My Meteorite Read online

  Praise for My Meteorite

  “Harry Dodge’s voice and vision are singular, but his genius is for revealing how each of us is plural. This is a beautiful record of his loves and deaths and ways of making, but even its most intimate moments open out, become portals to other possible worlds. No genre can hold this book. It is a work of tender force, prying open every category. My Meteorite is breathtaking—or breathgiving, because the whole thing oxygenates discourse, makes me feel alive.”

  —Ben Lerner

  “Captivating. My Meteorite holds you in its thrall like a brilliant friend—so vulnerable, hot, funny, and casually weird that you don’t notice the profundity until you’re already walloped by it. Dodge juxtaposes the tenderest of human details with hungry, brain-splitting inquiries into the very premise of life, and these shifts in scale are incredibly moving and provocative. Don’t forget to notice that Dodge is a masterful writer; that’s how he pulls this whole thing off.”

  —Miranda July

  “Dodge has offered a new, luminous angle on autobiography that not only traces where the body has been—but also what it loves, how it thinks and feels within the potent intellectual and physical detritus of its lived world. Reading this book is like being bathed in the bright, gritty sear of a comet’s tail. But the mark it leaves is stunningly terrestrial: a thumbprint of a mind on paper—singular in erudition, hurtfully wonder-struck, and true.”

  —Ocean Vuong

  “Harry Dodge’s fierce intelligence and love permeates and shapes every line of this book, which is redolent with loss, desire, and truth. Expansive in scope and intimate in detail, Dodge’s account of becoming a self while living in a world defined by community lifts the spirit as it feeds the mind. A major achievement.”

  —Hilton Als

  “Harry’s book is ‘outside’ the book. Why should you read it? You’re out there too. I could say this is the smartest memoir I ever read but that’s pulling us back to the safe place. We are animals, machines, friends, reading things and we’ve never been talked to this way before. Seductive and wise, My Meteorite is the conversation you want.”

  —Eileen Myles

  “Picasso wrote meteoric poetry and now Harry Dodge has written a brilliant autobiographical manifesto that takes the accidents of death and birth and remixes them into a whirlwind unlike any book I can remember reading. Dodge stares into the eye of synchronicity and turns magical thinking into a new method of being realistic about how strange and open-ended the world actually is. Reading My Meteorite, I feel re-enchanted, all over again, with how miraculous an enterprise writing can be, when it is engaged with the degree of passion, inquisitiveness, and arrowy verbal virtuosity that Dodge brings to the game. Feel your whole body tingle as you read this blazing ode to randomness, to a cosmos where every particle and wave has a say in the matter.”

  —Wayne Koestenbaum

  “A thought-filled, deeply moving and personal book. The past, present, and future collide like Harry’s meteorite to earth. Life is tenderly felt, questioned, and affirmed within the pages of this exquisite prose.”

  —Catherine Opie

  “Riveting. A freewheeling, feral romp through the wilderness of consciousness and connection!”

  —Eula Biss

  “How does one write a self that is constantly changing, remaking itself with each new experience? Harry Dodge does this with heart and intelligence in this raucous, tender book. An utterly absorbing tombola of subjects, a book about infinity, and possibility—of love, our own identities, the geographical boundaries of the universe. It’s a profound piece of work, and I feel honored to have read it. A modern masterpiece.”

  —Sinéad Gleeson

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MY METEORITE

  Harry Dodge is a writer and visual artist whose work has been exhibited at venues nationally and internationally. His solo and collaborative work is held in numerous institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2017, Dodge was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Harry Dodge

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  “Although innumerable beings have been led to Nirvana” from Knots by R. D. Laing, copyright © 1970 by R. D. Laing. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Dodge, Harry, author.

  Title: My meteorite, or, Without the random there can be no new thing / Harry Dodge.

  Other titles: Without the random there can be no new thing

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2020] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019029706 (print) | LCCN 2019029707 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134367 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525506201 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dodge, Harry—Psychology. | Dodge, Harry—Anecdotes. | Human behavior.

  Classification: LCC N6537.D562 A35 2020 (print) | LCC N6537.D562 (ebook) | DDC 709.2—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029706

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029707

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

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  FOR MAGGIE, WITH ALL MY LOVE

  Contents

  Praise for My Meteorite

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  My mother dreams that she went with me as an adult to look for me as a little boy: that together we ask people whether they’ve seen this child go by, ask the woman in the café whether he’s been there demanding a lemonade, ask the horses on the merry-go-round whether he’s ridden them, ask the waves whether he’s drowned.

  —HERVÉ GUIBERT

  Prologue

  Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time

  Any time-plumber know
s this fact.

  Liquid time (viscous, variable, sociopathic; the ubiquitous matrix wet with time, time the whole banana) doesn’t always move in one direction, a waterfall churning into rivers that are also pointed down. It may, like the Earth itself, corpus or organism, be careening, surface teeming, in one dark line, drawn by a fat soft pencil. But upon the surface of time, that is to say, on its protrusions, there are eddies too, things that reverse, or simply start again and again. Smarter, wiser now. Ready for more.

  This morning I fell through layers of time until it caught me, reddened, hotted up, became dense enough to slow me down, decided to slow me down. Or you might say it tightened. A bendy bed, tumescent planar expanse, barren, and characterized by an obsequious (but also prodding) softness; a graphics card landscape had been emptied and someone large (inconceivably so) had placed memory foam there instead of a world. I landed on my back, nauseous. A long incision at the back of my head stung deeply, half an inch into my skull, partly into my brain. There was leaking, pulp, interstitial juices mixed with blood: a weak and oily red Kool-Aid not all the way to numbles. I made it to my feet, stood, flapped my arms, successfully ascended. I hadn’t been here before, but—flying—worked through things that seemed curiously familiar: I approach the stove and recall an acquaintance who died of cancer. She told me, near a stove, that she was starting treatment for a kind of aggressive, inundating leukemia. I didn’t know her well but this thing happened near a stove, our conversation. And so every stove, I mean to say, every time I approach a stove, is another instance of remembering her, she evanesces, holographic, palpable, confides to me that her mother is so cool, helps her, she is now living at home. Not infrequently (and specifically when I kneel to pet my white poodle) I picture Laura Owens, her glasses, brown hair flat to her forehead, freckles—the first time I met her—someone’s dinner table, in Echo Park.

  Memory works by classification and venue. There are trillions of minuscule bowers in our brains and each one stores data—our experiences. The data is categorized, organized: beds, dogs, tendernesses, events near a stove, prone, has a tongue, stuff with long tongues, black gums/pink tongue, rhymes with art, ad infinitum. Each time we have an experience, our brains bust out new cubbyholes (if they are needed) and transport copies of significant data to relevant folders. I’m interested in redundancy; the same data is stored again and again in many, many locations, each deemed valent by our autonomic nervous system. What I’m trying to say is I might store a memory of an experience in three thousand places. There are times when it’s not possible for me to consciously parse the common elements of two separate situations, nonetheless they have been paired in me—by the automata of flesh—for eternity.

  Fuck me, that is wrong, they are not stored forever—they are stored, more precisely, until my brain is gone which (I’m just realizing here) is a woefully deficient interval.

  * * *

  • • •

  My son Iggy, who is five, has been listening to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe repeatedly, cyclically, by using an app called Audible on my phone. I’ll be working in the yard and then reenter the house, walk through the kitchen; he’s eating green beans, listening intently, staring at my phone, inexplicably rapt by a glowing, digital image of the book cover which does not change. Peter is killing the wolf with a sword, there is gore. Handsome, mysterious Aslan (the Christ-templated lion character) submits to being shaved, bound to a large flat rock, and then flayed. This part is scary and a bit prurient what with all of the preparatory restraints. But I hear this one paragraph again and again, it becomes uncanny how often I come through and this part is playing: Lucy, the youngest of the human girls, can’t believe Aslan has been resurrected because after all she watched him die just the evening prior. Incredulous, she exclaims, “What about the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time?” (DMDT has outlined the postslaughter chain-of-command and it indicates the Witch as sole victor and lone dictator of Narnia.) Aslan, reborn and boingy like a celery stick, replies, “The White Witch knew about the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time, but what she didn’t know is there is an additional magic, a Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time. That is why I’m alive, that is why I am reborn.” The grim juvenile argot of supernatural one-upsmanship never fails to make me laugh. Today Iggy said, “Poppy, what was there before time?”

  We’re not in love, but I’ll make love to you.

  —FRANK OCEAN

  1

  June 2009 The place where my mom died was a nightmare. It was industrial dying, industrial death. It was a hospice, they said it was a hospice (but it was huge, with a lot of beds) and the reputation of these places is, Wow, why did we wait so long to get our loved one into a hospice? In other words, you hear Suddenly, wowee, now that they’re in hospice, these nearly dead folks have tons of sweetness, cleanliness, and care from people who know how death works, how crippled, dying, drooling people gasping for breath are best comforted. One true detail is that a dying person could only stay in this particular hospice for three days. The lady actually said, Hopefully she dies soon so we don’t have to relocate her. There were black plastic body bags being zipped up and uniformed transport drivers hustling them around on gurneys like it was a fucking grocery store. Zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip. There were automatic double doors with a black mat like at Target and they swished open both at once like industrial wings. There were full-grown trees outside and deep, soft, green lawns proliferated in the contiguous expanse as far as I could see.

  May 2017 My dad died today in Pasadena. I had seen him two weeks before but blew it and hadn’t gone back. I thought I had more time. I gotta go, I told him, I’ll be back tomorrow. And now there is no tomorrow for Dad. I love you Dad. I said to him, his gray wandering eyes. Why do people’s eyes start to go gray when they’re dying? He looked at me though, and gravelly, with effort, managed to get out, I love you too Dad. And formed a crooked smile. These words he meant, and meant politely, because he did and (also) did not know who I was. I love you too Dad. I like that for last words, don’t you? It’s Father’s Day soon, in a few days. We’re all fathers. My son, when he was little, was excited about special occasions. He had a cognitive leap just preceding Mother’s Day when he was two, and thought every celebration was an offshoot of this one. Happy Birthday Mother’s Day, he would say. Happy Mother’s Day Father’s Day.

  * * *

  • • •

  Roland Barthes says that even if a thing seems to be the same as another thing, treat it as if it were different. This is a behavioral exhortation, make no mistake. In Deleuze’s meditation Difference and Repetition, he too suggests that even a thing that repeats has differences worth noting, worth praying to. He doesn’t say the word pray but I know what he means. I don’t even mean pray when I say the word pray. I mean a different thing, but I use this word. (I’m not spiritual—this is doctrinaire—so PRAY TO WHOM would be my question.) In a not-so-strange fold, or LITERARY PUCKER even, this exemplifies my current point: a word seems to be the same but is in possession of differences worth noting, worth jacking off to, in other words. Super-sexy differences.

  June 2015 La Verkin Creek, Campsite 6, Zion National Park, Utah. My son Lenny, who is ten years old, sharpens a pencil with his small knife. I interrupt his preadolescent concentration, Look baby, at the pink of that in the late afternoon sun, it’s like flesh, the flesh of the Earth. The meat of the Earth, or a steak or a block of flesh. I observe color first, surface, the matted, torn face of the thing, bright pulsing orange and now pink. These soaring buttes are close, just past the creek, beyond a stand of billowing cottonwoods which leak prodigious tufts of silky parachute seeds. (The air is riffled of this meretricious down, causing us to be able to see the shape of the wind as it attends the valley bottom. Gusts, planar whooshes, slipstreams and more.) I can’t help but think of this rock as slabs of blood-soaked, vulnerable body parts laid out to test our moral compasses, our greed. I am moved by the show of trust. I want to lay
hands upon hot rock, say the best thing, be right and true and real. I’m moved every day, all day in places like this. Thunderously large. Lenny has taken them in visually—the buttes—but his reply is snipped, Hm. He doesn’t like being told what to think about the geologic presences here, but I can’t help test-running this: a mild-mannered introduction to a strain of homespun geologic theosophy I’ve been stirring in solitude for a lifetime. Then he relents. Yeah, he says, I see what you mean. He says it politely because he does, and does not, know what the hell I’m talking about. I adjust my featherweight folding chair and he finishes the pencil sharpening with a flurry of quick, controlled mini-strokes right at the tip of the thing. I hear the creek again, uncoordinated soprano trills, a susurrating concatenation of small bells. The natural pool at our site is large enough for both of us, standing or sitting. I watch him, my son, I watch the trees, I watch the dense masses of white fluff, I watch the stones ache as the sun careers away for the evening. One bat exits a hole in the rock behind us and flies drunkenly over our camp. I appreciate it as a basic notching into the continuum of disorderly conduct. Hey boss, I think silently to the insect-like knob of floating flesh as it disappears into the massive, tangled, arboreal crown of willow, aspen, oak, and sycamore.

  Lenny scrawls a list of animals (ones we’ve spotted so far) on the back cover of the book I’m carrying on this trip: My First Summer in the Sierra, an early work by John Muir, first published in 1911.

  Rattlesnake: 3 ft., beige, dark brown tetrahedrons

  Warren snake, 8 in., ginger, gray stripe on head

  Black and yellow striped lizard, 10 in.

  Blue and beige with orange cheeks, 4 in.

  Plateau lizard, spotted, gray yellow, red head