mr170804 My mistake, too?  

I’m writing my autobiography. Is it to be my mistake? Should I be doing something else? I think about the world situation, and I remember what Signora Maria Guaita said: “Only artists and poets can save the world now,” she declared to me when I visited her in Florence. An old resistance fighter during WWII, I pay heed to and I honor her view.

But, here I am, writing about my life. Is this what an artist should be doing to help save Earth’s human life sustainability? Is this what an Emeralda Warrior should be doing? That old warrior, Maria Guaita, has her story—and the story of Il Bisonte, her printmaking school—in books.

Seven months and 450 pages into my autobiography, I read a memoir titled, My Mistake, by Daniel Menaker, a well-known writer in New York. Menaker wrote an article about his brother’s death—the second article he’d written about this tragedy and his self-blame. It was rejected.

He told his analyst about it. But his analyst, he writes:

“Instead of responding to the umbrage I’ve taken, he tells me that my brother’s death is threatening to turn into a nuclear integrative fantasy for me. Nuclear because it is becoming the center of my unconscious emotional life. Integrative because it creates a shape, a terrible and beautiful structure, for everything in my life that came before it and has happened afterward. And a fantasy because for reasons of unconscious conflict and patterns, I’ve begun to inject its occurrence into many parts of my history upon which it has no rational bearing.”

The analyst illustrated this nuclear integrative fantasy by what we know of the lives of survivors of the holocaust. Menaker continues to illustrate, from his experience with an example of nuclear integrative fantasy in meeting a woman whose brother had died, and who dwells on this in conversations with everyone she meets.

Is this a good use of time?