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PARTISAN REVIEW
creating distance between what we knew and felt and what we didn't
want to know or feel.
In the aftermath of
9tII,
therapists had to try to heal themselves
along with their traumatized patients. I tried to help my analysands
articulate past personal and public traumas that were instantaneously
connecting to the new one. As I helped them ward off Post-Traumatic
Stress symptoms from developing, I helped myself by writing a long
lyric sequence,
The Unholy Dark.
The sequence helped me metaphori–
cally connect the
9tII
trauma with earlier ones and to complete a
mourning that I had been unable to do before. But even this mourning
process would turn out
to
be incomplete until months later, when I dra–
matized the aftermath of the disaster in
Dark Carnival: A Dramatic
Monologue.
My wife and I were home when the first plane hit. My son who lived
downtown saw it and called us. We turned on the T.Y. and watched
transfixed as movie fantasy turned into reality. That day, and through
the rest of the week as I listened to my analysands, I observed that the
towers quickly became metaphors for parents who had died, or crum–
bled for them in childhood and adolescence. These metaphors showed
up in their dreams and just below the surface of their daylit dialogue. At
the same time, I saw how the fall of the towers was also connected for
me
with the deaths of my parents, and the clustered deaths of my
extended family.
Just months after my son was born, my father died from a flu shot–
an ordinary American object, like a commercial jet. Afterwards my sec–
ond tower, my mother, crumbled emotionally and then died of a heart
attack. As I was beginning to write
The Unholy Dark,
I found I was
connecting the rescue efforts
to
my failed efforts to rescue them. (I had
warned my father not to take that shot and had tried to stop my
mother's long fall. ) Further back the disaster and rescue efforts con–
nected to my being three years old and watching my mother fall down
unconscious, seemingly dead .
It
also hooked into another public disas–
ter I was directly involved in-trying to rescue children from starvation
during the Nigerian Civil War. Then, in my twenties, I realized I was
also trying to rescue my mother's childhood from the pogroms she had
witnessed in Russia.
Here is the first poem I wrote in
The Unholy Dark,
"In
the Restaurant":
I'm served by Erica, badly exposed
To Chernobyl burning in those breakfast years,
Scrambling her cells to terrorist cells
