, to judge by the cuddling going on between the woman and one of the several serpentine heads. Now snakes occur often in Blake, sometimes wriggling in miniature along the bottom of a page, sometimes threatening to envelop a human in its coils – like the conventional Satan in Eden – but at other points quite benignly. (Remember that in the “Proverbs of Hell” Blake cheekily took the Devil as his heroic exemplar of rebellious energy.) (And we have to distinguish the serpent from the humble or beneficent earthworm, like the one coiled around the buxom female figure on Plate 63.)

The several-headed serpent recurs in my favourite Jerusalem illustration, the chariot scene on Plate 46. It’s as fiery, precise, suggestive and strange as anything in Blake’s whole oeuvre, and again most of the explanations seem tortuous and partial at best. Critics are obsessed with locating sources for these images, as if Blake can’t be credited with just making stuff up. The human-headed bulls or draft-oxen in this scene seem strongly modelled on ancient Assyrian friezes and monumental statuary, reproductions of which Blake would have seen. But the bulls’ coiling horns ending in delicate human hands, and the way the three-headed serpent curls to form the chariot’s wheel, seem to be Blake’s own touch. Not to mention the little harpy-like riders – surely those faces are meerkats’!? Being harnessed to a chariot or a plough is a regular motif of mental entrapment or limitation for Blake, but it’s by no means clear that that’s the import of this blazing portrayal. Though the presumably father-and-daughter passengers (identity controversial) do look rather miserable, don’t they?

            (This isn’t the place to go down wormholes of explanation – but ... here’s a thought...)

            As my erstwhile student Jyoti Singh showed at length in her PhD thesis, animals abound symbolically in Blake’s work: lions and tigers, eagles and sheep, spiders and flies. He drew constantly and eclectically on these creatures’ established symbolic capital, as well as investing them with his own idiosyncratic meanings. He also closely observed the natural world in its own right: this is clear from the multiple quirky but naturalistic little marginal drawings to his big poems: flying birds, spiderwebs and seashells, fish eating other fish, caterpillars, frogs and snails. The same applies to plant-life: dozens of allusions to roses and sunflowers, vines and briars, and frequent depictions of human figures emerging from or merging into the twinings of creepers or roots.

            Which brings me back to my central question: What does Blake intend with these multispecies human-nonhuman hybridisations?

            The editor of the Tate facsimile of Jerusalem, Morton D Paley, says he ‘cannot but see Blake’s depiction of beasts as other than monstrous’ – expressions of the dark, inhibiting sides of the human psyche. While this seems true of some deployments, I’m not convinced this is so true of the Jerusalem examples. What if we were to regard them quite differently, which is to say positively, as expressions of a spiritual continuum of human and nonhuman? The hybrid depictions do not appear at such a scale and regularity in any previous poem; here Blake intends something new that transcends the struggle for independent creativity that burdens the earlier epics, from Urizen to The Four Zoas. What if, in a word, we regard these hybrids as therianthropes?

            Therianthropy, a word that entered our vocabulary only around 1901, is defined crudely as the transformation of animal into human, or vice versa. Here in Southern Africa we’re familiar with the phenomenon from San rock art, with shamans (it’s thought) taking on animal characteristics for spiritual and/or hunting purposes. Blake likely didn’t know about the San art (though he did know of the then “British Kaffraria”, which is precisely where I live). But therianthropic myths and tales and related artworks abound in almost all the world’s cultures, and Blake knew of many, from the animal-headed gods of ancient Egypt to Greek myths of metamorphosis, from Irish and Nordic folktales to the gargoyles leering from mediaeval churches and the teeming beasts of Hindu mythology. What in ancient times was a genuinely spiritual sense of human-nonhuman continuity has in the West been largely debased to the entertaining tinsel of Mickey Mouse and Nemo. But given that Jerusalem is Blake’s great triumphal struggle of spiritual completion, it makes sense to me that these particular examples can be legitimately termed therianthropic.

This gels with Blake’s expression of ‘ecological’ continuities at other levels. The purely symbolic or heraldic animal apparitions of his early work became, as I mentioned, amplified with more naturalistic observation. This was notably deepened during a stay in a rural cottage near Felpham on the coast, quite a change from his accustomed London. While there, he wrote another daunting epic, Milton. Alongside wrestling with the theology of the author of Paradise Lost, Blake wrote some arresting passages about spiritualised natural beauty. Here’s just one:

 

The Lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the morn

Appears, listens silent: then springing from the waving Corn-field! loud

He leads the Choir of Day ...

His little throat labours with inspiration, every feather

On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the effluence Divine ...

 

Though Blake didn’t lose sight of the predatory aspects of ‘nature’, he saw all of it as ultimately ‘Human’, that is to say, infused with a sacred spirit, if only one opens one’s eyes to it. Even the

 

little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand?

It has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven & hell,

Withinside wondrous & expansive ....

 

Hence, I propose, all the little critters enlivening Jerusalem’s pages. They, just as much as the great illuminated therianthropes, are manifestations of our continuity with the nonhuman. We are obliged by the limitations in our vision and artistic means to capture this indefinable continuum in little flashes, like the illustration on Jerusalem’s Plate 54 in which stars rising from human heads seem to mutate into bats and then swarming insects, or the sweet footer   depicting a joyous child riding a serpent with reins like a horse. And right towards the end, in the final ecstatic visionary phase, Blake puts it succinctly in words.

 

                                    And I heard Jehovah speak

Terrific from his Holy Place & saw the Words of the Mutual Covenant Divine

On Chariots of gold & jewels with Living Creatures starry & flaming

With every Colour. Lion. Tyger. Horse. Elephant. Eagle. Dove. Fly. Worm.

And the all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems ...

All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone, all

Human Forms identified. living going forth & returning wearied

Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing

And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.

 

A totally bizarre kind of modified Christian ecology. And right there is the chariot of Plate 46, I reckon.

 

No doubt someone in the vast industry of Blake criticism has said this kind of thing before, but I’ve yet to see mention of therianthropes. Just putting it out there ...

*****

Images: Wikicommons

Blog 131 - Baptiste Morizot's "Ways of Being Alive"

 

The French philosophers I’ve routinely encountered in literary studies – to wit, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari – have oscillated between the dizzyingly stimulating and the infuriatingly unintelligible. In the emergent thread within ecological-literary academe dubbed Critical Animal Studies, Derrida’s essay “The Animal that Therefore I Am (and more to follow)” has assumed a prominent space. In between quite lucid and polemical statements (like condemning the conceptual divide between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ as a “crime”), he can be bafflingly elusive, addicted to endlessly involuted puns. Mostly the essay convinces me that Derrida didn’t understand cats. Likewise, I attempted at times to apply Deleuze and Guattari’s fashionable concept of “becoming-animal”, frankly without feeling I fully understood what they (or I) were doing. But then I’ve always been a rubbish philosopher/theorist. I respond rather to their poetics, their intriguing metaphorical ventures, their colourful word-play – precisely what, in the eyes of some of my academic colleagues, disqualifies them from being philosophers at all.

Baptiste Morizot – though he refers glancingly to all these predecessors in his book Ways of Being Alive (Polity Press) – is, thankfully, eminently lucid. Of a younger generation (he is 40-ish), he is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Aix-en-Marseille. He has several other books to his name, which I’ve not yet read, but which are evidently related in theme to Ways of Being Alive. This title, though a fair translation of the original French Manières d’être vivant, sounds unhappily a bit like a popular self-help manual. Though it is concerned with trying to outline a way of living better – that is, in more fruitful conjunction with the non-human fellow-denizens of our world – it is much more than a set of rules to live by. It is too nuanced and complex, too ambiguous, too lyrical for that.

It seems there’s something of a trend towards, not quite denying “red-in-tooth-and-claw” Darwinism in our conceptualisation of nature, but counter-balancing that view by focussing on mutualisms, symbioses, collaborations. One branch of this trend is concerned to blur if not altogether disburse the putative division between ourselves and other creatures. Most of the skills and abilities we usually boast of as uniquely human are, it turns out, shared by many other animals, from gorillas to ants; we are far closer to one another than we are different. Moreover, we are scarcely divisible from the environment we so gaily swashbuckle through as if we own it. After all, each one of us is mostly water (Morizot has a charming chapter suggesting that we still pass on and carry saline elements of the ancient seas in which once lived our most distant ancestors – sponges.) A leading light in this field, Donna Haraway, likes to point out that of all the cells that astonishingly combine to form a person, only about 10% contain human DNA: the rest is microbial, bacterial, viral – non-human elements all busy constructing and combining and repurposing one another through “horizontal gene transfer” (elaborated in David Quammen’s rather annoyingly chatty book, The Tangled Tree). On this view, the human “self” is something of an illusion, a useful fiction that has unfortunately run amok on the planet. Similarly, there is no clear line between “culture” and “nature”: “nature” is not “out there”, a mere resource void of intrinsic meaning – the stance that has permitted us to exploit and wreck the biosphere so shamelessly. Rather, “nature” is within us, too. Hence Haraway writes instead of “natureculture”; others of “biohumanism”, or “posthumanism”. Haraway contributes to a wonderful collection of essays edited by Anna Tsing entitled (echoing Morizot), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, which ranges from microbes to lichens, ants to salmon and (again echoing Morizot) wolves.

A related trend is also emerging: the fantastic symbiotic relationships amongst plants (without whose presence, incidentally, we would simply cease to exist – would never have existed). A slew of new books includes Merlin Sheldrake’s delightful Entangled Life (about fungi), Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, and, pre-eminently, Richard Powers’ astounding novel about humans and their trees, The Overstory. So it’s perhaps not surprising to find Powers contributing a Foreword to Ways of Being Alive. Of Morizot’s work Powers writes:

The view from the heights of this book is vertiginous and exhilarating. Morizot explores life at all gauges, from the cell to the entire biosphere. He peers through the longest lens of time, backwards across billions of years and forwards into an endlessly unfolding future. His words reawaken consciousness to all its possibilities. For Morizot, “the best analogy for understanding the evolutionary nature of the biosphere is that of a poetic fire: a creative fire”.

For some, that might smack too much of a wannabe spirituality, of discredited gods, or a primum mobile, or ether, or a Herbert Spencer-like Creative Principle. But it’s an analogy, not a statement of religious fact. Though Morizot does entertain certain refurbished notions of animism (again, he is far from alone in this), and though he wants in a sense to re-sacralise our relations with the biosphere, he is not trying to entrench a pre-determining dogma. It is impossible, he says in an endnote, to altogether evade metaphor and analogy, even in the sciences (our own scientist-poet Douglas Livingstone knew this). Rather, the writer-philosopher participates in the enigmatic creative forces of the biosphere by being poetic, by applying the surprising recombinations and penetrative engagement of poetry in the very attentiveness of language. Morizot’s own rich lyricism enacts, beyond either logic or earthy pragmatics, a search for a “complete style of attention”. John Felstiner, in his book Can Poetry Save the Earth?, calls it “poetry’s exact enlivening touch for nature’s common surprises.”

Not that either philosophical logic or worldly practicality is missing from Ways of Being Alive. Morizot supports his arguments with references to a wide range of philosophers, from Kant to Nietzsche, Dewey to Rawls, Spinoza to Latour. On the other count, his perspectives are deeply informed by in-the-field, tramping-through-the-snow work, tracking wolves through the mountains of central France. The reintroduction of wolves here is one of those small-scale success stories of “rewilding”, to use the favourite term of George Monbiot (another compatible, if more sociological, thinker-writer). Having been raised alongside many wild animals by my naturalist mother, this is the most fascinating aspect of the book for me. And particularly intriguing is an episode of communicating with certain wolves by mimicking their howls. And they reply! Or do they? What could be going through a wolf’s mind at that moment? We can’t know exactly, of course, but something is going on. As my mother demonstrated a thousand times, communication between species happens, can be nurtured and invented. It is a hint that animals can be “intercessors” between us and the world, a kind of doorway to recognise our still deeper “affiliations to plants and bacteria, which lie further back in our common genealogy”. They are like “ferrymen or smugglers”, connecting us in mutual respect, however mysteriously. They embody a sensory connection lost to too many urbanised moderns, the product in large part of “a dualist philosophical anthropology, which runs from Judeo-Christianity to Freudianism … the hierarchical dualism that contrasts humans with animals”. Indeed, many of us don’t even recognise that we’re desperate for deeper connectivity, one which nevertheless respects the difference of the Other. Morizot uses the task of tracking of the wolves through the forests as an example (I’m reminded a little of Louis Liebenberg’s work in The Art of Tracking: The origins of science). Here’s a particularly arresting passage, exemplifying a “human openness to the outside”:

To deploy together all the vibrating antennae of sensation, perception, interpretation, deduction, intuition, imagination. We need the incandescent alloy of a vibratory sensitivity to others in their otherness, a participant perception, an interpretive and imaginative activity of great boldness and caution, a rigorous and wild activity of deduction, a creation of hypotheses that is dishevelled in its heuristics and perfectly reasonable in its conclusions, a general openness to signs, an investigative use of the sensing and walking human body … We can try, although we often get it wrong, to translate [their wealth of meanings] a bit.

Wonderful, and suitably humble. And it’s now almost axiomatic that there are tangible ecological benefits to the reintroduction of an apex predator. Morizot (like Monbiot in his book Feral) cites the oft-aired case of wolves being returned to Yellowstone Park in the US, with dramatic impacts on the whole ecology. (I did once talk to a Finnish wolf-researcher, mind you, who judged the original assessment of that impact “a bit premature”. It would also incidentally be fascinating to compare Morizot’s book with Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams.) In any event, as with the reinvigoration of bison populations in Poland, bears in Greece, wild boar in Italy, human-interface problems can accrue. We’re all too familiar with this sort of thing in southern Africa, with jackals in Karoo sheep country and leopards in the Western Cape, not to mention elephants in Botswana. One of the outfits Morizot works with is called CanOvis – dog/sheep – who try to intercede, work out liveable solutions, that can benefit both wolves and the sheep-farmers on whose flocks the canines inevitably prey.

The French wolf situation is in effect a case-study, a real-world synecdoche, for a global crisis. The dynamic of human domination – with firearms, gin-traps, poisons, axes, ploughs, fences – by way of protecting crops and livestock, has everywhere resulted in catastrophic declines in the populations of almost all classes of other worldly inhabitants. What we do with, and say about, other animals (and plants and insects, fish and fungi) has to be evaluated against the fact that today, Morizot laments, “we are creating from scratch a mute and absurd cosmos which is very uncomfortable to live in, on an existential, individual and collective scale. … [W]e are generating global warming and a biodiversity crisis that concretely threaten Earth’s capacity to provide human beings with habitable conditions.” Not only potentially uninhabitable for us; the catastrophe means that an infinitely variable and unpredictable gamut of evolutionary possibility has been snuffed out.

I’ve mentioned in passing a bunch of other related books partly to emphasise that Morizot is increasingly not alone in his broad thinking. This might also make him seem a bit less than entirely original. After all, as early as 1798 William Blake was lamenting that some people saw a tree as merely “a green thing that stands in the way” instead of a flourishing world of delight. Prophets and scholars of anthropogenic environmental meltdown have scarcely been lacking over the last century– thousands of them, from Thoreau to Naomi Klein, Rachel Carson to Greta Thunberg, Aldo Leopold to Bill McKibben – culminating in terrifying books such as James Hansen’s Storms of my Grandfathers and David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth. Compared to the latter rather swingeing compilation of alarming statistics, Ways of Being Alive is infinitely more subtle and sensually engaged. If the underlying message is similar, it is nevertheless one that needs to be said again – and again and again. Morizot does so with unusual density, complexity and beauty. He is, novelist Alain Damasio writes in an Afterword to the book, a bit of a “mongrel”, a “failed novelist” who forges a peculiarly elegant prose from philosophical ideas, enriched by his living those ideas through in pawprints and scats.

Is there a way out or through, in Morizot’s vision? One route, as I mentioned earlier, is an appeal to the values suffusing ancient animism. This is not to recommend an impossible return to some atavistic primitivism, rather something newly invented to suit our times. But the values remain pertinent, “namely complex social relations of reciprocity, exchange and predation which are not peace-loving or pacific … but are political in a still enigmatic sense, and call for forms of pacification and conciliation, of mutualist and considerate cohabitation.” Interestingly, Morizot evokes our familiar African concept of ubuntu as an analogy. To achieve this, we each need to become “diplomats of interdependence”, the “guardians” of a “community of interdependencies”. In this diplomatic mode, the fossilised shibboleths and stereotypes are left behind for a kind of space of creative ambiguity. A capacity to entertain mysteriousness itself seems paradoxically key. In Morizot’s wolf work, the more he learns and hears from all sides, through tracking, howling, thermal imaging at night, swapping anecdotes with shepherds, the more exceptions, enigmas, ambiguities emerge:

Dogs, wolves, sheep, the shapes merge into one metamorphic dialogue: you are my ancestor against whom I fight; you are my old prey that I defend at the risk of my own life; I am your descendant who sometimes plays with you, and whom I kill when you get close to my protégés who were still my booty only yesterday; I am your ancestor, who desires you and deceives you.

As this might indicate, “becoming-diplomat” means discarding the hard lines we so often and instinctively draw between Them and Us. It means recognising that each discerned entity is in fact many identities and impulses woven together. There are many "ways of being alive". Each contact, each situation, each meeting requires an open attentiveness that will allow for an individuated and appropriate response. (This is, I would say, rather Zen.) There’s an underpinning of necessary idealism in this strategy, but Morizot is not naïve about it. It makes negotiation harder, not easier, but also ever more vital. (He likes Donna Haraway’s felicitous phrase, “staying with the trouble”.) He knows all too well that his notion of “adjusted consideration” towards animals, rivers, forests is regarded by “the men in suits who rule the world” – the executives of global Petro-government who signally failed last week to achieve anything of life-saving substance at COP27 – as childish and irrational tosh. Let’s face it, profit-driven neoliberals are unlikely to be persuaded by this kind of thinking. But we have to try. In his Epilogue, which manages to be simultaneously grim and ebullient, Morizot concludes:

Why should we treat the living world with consideration? Well, because it is this world that made our bodies and our minds, capable of emotions, joy, meaning. It is the living world that sculpted all our faculties, including the most emancipatory, in a constitutive interweaving with other life forms. It is the living world that keeps us upright in the face of death, by its continuous and joyful infusion of life (this is called, among other things, “breathing”). Unplug this connection to the living world, and it’s all over.

*****

Blog No 130 - "Thicket": Harry Owen's new poems

For the information of imperfectly-educated readers, Harry Owen is an immigrant to South Africa from darkest England, erstwhile Poet Laureate of Cheshire, and quite likely the most genial promoter of poetry south of Seamus Heaney. Entering the so-called sunset years has not prevented him forging a second marriage, lodging in Grahamstown/Makhanda, and falling deeply in love with the thorny and shaggy wildness of the Eastern Cape. He has published several volumes of fine and affecting poetry, both his own (notably Non-Dog, The Cull and All Weathers) and anthologies of others’ (For Rhino in a Shrinking World and Poems of the Grahamstown Diaspora). As one of his many ventures to insert poetry into everyone’s lives, he ran for several years a monthly poetry-reading evening, dubbed Reddits. A wonderful free-for-all space in which greying locals recited Robbie Burns alongside township rappers, established poets intoned alongside students trying out. Somehow Harry would keep things under control, with always just the right word of encouragement, solemnity or jokiness.

Sadly for us, Harry and his wife have emigrated to another country – that is, Stellenbosch – a “land of plastic grass/ and birdlessness”. This has been a serious emotional wrench for him, as several poems in this new volume, Thicket, attest. Reddits readings continue, but they’re not quite the same. Come back, Harry, all is forgiven! In fact, he was back recently, to launch this collection, coinciding with a whole “Thicket Festival” happening in nearby Bathurst. The Eastern Cape’s Albany Thicket is not just a generic term: it has become a scientifically-recognised biome in its own right, with its own unique assemblage of biodiversity, of endemic species of bird and tree, mouse and mole. Harry Owen’s loving observations of the region’s landscapes, flora and fauna, and especially of birds, forms the core of this collection. Individual poems focus on the cicada, cobras, bougainvillea, a mantis, even a moth called the Cycad looper.

The richness is perhaps best summed up in “Amakhala Venn” (Amakhala being a nearby game reserve with which Harry formed a special bond). There, startling colours clash and overlap, as in a Venn diagram, and one gains hints of “the way the world once was, the way it yearns to be.” This is ‘Nature’. the matriarch, “mama, mother”, a world of “watchful calm” in which “the guileless impulse of animals” offers a stance less torturous than the human.

But Harry does not succumb to a vacuous Romanticism. Whatever soul-food quiet nature might provide, it doesn’t come cheaply or unalloyed: Harry acknowledges the existence of the electrified fence; and “how would we feel/ without it? Be honest now.” The thickets may be where snakes cavort and mate in wild independence, but it is also subject to hardship, as in the poem “Drought”, and it’s full of spines one has to grasp. Not an easy world. That call for honesty is another persistent feature of Harry’s life-view, and it goes along with his accessibility; there is no modernist or postmodernist trickery here, no portentous obscurity.

One can feel a little more at ease in one’s garden, perhaps. A number of these poems are set in or derived from, the Owens’ property in Makhanda, happily endowed with some shadowing trees rich with life. One can glean some sense of ease here, as in the poem “Sapiens”:

Dusk is drifting in and the air feels

autumnal, chilled, as now you stand,

peeing, under a sneezewood tree

in the garden where a black-headed

oriole joins you in joyful retreat.

Two dogs play, “wise beyond words”. But even here unease intrudes. For example, in “Scraping the Leaves” Harry, mid-contemplation, compares us humans to an olive thrush scratching frenetically through a leaf-pile:

Are we so very different? All through life

we scatter someone else’s stale debris

around us, hurling dry twigs to the air.

We flail to survive, and habit’s the long-

established way of doing it. But fed,

safe, watered – must we still insist on scraping?

These destructive habits, which we dignify or excuse as “normality”, may be just “that damaged smear of life we’ve become accustomed to”, like a smoker’s hack, “wasting us all away.”  Quite a few poems have an air of elegiac mourning for non-human lives lost, and sometimes an edge of rancour at human-induced damage. Moreover, Mother Nature is liable to get her own back, not least likely via plagues such as Covid-19. Harry echoes the great eco-poet Douglas Livingstone in “La Corona”: “The earth comes fighting back, and who can blame her?” He is not as misanthropic or vengeful as some, mostly feeling just “a deep sadness, regret. Frustration.” Few if any South African poets since Livingstone are writing with such ecologically-informed accuracy and engagement, even activism (his edited collection For Rhino in a Shrinking World is just an extension of in-the-field engagement with famous wildlife vet William Fowlds). ‘Nature’ is not some detachable entity ‘out there’, but an intertwining of processes and presences that helps make us who we are.

Humans don’t always treat one another much better than they do the natural world, the rhinos “dead,/ orangutans cremated for palm oil,/ and our rancid oceans choke[d] on plastic”. Harry reserves a particular brand of outright condemnation for the depredations of corrupt politicians and officials. In “Slough Revisited”, a poem modelled on satirically jaunty rhymes by John Betjeman, the grubby trash of Grahamstown is explicitly targeted, its “sick municipality” full of “parasites whose serpent tongues/ keep singing their mendacious songs”.  But the poem is also a call to a different kind of solidarity and self-sufficiency, and a call to “vote them out”.

That’s unusually political for Harry, but it also speaks to the variety of verse forms and subjects Harry can persuasively tackle, from visits to England to generous tributes to fellow poets, including the late Mary Oliver and Chris Mann. Such seriousness is offset by touches of characteristic humour. He takes self-deprecating delight in noting that a “nightbird”, calling mysteriously in the dark, in fact turned out to be a fruit bat.

The coastline also features regularly. Harry and Chrissie would retreat periodically to a house at Chintsa, near East London. There, the ever-present, “uniquely various” sea casts the poet into meditative states. The beach provides long walks on which to observe the agamas and the oyster-catchers, the shells and the wind-patterns on sand, its hidden rocks and incoming storms. On that beach, too, Harry found himself rather surprisingly suffering a “cardiac event” – a heart attack. Superb care in East London saved his life, the period of hospitalisation being the subject of a prose piece that opens Thicket. If he had not faced up to his mortality before, boy, now he certainly had to. Grappling with ageing, the fragility of the body and of being, the imminence of death, is one strong theme of this collection. Questions around what he has achieved, why he exists at all, who he has become, circle back repeatedly.

As one might expect of this energetic but humble being, at once enterprising and self-effacing, he fails, or perhaps refuses, to come to definite conclusions. In “Mantis” – a poem perhaps owing something to Ruth Miller’s poem of the same title – the insect, with the “cursive scrawl” of its thorax and its “voracious perspicacity”, trapped against glass, throws the poet into analogous confusion: “Are you trapped, lost? Or are you here by choice?/You twist your head and glare at me./ We are alone. What is it I do not know?” The attitudes are highly variable, moody: now he feels we are as “essential” as any other organism, at another point entirely “inconsequential”. He can feel himself “blessed”, even as he questions, “But who am I?/ Who have I ever been?”

A question that sets one up for further creativity, and a question for each and every one of us. A searching, vivid, open-ended volume of poems for any and all of us.

****

Thicket is available from Minimal Press, www.minimalpressbooks.co.za 

Blog 129 - Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree" and non-human life

 

American writer Cormac McCarthy is probably best known to the general public through the films made of his novels No Country for Old Men (Javier Bardem with that dreadful hairstyle and stun-gun), or All the Pretty Horses (Matt Damon dashing on horseback), or The Road (Viggo Mortensen in quite possibly the bleakest futuristic story ever told). What can’t be filmed is McCarthy’s language – extraordinarily rich, even overwrought, laced with resonant archaisms, grammatical oddities and invented colloquialisms. Blood Meridian, probably the most influential of his novels (at least two South African writers have consciously tried to mimic its inimitable style), is exemplary in this regard. You’ll never see the Sonoran desert, or indeed any desert, the same way again, or think of the aesthetics of violence the same way either.

But my favourite McCarthy novel is Suttree (1979), acknowledged by some readers as his masterpiece. Unusually for him, it’s set in a city – 1950s Knoxville, Tennessee – and unusually for him his main character is quite likeable, compassionate despite being radically dislocated. I’d hazard that if the novel has a central theme, it’s the persistence of compassion, of a certain ragged and rugged community loyalty, in the face of unpromising, even apocalyptic, circumstances. Ex-jailbird Cornelius Suttree is surviving by fishing the sludgy backwaters of Knoxville’s river. He occupies a decaying houseboat on the edge of McAnally Flats, an impoverished slum of broken architectures, car wrecks, weeds, washed-up vagrants and the aged, often black, cast-offs of the American city. The area’s name, with its echo of anal, matches the “cloaca maxima” of the oil- and slaughterhouse-polluted river; the place is neck-deep in trash, meticulously observed. Suttree walks about a lot, mostly abstains from systemic drunkenness and endemic criminality, drifts in and out of solvency and, within his means, dispenses help and money to his fellows, in a gritty and unsentimental way.

McCarthy’s extensive descriptions of landscapes generally have lent themselves to ecologically-orientated readings, or “ecocriticism” – not least of all those in Suttree. Ecocriticism, as a school of approaches aimed at bringing to light and interrogating human relations with the natural world, has proliferated into various sub-branches. One increasingly popular branch aims to dislodge the human or anthropocentric perspective in favour of an ecocentric one. It wants to knock humanity off its alleged pedestal of dominant uniqueness and to view it rather as just one amongst a multitude of other creatures, all networked together in an infinite variety of ways. A burgeoning sub-school of so-called Critical Animal Studies asserts that other animals are equally unique and valid centres of consciousness and agency, and their roles need to be acknowledged in our readings (and writing) of literary works. Even more recent is Critical Plant Studies: maybe plants have a proto-consciousness, too, or at least are responsive to network ‘signals’ of some sort. In any event, there they are, and we are wholly dependent on them.

Now Animal and Plant studies are being enveloped by “multispecies” perspectives. So far, this has been pursued more in ethnography and anthropology, but is making its way into literary studies, too. It draws partly on Darwinian and post-Darwinian evolutionary theories; in this view we are just a twig on the great “tree of life”, which envisions species branching endlessly away from one another in a riot of inadvertent creativity. More recent microbiological science complicates this picture. Intra-cellular mitochondrial studies by Lynn Margulis and her acolytes have gradually persuaded biologists that across the “vertical” twiglets of the evolutionary tree, viruses and bacteria can cross from species to species, hijacking cells and turning them to unexpected uses via so-called “horizontal gene transfer”. It’s suddenly now a very “tangled tree”, to borrow the title of David Quammen’s rather irritatingly chatty book on the subject. This holds true of our own bodies. It has long been known that we share 96% of our genes with the great apes, 70% with bananas. Leading ecocritical thinker Donna Haraway is fond of reminding us that only about 10% of our body’s cells contain uniquely human DNA: the vast majority is commanded by bacterial, microbial, viral material. Not to mention a plethora of parasites, from worms to skin mites. We are, each one of us, already a multispecies entity. It all makes deciding what our allegedly unique “self” really is, or even, in some extreme views, if it exists at all. At any rate, that we do live in a multispecies world is an indisputable fact. That our very existence depends upon a multispecies network is also a fact. Attitudes towards those facts, however, can vary and conflict.

Is all this relevant to Suttree? I think so. Of course, others have latched onto ecocritical readings of McCarthy long before Ol’ Slow-boat Wylie here chugged up the river. But no discussions I’ve seen so far go into Suttree’s multi-species dimension. Scholars highlight the novel’s environment of historically layered trash and industrial pollution; some of the animal presences; America’s obsession with the car as the primary manifestation of Cartesian rationalism and environment-destroying technology; and the social-justice consequences of ecological degradation. All well and good, but still rather anthropocentric. Yet it seems to me that a multispecies reading of Suttree is unavoidable, in fact essential to its main themes. The novel is saturated with non-human presences, from weeds to bees, from pigeons to catfish, from cats to honeysuckle, from newts to moulds. This riot of life has its own history, on a geological scale. Here is a typical passage from the very first page:

Old stone walls unplumbed by weathers, lodged in their striae fossil bones, limestone scarabs rucked in the floor of this once inland sea. Thin dark trees through yon iron palings where the dead keep their own small metropolis … the deathware stained with carrion. … Past these corrugated warehouse walls down little sandy streets where blownout autos sulk on pedestals of cinderblock. Through warrens of sumac and pokeweed and withered honeysuckle giving onto the scored clay banks of the railway. Grey vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk’s shell. Weeds sprouted from cinder and brick. A steamshovel reared in solitary abandonment against the night sky. Cross here. By frograils and fishplates where engines cough like lions in the dark of the yard. To a darker town, past lamps stoned blind, past smoking oblique shacks and china dogs and painted tires where dirty flowers grow.

So much is going on here. Primordial fossils lie alongside the recent dead. Vines, shells (and everything else, it’s implied) obey the same implacable laws of nature. Even the machinery partakes of the animal. All is subject to a “slow cataclysm of neglect”, though natural life paradoxically flourishes. In this “encampment of the damned”, shaped by “wave on wave of the violent and insane”, only “ruder forms survive”. Suttree himself, who is both rude and somewhat educated, seems almost indestructible.

Some of the ecocentric thinking I outlined earlier is rather utopian in tenor. Though the predatory dimension of Nature may be paid some lip service, there’s an underlying hopefulness: If only humans were no longer seeing themselves at the top of the pile and as ultimately privileged, but rather as networked in some sort of ecological equality with multiple others, somehow a better, more respectful world will emerge. Somehow anthropogenic damage to our environment will be mitigated. I like the thought but am not convinced. It seems to me that this idea in itself emerges from conditions of coddled privilege. What happens to multispecies co-existence in conditions of extreme poverty, where there are few margins for error, little education, and thin soil for compassion? Suttree seems to encapsulate just such a world, where emotional engagement with the non-human world is something of a luxury, if it happens at all. These are trash(ed)-humans who are emphatically not at the top of the pile. Similar conditions may be observed in locations across the globe, from the Cape Flats to Mumbai, Lagos to Sao Paolo. This is not an environment in which ideas of beautiful nature, of conservation, or of animal rights, can easily establish.

Take the animals of Suttree, most of which are either untamed or victims. Though the odd character has a pet cat or companionable dog or a bunch of goats, love or caring is rare compared to normalised negligent violence. It’s not so much ‘cruelty’, as that implies a certain deliberate malice; here, the violence is shorn of almost all emotion. The pig slaughterhouse across the river is impersonal; people eat the pork without qualm. Meat hanging in a local market is described as objectively grotesque, but not because Suttree himself expresses any disgust. He kills and guts his catches in apparent complete detachment; just once or twice comes a hint that the fish flopping in the bottom of his skiff might register or feel what they’re going through. At one point Suttree casually throws a stone at a tethered goat, without malice or obvious intent. He also slings mud and stones at a defiant cat angling to steal one of his fish. Another fisherman, an “Indian”, specialises in hunting turtles; the slaughter of one is described in excruciating but entirely dispassionate detail. Harrogate, an unhinged if inventive teenaged criminal whom Suttree half-adopts, poisons bats with strychnine and tries to pass them off as rabid, for a bounty. Suttree does insist on freeing a dog stuck in a neighbour’s slops-barrel, whereas the neighbour is inclined just to leave it. But it’s not clear whether Suttree is concerned to help the dog or the neighbour; there’s no apparent solicitude for the liberated hound.

On the Flats, the fragile contingency of all lives is exposed, those of humans no less than of weeds. In this sense there is a kind of Darwinian democracy at work – or a ‘critterocracy’. Repeatedly these humans are not so much reduced to the animal, as ‘levelled up’ with them. In dozens of instances people are compared to animals: a man is “owlfaced”, youths are energetic as horses, Harrogate is known as the “city mouse”, Suttree himself is like a wandering dog. These examples of simile might be dismissed as merely colourful comparisons, some demeaning and even in today’s perspective downright racist. But there are too many to be merely occasional, and in other instances McCarthy seems to want to meld them more organically: “Suttree looked towards the river and tested the air with his nose in a gesture of some earlier antecedent.” A primordial animality lives within him – a textual analogue to horizontal gene transfer, you might say.

In one brief but significant interlude, Suttree takes an aimless hike up into Tennessee’s forested and snow-topped mountains. Inadequately clad and ill-provisioned, he drives himself to the point of hallucinatory starvation. He experiences something of old-school ‘pure appreciation of nature’, relayed in lyrical terms, an apprehension of “incredible loveliness”:

Old distaff Celt’s blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care.

Here is something like the transcendence of arrogant self-hood that our ecocentric theorists would valorise, but for Suttree it scarcely acts as a life-changing epiphany. He just doesn’t care. It’s too close to hunger-induced derangement, in which he sees “with a madman’s clarity the perishability of his flesh.” A certain wisdom in that, but it’s hard to read McCarthy as wanting us to regard the lovely Thoreau-like vision seriously. It's as ephemeral as any other stance. Suttree can’t survive ‘in Nature’, however beautiful. His starving hallucinations, often nightmarishly multispecies in appearance, will be repeated and amplified later when he falls ill with typhoid (another organism, of course).

In a contrastive interlude Suttree, having befriended a successful prostitute, finds himself in money, an apartment in Knoxville’s city centre, a smart(ish) suit, and even a swanky car. But he becomes even more directionless and disillusioned; this environment is sterile, artificial and faithless. Non-human life is notably absent. Even McCarthy’s prose becomes grey and flat. It all falls apart, and Suttree is soon right back where he was. In effect, McCarthy’s eco-lyricism, precision of observation, awareness of deep history, and lushness of language are reserved for the McAnally Flats. His are the aesthetics of destruction and neglect, a kind of beauty of the apocalyptic – indeed of successive apocalyptic upheavals. At the end of the novel, another one looms: the Flats and their destitute inhabitants, from burdock and rats to people and moths, are being flattened for the sake of an expressway, a concrete-and-girder altar to America’s obsession with the car. The reader suffers a genuine sense of loss: for all its entangled horrors and poverty, McCarthy has rendered the place strangely loveable, partly because of its very precariousness.

In the end Suttree has to leave the Flats, hitch-hiking away through the new and dusty roadworks. In an echo of his own scratchy philanthropy, a boy spontaneously brings him some water. In the closing paragraphs, real and symbolic and hallucinatory animals again define the tenuousness of his being:

Behind him the city lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears. Off to the right side the white concrete of the expressway gleamed in the sun where the ramp curved out into empty air and hung truncate with iron rods bristling among the vectors of nowhere. When he looked back the waterboy was gone. An enormous lank hound had come out of the meadow by the river like a hound from the depths and was sniffing at the spot where Suttree had stood.

            Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.

*****

Blog 128 – "Legacy of Dust"? Douglas Livingstone's poetic ecology

 

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