stisdale

[stisdale]

Best American Essays 2024

My essay, Mere Belief, is included in the new volume of Best American Essays:

[stisdale]

[stisdale]

Mmmm

The first thing I learned to say in Luganda was Olyotya (o-lee-OH-tee-a). This means "How are you?" The second thing I learned to say was the reply: Mbulungi  (m-buh-lunj-ee). "Good." (Mbulungi sounds a lot like mulungi, which means beautiful. How many times have I answered a polite inquiry about my health by saying that I am beautiful?)

My friends here speak English fluently, as most educated Ugandans do. Like most Ugandans, they are too polite to make a fuss about my clumsy mistakes. But they are not too polite to be amused by them, for Allen or Dora to stroke my arm, calling me dear and laughing gently. The American accent is amusing and strange. When I try to say a simple sentence, "It is raining today" — tonnya, rain, drip, leak — the children laugh wildly. I've often seen children fall down, laughing. At me. David, a friend who lived here for a time, is good with languages. He remembers how long it took before he realized that when he was trying to get water—Njagala maazi, "I want water"—he was saying instead Njagala mazii. "I want shit." He noticed the "knee-slapping laughter," without knowing what it was about.

I will add only that you really want to know the word for "umbilical cord" before you try to talk about being stuck.

Conversation between acquaintances is sprinkled with barely translatable intimacies like bambi and banange wano. Everything sparkles and slides with the endless repetition of ooo and hmm and eeeh, interjections that are partly an acknowledgement, a signal that one is present, ready, paying attention. That one word, eeeh, says more to me about Uganda than the volumes of history I have read. Eeeh is affirmation, negation, philosophy, and existentialism. It is relation, time, self; it says "I am here" and "I have heard you" and also "I don't think so" and "Isn't life a corker?" In one thick book of Lugandan language lessons, I find a glossary of new words, including these definitions:

Wuuu - Wuuu

 Mmm - Mmm

 Eee - Eee

Oo - Oo

I read in the Foreign Service Institute textbook that to teach the use of such interjections, which are critical to the swap and barter of conversation, an instructor should "Say [Mmm.] as it is used in greetings. Say it several times, and teach the students to say it exactly as you do."  But how is that? I have never heard it sound the same way twice. The lesson continues:

A: Agaffa-yo?

B: Ekyali nnungi.

A: Mmm. [OR] Eee.

B: Agaff-yo?

A: Ekyali nnungi.

            B: Mmm.

A:  Mmm.

            And so it goes.

[stisdale]

Eclipse under clouds

Clear skies east and west, but we are under clouds. The disappearing sun peeks out now and then, we crane our necks, we go back to cornhole and barbecue. The world's colors deepen, enriched, until the purple thistle blossoms seem to glow, and then color seeps away into a gray dusk. The clouds tease at the last moment before totality, then close like the curtain after an encore.

But with that, a darkness like no other. This is not night, which is the absence of light. This is the potent presence of darkness, darkness substantial, darkness the thing. And darker, darker still. I cannot see the others. A few moments only and then the colorless dusk again and then daylight, so much light. Why do we ever say a cloudy day is dark? How can we forget how much light fills our days?

The next evening, lightning erupts in the sky. It is all around us for an hour: repeated, fracturing, splashing explosions of light in the transparent darkness of ordinary night.

[stisdale]

photo by Josh Hunt

[stisdale]

Our earliest years are a dream. There is so much to learn; the growing brain keeps only what it needs to survive. Ejected into a bright, cold place peopled with aliens, no language, no defense, we have to pick out a few essentials. Why bother to remember your second birthday party? Find the patterns, that’s what matters. Figure out who these characters are, the roles they play. Master these limbs, these senses, then forget the lessons. Learn to walk: Stand. Balance. Lift foot. Lean. Lift other foot. Lean. I can walk; I don’t remember learning to do so. Memory is for the future. Memory is what keeps us alive.

Still, we are story-making animals and so we make stories. From the earliest years we remember only the finest shards. The rest is created. We infer, we fill in, we explain. Nabokov said, “History begins,” finding himself around the age of four, standing beside a large divan.

After some years, we can reminisce. But who is to say how much is remembering what we were told? And this mysteriously remembering self just keeps waking up moment after moment, rising and falling away ceaselessly. And the ceaselessly arising self gives way to another, each succeeding the one past, and the self learns about rising and falling away, learns about succeeding selves, learns about the I who must inherit the scars and wounds of an uncountable line of extinct, impermanent Is, learns that this particular I will not remain, either.

In the 5th-century Visuddhimagga we find this teaching: that a living being endures for the length of a thought, just as a single point on a chariot wheel touches the ground as the wheel rolls. We roll on, the world spinning by, the road rolling away.

[stisdale]

Our democracy: broken, soiled, but you can still see the message.

[stisdale]

Jury Duty

The courthouse is new, and the jury waiting room is spacious, with lockers, a small kitchen, a little coffee shop near the stairs, large television screens and lots of comfortable chairs. The tall windows face east across the river, toward the mountain. But there are still two hundred of us pressed together for the next few days: all ages, old men in Carhartts and boots, young women in suits with briefcases. Even as late arrivals check in, we watch two long videos. One extols the civic responsibility of jury duty, and one—featuring our county’s racially diverse judges—teaches us about unconscious bias. A short, brightly smiling woman gives us polite but firm directions, and begins to call panels. There are three, and I am number 6 on the third panel.

Eighteen of us are seated in the courtroom. We get a long, friendly welcome from the judge, who reviews at length the reminders of unconscious bias, and tells us we are there for a trial on charges of harassment and assault. A sorry-looking fellow watches us from behind his young attorney. Brief clouds of bad breath float by, lingering fogs, and now and then I wonder how much virus the mists carry.

Each of us answers standard voir dire questions: Where do you live? Where do you work? What are your hobbies? Have you ever been the victim of a crime? What is your education? Do you know anyone in law enforcement?

It is difficult for many people to answer these questions succinctly. Have you been a victim of a crime? Yes, let’s start with when I was five and my wagon was stolen. But eventually it is my turn. I live in Northeast. I have a college degree. I am a writer. I have been the victim of two burglaries. I don’t know anyone in law enforcement.

Almost no one has been the victim of any crime, and the majority have some college education. But then the defense attorney asks us where we get our news. “Social media.” “Reddit.” “My mother.” “I don’t follow the news. “Friends.” Social media.” “Social media.” “Social media.” “Instagram.” (Instagram?) A few people mention the New York Times and NPR.  I make a list: New York Times, Washington Post, the local newspaper and radio stations.

The defense attorney asks us if we trust the justice system. I say that I am aware of a shortage of public defenders. The prosecuting attorney asks us how we would feel if the evidence consisted of an eyewitness. I say I couldn’t be able to convict a person based only on an eyewitness.

I am dismissed. Six people are empaneled, including the pony-tailed guy on DUI diversion and the old man next to me who had to be prompted to answer questions and actually said, “I’m not paying attention.”

I wish I had mentioned reading DW, The Guardian and Al-Jazeera.

Back to the jury room. The staff remains cheerful; the crowd remains restive. The screens show silent HGTV renovation shows. When the woman is ready to call another panel, she says, “I know. You will hate me. I am sorry!”

I am called back as the fortieth person on a panel of forty. The judge gives us a long reminder about unconscious bias, and tells us this is going to be a longer trial of several days for multiple serious charges: car theft, evading police. A handsome man with olive skin and a long black braid turns to look at us. The judge wants to know if a trial of this length will be a problem—“an honest problem,” she adds.

I am sitting next to a twenty-something woman with acne and brightly dyed hair who can’t hold still. She whispers to me; she is an artist, she can’t miss work, how can she get out of here? But she doesn’t raise her hand. Her legs jutter and shake.

Eight people are dismissed for hardship: a man who doesn’t speak English well, a few others who run a business on their own, and a gloomy sad sack of a man from my first panel, who says he is unable to speak above a whisper. Once again, I am near a flamboyant woman with long nails and lashes. She makes a lot of jokes; the defense here seems to like her. But she wants out. She does nails for a living and is losing income. It’s a hardship, she says. She is not dismissed.  

It is late in the afternoon and we are sent home for the day. The next morning, we are briefly seated and then sent to wait in the hallway. The fidgety artist never appears. We wait for almost three hours. People pace and stare at their phones and stare out the window at the heavy atmospheric river falling. A few people work on laptops. A few of us read. The woman with the long nails and eyelashes chuckles at her Instagram feed and noisily eats a foil-wrapped sandwich and a big packet of chips and a can of selzer. She mumbles and complains out loud to the room. Can’t we get this over with? How much longer does this go on? Now and then she heaves a big sigh. Everyone pray that we go soon.

Finally the clerk comes out to tell us that the case has been resolved, which I take to mean the guy pled and will do some time. But we are not dismissed. We return to the jury room.

It is an airport gate after several delays. Long silences. Inexplicable announcements. Staff in the background doing mysterious tasks. A few people grumble about the perceived but not articulated unfairness of it all. People nap, eat the expensive snacks from the coffee shop, stare at the silenced screens. A woman with the permitted circular needle does crochet and talks to everyone sitting nearby, though no one responds. The woman across from me has kicked off her shoes and curled up in the chair; she is on her ear buds, talking to a contractor about remodeling details. We are in a Bardo realm, suspended.

In mid-afternoon, the last panel of the day is called, twenty people. Most answer in a dead voice, Here, and rise to get their badges. “I know!” the woman says. “I am so sorry!” A few people never answer; they have wandered away. I want to be called. I feel lucky to be here. I’ve read four magazines and eaten a gyro and I believe in the jury system and it is only two days in two years. But clearly I am in the minority.

When we are finally all dismissed except for those kept in the courtrooms, I ask the woman what happens to people who don’t show up when their name is called. She says with the same bright energy she has maintained for two days. “It’s up to the judge, but maybe he makes them do jury duty all over again.” We both smile at this idea.

I ride home on the bus, rush hour. A boy plays a tinny video game. A kid in the back shrieks with anger. I can smell sweat and stale fried chicken. A man stinking of cigarettes holds his head in his hands, two garbage bags full of clothes at his feet. When the bus sways, people catch each other, apologize, turn to look out the windows again. These are my peers.

[stisdale]

Death Trivia Redux!

My friend Elizabeth Fournier and I will present an evening of trivia and strange facts about death in Oregon.

November 3 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

McMenamins Chapel Pub 430 N Killingsworth St, Portland, OR, United States

[stisdale]

The Fifth Season

Last fall I went to my hometown of Yreka and stayed at the Miner’s Inn. The parking lot filled up on Sunday evening with various utility trucks as the road repair and firefighter crews came in for the week. They were mopping up the huge McKinney fire, California’s biggest fire all year. It had burned for weeks through the Klamath wilderness: 60,000 acres, four deaths, at least 118 homes.

The workers were all on their way before eight the next morning, boots pounding up and down the staircases, leaving the breakfast buffet in shambles. My brother picked me up in his old Suburban and we headed into the Shasta River canyons on 263, a twisting terror high above the river, no guard rails, the beautiful river far below the rocky, arid slopes. We turned onto 96, the Klamath River Highway, which runs along the great river. The water had turned foamy and dark. In a while  patches of blackened ground appeared. Then whole hillsides, charred and torn. Piles of rubble. A broken chimney, twisted cars, grey ground. One of our old family cabins was destroyed, the foundation barely visible in a stand of dead ponderosa pine. Most of a small town was gone. A school left untouched. Distant moonscapes into the hills.

We stopped at the turn to Seiad Valley, where there’s a river flat of big eroded stones beside a pretty swimming hole under the bridge. Here the river rests, quiet and deep and cool, and today the pool is thick with dozens of King salmon. From the bridge, we turned off 96 and climbed up a narrow, sharply winding road above the wide Scott River. Houses were visible here and there through the thick green trees, and we couldn’t see fire damage at all. I know it is there, just over a steep hill, miles of it. But here it is clear and green and smells of blackberries.

Our other family cabin is several miles on. It is owned by a friend of my sister now, and they both met us on the road’s narrow shoulder. We looked around the little place, remembering, and then trotted down the path that is so much shorter now than when I was young, down to the river. The water is wide, deep, and slow here, with a rough stony cliff across the water. The huge rocks have barely moved: the one for sunbathing and the one for sliding off and the one for jumping off. So we did, my brother and me; we jumped off. It was very cold; we didn’t swim long.

A month ago, my cousin lost everything he had in the fire of Lahaina. Everything he had turned to ash. Three weeks ago, a fire ran over the rivers again. It was centered this time on the quiet pool of salmon. It still burns, burns in all directions, up against last year’s scar, into the high hills, across the roads, across the scattered cabins. Across the creeks that feed the deep, cold river. Into the tiny hamlet of Scott Bar, where one man dies. It burns in the cliffs across the river from our old cabin. It jumped the river once, hit the rocks, couldn’t get a purchase. The cabin still stands. And the fire still burns.  

Fire has become our fifth season.

[stisdale]

[stisdale]

In the middle

I took LSD a few times with a vague hippie named Terry. We watched the bananas on the table breathe; we let music fill our corpuscles. Once he played a recording of Alan Ginsberg reading Howl and I painstakingly wrote a manifesto, the ink alive across the page, bleeding from the pen: “There is never an answer to ‘why.’ You must never ask. The only answer is BECAUSE, which is no answer; so there must be no questions. Our collective ego is spun against the universe into nothing.” The letters run off the margins, large and then small, shifting. I cried because everything was derivative, everything plagiarized, imitated, stolen and mimicked. Another time we went to see The Three Musketeers, and when it was over we realized we had to cross two streets to get home. We had to cross streets that weren’t really there to avoid a death I didn’t, at that moment, believe in, and we had to do it in secret. It took a long time, I think, watching the liquid glow of headlights running past, slipping into the dark. Later our bodies turned to glass and everything felt like the middle of something, not a beginning or end.

I was seventeen, and I believed I was having original thoughts.

I left, I went to Ireland for three months, and only saw him one more time, bouncing up to his door, ready to begin again, and he was sitting in the kitchen with his wife and daughter.

[stisdale]

[stisdale]

The Bottom of the Sea

That night, I lay on the carpet, watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. A giant walking man-eating plankton was rampaging through the great submarine, the Seaview. Admiral Nelson was intent, staring down the possibly-Nazi biologist. “Doctor, did your experiments given any hint of this?” Dr. Reisner was upset. “There is regeneration in plankton, but only at a very primitive level. I do not understand this at all.” Neither do I, except that I liked the frisson of fear when the rubbery plant grabbed a crewman and dragged him down a corridor, screaming. My mother sat in her armchair, smoking, a Georgette Heyer novel on her lap, its interesting cover drawing my attention. “Come here,” she called to me. “Let me see your legs. I want to check for in-grown hairs.” I lay on my back and put my feet in her lap, and she ran her hands up and down my calves. I turned my head to the television. Captain Crane was on the intercom. “Anybody who tries to go in there is dead.” Admiral Nelson was firm: “It’s our only chance.” Crane looked stricken. “Aye, aye, sir.” But my attention was on my legs, the blissful stroke of her hands. I was rarely touched; we were not a touching family. Our evenings were like this: the kids lined up on the floor, watching television; our mother smoking and reading; our father, asleep on the couch, snorting now and then. We put ourselves to bed. Stroke. Stroke. Skin, on skin. Stroke.

Later, I pretended to fall asleep before it was time for bed, and she had to carry me upstairs. I would never have asked. I let my head dangle, slack, weightless. Held.  

[stisdale]

[stisdale]

A man shifts a box, murmuring. The complexity this image represents is mind-boggling. He murmurs, a shadow in a shadow, and in a barely measurable instant, a surge of activity pulses across a few of the millions of miles of nerve connections in the brain. A complex of pathways is laid, much of it scattered in the medial temporal lobe. The hippocampus is critical, but memory isn’t filed or placed any one place in particular; it is shattered like a spring rain across the hemispheres. The pattern won’t stay without consolidation. Consolidation is a cascading spectrum of processes that may work by changing membrane strengths and voltage gradients in neural cells. Memory is a kind of ceaseless remodeling. Consolidation takes seconds or minutes, perhaps days or longer; many studies show that sleep helps consolidation. Then newly traced pathways are linked to earlier traces in novel patterns; these are organized in obscure ways and change over time as new traces are created, forming roads with many entrances and exits, many swinging doors. And after the pattern is laid and patted into place, what remains? Potential. Capacity. Despite the microscopic shifts, memories don’t exist, exactly; they are not fixed objects. They are more akin to templates or molds—it is the empty space that counts. The sparkle, the wound, the grit: until I reach for a memory, there is only a fugitive possibility.

-From a work in progress

[stisdale]