Rage is natural, but ultimately less effective than being loving

            My background as a future doctrinal law professor has been, shall I say, circuitous. This is my second career, and my prior career was as a social justice warrior and clinician. Clinicians are deeply and badly needed in this world, and while I once regretted my decision to pursue a doctrinal path and would have given anything to go back in time to highly specific moments, like the protagonist in the science fiction movie, The Time Traveler’s Wife (though I’m a woman and not a man, and I’m an academic, not a librarian), I don’t regret and will never regret it, though if I’d known what it would have involved and could have foreseen each and every aspect of my journey, no force on the entire planet could have compelled me to go through with it, unless of course I was compelled by the laws of spacetime itself. 

I leave the specific question of time, a deep interest of mine, to another moment. There are many wise physicists who studied or study the question of time, such as my hero Stephen Hawking whose theory of time in the “Big Crunch” is part of a new paper I’m working on and I seek to vindicate him though I have no idea if I’m right, Brian Green, Carlo Rovelli, and my personal favorite because I have a family connection, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Kary Mullis (he was never an academic, and worked within industry, and won the Prize for PCR, not for his work on time, though he wrote an eccentric paper as a graduate student that Nature shockingly published), and of course a woman I saw speak at a physics conference named Nikta Fakhri at MIT whose original work actually suggested time reversal might be possible, though her paper was not published in this form. Time is an open question that any aspiring physicist would be delighted to crack because it’s one of the biggest unanswered questions in physics and the person who solves it if they solve it in time will actually win the Nobel Prize assuming it can be experimentally validated.

But returning to my circuitous path, as a clinician I had no faith. And that’s okay, not everybody needs to have faith, and I don’t judge atheists at all, and I know many lovely and wonderful persons who identify as atheistic, I’m just not one of them. However, my lack of faith resulted from a dark decade where I was deeply out of alignment with myself, even though ironically I prayed for this decade to happen . . . be extremely careful what you wish for, it may be granted, and in the future I resolve not to pray for bad things or pain because I got exactly what I wanted . . . a career in constitutional law, a lot of pain and suffering (why would I wish for this, please ask my former self, past-self what were you thinking?), and I worked on cases with some of the most bizarre fact patterns I’d ever seen. I also prayed to burn out and start writing about structures, the subject of my job talk paper. I kid you not. I actually made a specific prayer with all of this and uncovered it later when I went rooting through my diaries, and everything I prayed for had come to pass in the most bizarre way imaginable, though I had to take a rest stop at Yale Law School before I fully came into my powers at Cornell. At Cornell, I also strangely prayed for some bad things, and man do I regret those, and all I have to say, is, darling past self, what were you thinking, when you pray ask for good things and be sure you want them because the worst curse as Trumon Capote can tell you is “answered prayers.” (It’s his unpublished book where he wrote a tell-all biography about his rich friends in New York and mocked them all. Afterwards he was ostracized and his career ended, and no one published this book.)   

Luckily, when I was at Cornell I was surrounded by many wonderful people of faith, and had a spiritual awakening circa 2019, which started a process of me coming into alignment with myself. (I also prayed to have a spiritual awakening, though guess what I wasn’t sincere, but it happened anyway.) I cannot make this stuff up, but it’s true, and I’ve established that I don’t make knowing misstatements anymore. To the extent my current prayers haven’t been granted, perhaps it’s because I’m not fully sure of what I want, and I go back and forth like a sine wave and while I love sine waves in my math, of course they can be incredibly frustrating to people in my life who would like me to make up my mind for once in my life, and other people have agendas for me and what I should do, but respectfully isn’t my life and aren’t my prayers up to me?

Suffice it to say, when you go through a spiritual awakening, often one of the steps may be losing everything, and sometimes you have to lose everything to value it. This is called the “Dark Night of the Soul.” Okay, so I didn’t lose everything, but I lost a lost. And once I lost it, I did something I’m absolutely not proud of, which was yelling at the top of my lungs. I’d been a yeller in my personal life, but in general I was very professional at Cornell, and I think one of the hardest things about my decision to leave Cornell was that I renounced one of my gifts, which is that I am a trained debater, and was a born litigator, and I have litigation in my veins, no matter how hard I try to remove it. I think I disappointed a lot of the people I care about because they could see my gift and could not understand why I’d renounce something I was obviously good at and talented at, and that seemed to benefit them. 

At any rate, I renounced litigation in part because I wanted to be a more peaceful and less adversarial person, and while I don’t oppose the adversarial system and that’s not what my current scholarship on game theory stands for, my view of litigation is that especially in these dark times, while litigation may be our best shot of preserving democracy, I personally don’t have the warrior mentality I used to go into battle and subject myself to what most litigators do, which is press their opponents from every angle, sometimes even including using nasty techniques to win, including screwing with an opponent’s head, or even something a mentor I love dearly but disagree with now who advised putting arguments a brief you have no intention of pursuing merely to force your opponent to waste precious briefing space on an issue. Basically, I discovered litigation brought out a side of me that I disliked, and I didn’t want to be that human anymore, while I simultaneously discovered another passion I had no idea could feed and nourish my soul in the way it has, but I discovered what I was put on the planet to do, which is combining law, game theory, math, and physics, even though this process took about 5 years and is still ongoing, and Cornell was generous enough to allow me to explore this interest, even after I renounced litigating to everyone’s shock and dismay. 

But I guess I will say that outcomes in life are not guaranteed, and if you do something for a payoff or outcome, this is not a good motive. There’s a great paper I was originally given at Stanford about people who do their work for a) love of the craft, b) prestige, or c) both. And sadly, much as I wish I were solely in this game called academia solely for love of the craft, at Stanford I fell in the worst possible category – people who write both for love of the craft and are also outcomes oriented. You’d think these people would be the most successful of all, but shockingly people who do their work solely for love of the craft do the best. From a spiritual perspective, perhaps being too attached to outcomes is not something the universe rewards, and many great spiritual teachers instruct that before a wish is granted, one must be detached. I have no idea if they are right or not, only that if I could do what I do solely for the love of the craft, I absolutely would. But sadly, one of my faults or virtues is ambition, and partly I want to succeed to maximize my impact on the world. I don’t do it for myself (though hey most people in the academy like nice outcomes), but sometimes a body of scholarship actually does have the chance to change the world. And in my view, if someone could prove John Nash (the subject of my research) is wrong, or that Stephen Hawking was right, the entire world would change, and substantially for the better. I’m not saying that person is me, just that I’m dogged and persistent and often just refuse to take “no” for an answer when I want something. My parents joked that when I was a kid, I failed to understand the word “no” and I used to respond as a 5-year-old “which part, the n, or the o?” I just have always been the most willful, stubborn, persistent person I know, like it or not I’ve been this way my entire life. 

Luckily, although losing my community at Cornell through my decision to leave it in the strange hope that somehow eventually I could come back to Cornell (which by the way, makes no sense .  . . I sincerely wish I had just discussed my desires a little more openly with the people I love because I did not leave them because I didn’t love them, and if they think this, let me unconfuse them). I love Cornell, though I don’t have Cornell email access anymore, which makes me sad.  But sometimes a person has to lose something to know what they had, and people often take things for granted until they lose them, and to know what something meant or ought to mean to them. And that’s just what grief is, it’s a process that is really hard, on both an individual and their support network, and to the extent my decision to give up a gift to pursue another gift and I actually turned out to be even better at this other gift (i.e., math and physics), it’s one of life’s ironies. But I can say that I yelled a whole lot a lot, and rage is simply a part of grief. 

So, to people I’ve yelled at, please understand it’s something I’m not proud of and my seemingly litigiousness results from the lack of using my litigation skills, plus some injustices I won’t get into all that much, but one of the things that happened when I left Cornell reminds me of one of my favorite books by the author Junot Diaz, whose life fell apart after the love of his life cast him into the streets (and for good reason, he was a big cheater, womanizer, and it’s been alleged he’s a #MeToo perpetrator. I side with his former fiancée even though he’s one of my favorite authors and I’m so glad he exists, and read his work and will continue to buy his books in part because he did the work and got right with himself and because he is the most talented author I have ever read, and should not be silenced for any reason.) 

Like Junot Diaz, I was also cast into the streets by my ex-partner (though not for the reason he was), and crazy things happened, and my world just broke, and I was actually wrongfully levied $17,000 by the State of California, and on a trip back to Ithaca my former bank gave me illogical directions through the City of Geneva after I told them had a case that defeated a construction company located in Geneva and I told them the State of California had informed me my former bank had dishonored a payment, or when I got lost and my rental car actually refused to start when I was at a construction site when I definitely had enough gas in the tank. I’m not making this up, but I’ve established I am no liar, and from a spiritual sense perhaps my life breaking down in crazy ways resembles his story about a bad breakup. I honestly don’t know what to do about this, because my love of litigating was a really healthy outlet for my rage, and I also have no idea how to politely express that it’s not okay when I’m confronted with unjust and illegal situations like when my rent check did actually bounce and I had the money, or when the Oakland Police Department wrongfully towed my car right before I started my present job, and singled my car out from an entire block full of people when no one else had moved their car and I was towed when there is no parking enforcement on my block and I was allegedly towed because I had not moved my car for over 72 hours and my car was not actually towed the date the Oakland Police Department claimed and I have proof. 

To return to yelling, I think rage is a feeling that many people share, and specifically rage at injustice or when life is unfair, though basically most people already know life is unfair, and prior to my leaving Cornell, of course I knew life was unfair because I witnessed life being so unfair to many persons of color and women, but I was one of the most privileged people I knew, so it came as a shock to me when my life in particular was unfair, but maybe it had been unfair in my favor all along. Even still, I stand and have always stood for fairness, including in my career as a social justice warrior where I literally served torture victims in Chile, and my scholarship stands for a dream of fairness and peace and one of my favorite quotes is by MLK, and he said: “an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” 

But I will "be the change I seek in the world," and apologize right now to the universe for yelling, which I still sometimes do when people wrong me, or I am really hungry. As stated, yelling is a part of grief, and in the literature on Holocaust survivors, one of the most famous and wise Jewish spiritual teachers instructs that feeling rage is normal, and actually healthy, it’s just poor form to yell at those you love or at colleagues, and to the extent I’ve done this, I’m unspeakably sorry. I’ve did the best I could with the tools I had, and I sometimes yell because I’m not a perfect person, and many important people in history have also yelled like Malcolm X and Jesus. I prefer MLK even if he had a symbiotic relationship with Malcolm X, and could not have received support from the North had he not appeared mainstream by comparison. And MLK is right to be peaceful and kind, and I have compassion and forgive myself and anyone else who needs forgiveness. And I actually don’t think yelling is all that bad because many as explained above many other spiritual teachers I respect a lot did yell, including Malcolm X, and Jesus himself from the Bible actually seems to have caused quite a few scenes and was known for overthrowing an actual table in a temple while he spoke truth to power in his quest to ironically promote a message about love. Yes, Jesus stood for love, and he also yelled. “Both/and.” So to the extent I also stand for love, and sometimes yell, I apologize again, but I will not quit speaking truth to power, though I hope to do it more gently because gentle teachers like my former mentor Mark Jackson are so wise, and Mark if you read this, know I love you from the bottom of my heart and soul, and also know that I just accidentally turned out to be a crackerjack at math and physics and it’s what I was put on earth to do.

And my game theory work suggests no human is beyond redemption or beyond forgiveness, even Junot Diaz, and that’s part of the work of Common Justice I discussed earlier. By definition all humans matter, and shout out to Joe Margulies who inspires me even if he probably forgets me and we worked together on a death penalty case at the Brennan Center and I knew you at Cornell. You wisely said no human is a monster, and I fully agree. I once thought I myself was a monster because I have actually done one legitimately bad thing in my entire life, and it took a decade for me to forgive myself and in that “lost decade” I punished myself disproportionately for something that wasn’t even illegal and self-harm (in my case, overeating, watching too much TV, or involving myself with men who weren’t right for me) is ill-advised and no one should ever do it, and because I’ve forgiven myself and done the work, I can say with confidence forgiveness is a Biblical value and my scholarship stands for peace, for all humans everywhere. Including Donald Trump, even if simultaneously he is an existential threat to democracy and must be disarmed. And even if I also defend MLK, Jesus, Malcolm X, and the NSA in the same breath. In the world I stand for, there’s room for everyone at the proverbial table, even if the physics of walking on water are dubious. But Freeman Dyson whose research I hope to vindicate and who was a Nobel-caliber physicist with a Cornell connection and without an actual PhD and was also Episcopalian, is my hero, and Pierre Curie went to seances and mediums and believed in the supernatural, and he’s an actual Nobel Laureate, and I’m not, so I’ll let them speak to the physics of walking on water if they could also rise from the dead.

Incidentally, it could be said Madame Curie herself married Pierre for his lab. Is that so bad? If she hadn’t done this, radiation therapy wouldn’t have been invented, and next time you see a cancer victim ask yourself what might happen if Madame Curie hadn’t married Pierre because she was the genius and it was her idea, not his. No marriage? Erase cancer treatment and X-rays, which she invented, and used on the battlefield to treat wounded soldiers from history. Should history judge Madame Curie or Pierre? I think not.   

-Cortelyou C. Kenney

[NB: I corrected Dr. Kary Mullis' Nobel Prize from Biology to Chemistry. Shame on me! I should obviously have known this, but Mullis was a biologist who invented PCR, but he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and had a degree in Chemistry. I know all sorts of juice on Dr. Mullis, but I won't disclose it here. Just reproduce his obit from UC Berkeley: https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-2019/intolerable-genius-berkeleys-most-controversial-nobel-laureate/. This correction was made on June 8, 2025, after I instituted my corrections policy, even though this post predates my corrections policy. I err on the side of caution, and I admit my own mistakes, which is a virtue, not a vice.]