5/3/23

 Wednesday, May 3, 2023

In bed at 10:10, up at 5:53 after interrupted sleep with intestinal problems of unknown cause, dream of TSJ leaving for another state, wanting me to accept his pickup, in an unsafe condition, Caela, Jessie, Ben; 36℉, high of 52℉, sunny morning, cloudy afternoon and evening, wind NNW at 11mph, 4 to 12 mph and gusts up to 23 today, Sun rose at 5:41, sunset at 7:55, 14+12.      

Called Linda Barnes yesterday, breaking through my resistance to returning to the House of Peace,  I left a message on her voicemail but haven't heard back from her.

Returned Ed Felsenthal's call yesterday.  He said in the message he left that he had sent me an email yesterday but I haven't received it.  Ed hasn't returned my return call so I will send him an email this morning. . . . Ed called from his Marco Island retreat at about 10:30 to invite me to his and Lynn's 60th wedding anniversary in Palos Heights, IL on June 3.  They married at Christ the King Church in Beverly Hills, Chicago on June 8, 1963, with me among Ed's groomsmen, and Anne and I married in St. Eugene's in South Euclid, OH, one week later, with Ed as my best man.  We exchanged updates and schmoozed for 36 minutes, remarking that our group of college roommates, all in our 80s and still alive and kicking (though not too fast and not too high) are beating the odds on longevity.

"The Carapace of Self"  I read an essay in this morning's NYT,   Annie Ernaux Has Broken Every Taboo of What Women Are Allowed to Write By Rachel Cusk.  Last year, I read Ernaux's autobiographical 2020 novel Happening about her experiences obtaining an illegal abortion in 1963, 4 years before the legalization of oral contraception and 12 years before voluntary abortions were decriminalized.  In Rachel Cusk's essay, she discusses not only Ernaux's life and writing but also that of another French author, Delphine de Vigan, and in discussing her memoir Nothing Holds Back the Night about de Vigan's mother's suicide, Cusk says:

With this book, de Vigan spectacularly marked the end of her self-annexation, or rather the point at which the internal pressure of truth forced its content out into the world. Her mother’s suicide was a sort of refusal or breakdown of the female narrative. To comprehend it, every aspect of de Vigan’s reality had to be dismantled: the entire carapace of self, of history both personal and impersonal, of memory and fact and myth, of the collective life and the individual reality, and most of all of writing — narration — and its relationship to being. The book is not so much a reconstruction of her mother’s life as a gathering of evidence, by which the private and subjective is made public and accountable. It required a painstaking examination of her wider family — a formidable and traditionally French clan of aunts and uncles and grandparents — and therefore of family culture itself. The resulting book is an inquiry into the “reality” a child is born into, a domain tyrannized by authority structures and social codes in which the personal binds fatally with the authorized and communal to make a theater of blood relationships.

 

The phrase that caught my attention was a "carapace of self,"  the notion of a hard, outer shell we creatures build to protect our/selves from injury and, in the case of humans, from hurt, emotional pain, threats, etc.  It brought to mind feelings I've had in my younger life of the imposter syndrome, the sense of fraudulence, the sense that I don't belong here.  That feeling springs in large part from what Cusk calls family culture and 'the "reality" a child is born into, a domain tyrannized by authority structure and social codes in which the personal binds fatally with the authorized and communal . . .", i.e., the accident(s) of birth.  From all kinds of sources, our childhood imbues in us a sense of  who we are and where we belong.  My mother's occasional references to people who "come from money" was an unintended and unnecessary reminder that we did not "come from money."  Even the helpful, loving, and nurturing stress on the importance of education carried a not-so-veiled reminder that my parents were uneducated, working-class, blue collar workers.  When I got to Marquette to live and study and socialize with others my age who did 'come from money,' whose parents were business owners and managers or professional people, I couldn't avoid the feeling that I didn't belong here, that I was out of my league.  Ed Felsenthat's family lived in their own fancy home in the Beverly Hills neighborhood of Chicago; his father owned the family's lucrative business selling construction materials.  Jerry Nugent's dad was a stock or insurance broker.  Tom Devitt's dad was a LaSalle street lawyer, his uncle a federal judge in Minneapolis.  Even Joe Daley's father owned the family dairy farm outside of Columbus, WI.  Only Bill Hendricks among my roommates had a working mother, who was either divorced or widowed; we never asked or knew which.  I don't recall carrying that feeling of 'not belonging' into the Marine Corps, perhaps because of the degree to which Marine training leveled all of us, everyone wearing the same uniform, paid the same by rank and length of service, inculcated with the same martial values, etc.  But I had some of the same feelings again in law school where so many of my classmates were sons (we had precious few women students then) of lawyers or professional people.  Perhaps the heyday of the sense of fraudulence came when I was appointed to the full-time faculty upon graduation from law school.  The only other person to have had that distinction at MULS was the then chief justice of the Wisconsin supreme court, E. Harold Hallows.  I still remember one property law class I was teaching early in my academic career when I had an out-of-body experience, looking back at myself lecturing, as I lectured, and thinking that I was a clown.  

Looking back now on that ' imposter syndrome', not-belonging feelings, I realize they were a bit neurotic but not particularly surprising.  I worked hard and did well at a good high school and scored well on the Navy's competitive math and science test to win the means to go away to college with a full tuition scholarship.  I got into law school on the basis of my undergraduate record and military service and deserved to be there as much as any of the 'legacy admissions' and (forgive me) my classmates who 'came from money.'  And I was appointed to the faculty because of my law school record (which included excelling in moot court, editing the law review, and teaching 1Ls for months in a voluntary study group I led in my senior year.  But as Rachel Cusk, Delphine de Vigan, and Annie Ernaux remind me, we carry our childhood experiences with us as we move through life, including our childhood traumas, feelings of shame, and insecurities.  One of my favorite quotes: "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,—"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless."  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.