A Deeper Meaning

Today’s post is from regular guest blogger:

Ed Rybicki, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

I inadvertently became a published literary critic a little while ago. A long-time English Department colleague asked me for some help interpreting the collected works of possibly the most important modern poet from South Africa, and I quickly got caught up in some of the more interesting poetry I have ever read:

Douglas Livingstone was South Africa’s most important poet of the late twentieth century. He was also a practicing scientist who received a PhD for his work as a parasitologist for the CSIR in Durban, testing water purity levels along the Natal coast. Did Livingstone use poetry to reflect on his work as a scientist? Did his findings as a scientist influence his poetry? The self-reflection on the motivation for and results of a life of science come as he starts off on his early morning routine of driving along the coast to collect water for testing:

… coffee, toast, the rush for the lab
in the dark to gather up paraphernalia
load the station wagon and off again
for the river: man as hunter, Ahab
again, and Nomad, more prosaically
the quarry is microscopic Escherichias,
salmonellas, staphylococci, ascarid eggs,
coliphages, abject in the face of men,
a turning to an urge to heal the earth, its waters,
first the detection of ills which becomes
life-long non-progressive
find & measure the ills first, others
can heal with statute, exhortation,
engineering, first and for a lifetime detect. [RF: 473]

He then muses on the vision the microscope gives into the nature of life:

… Miraculous
cheek that prying probe, like some damned
gods voyeuristic telescope:
cilia spun from spirochaetes,
chloropasts from bacteria.

Billion year-old invaders
the silent mitochondria
propel our mobile towers, shared cells
sparking, colonized by vandals:
a fifth column of DNA
in interstellar sequences,
bland in their promiscuity. [RF, 287]

Heady stuff…deep thinker, Dr Livingstone. And in tune with modern microbiological thinking at a time when many biologists wondered if it were true. But he also had fun - and this is the one I printed out to stick up on the wall of the lab:

THE PASSIONATE BACTERIOLOGIST TO HIS LOVE

Come live with me & be my love
Up in the lab… first floor, above:
Where, shrouded in hygienic white.
We’ll potter through the febrile night.

Up here amid the test-tube racks
The centrifuge, the power- pack
I’ll show you botulinous meat
Mutations of a Spirochaete.

Entamoeba’s selfish mission
(Delighting in asexual fission):
And, just to elevate your hair
Some droppings from the Old Grey Mare.
Bacilli with a sunset hue
Will form a little chain for you.
And cocci on a culture plate
Will make your giddy heart gyrate.
You’ll see some eggs infected by
A Virus from a bloodshot eye;
For your delight, my lover doll,
I’ll flourish spleens in alcohol.
With dawn the roosters start to crow:
We’ll make a little fungus grow.
If you dig culture, little dove.
Why, come upstairs and be my love.

There’s obviously some culture in microbiology… B-)

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