Harry Dodge - My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing

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, NY; and Museum of Contemporary Art, LA. In 2017 Dodge was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

FOR MAGGIE, WITH ALL MY LOVE

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 theyve seen this child go by, ask the woman in the caf whether hes been there demanding a lemonade, ask the horses on the merry-go-round whether hes ridden them, ask the waves whether hes drowned.

HERV GUIBERT

Any time-plumber knows this fact.

Liquid time (viscous, variable, sociopathic; the ubiquitous matrix wet with time, time the whole banana) doesnt 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 hadnt been here before, butflyingworked 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 didnt 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, frecklesthe first time I met hersomeones dinner table, in Echo Park.

Memory works by classification and venue. There are trillions of minuscule bowers in our brains and each one stores dataour 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. Im interested in redundancy; the same data is stored again and again in many, many locations, each deemed valent by our autonomic nervous system. What Im trying to say is I might store a memory of an experience in three thousand places. There are times when its not possible for me to consciously parse the common elements of two separate situations, nonetheless they have been paired in meby the automata of fleshfor eternity.

Fuck me, that is wrong, they are not stored foreverthey are stored, more precisely, until my brain is gone which (Im 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. Ill be working in the yard and then reenter the house, walk through the kitchen; hes 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, cant 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 didnt know is there is an additional magic, a Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time. That is why Im 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?

Were not in love, but Ill make love to you.

FRANK OCEAN

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 theyre 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 dont 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 hadnt gone back. I thought I had more time. I gotta go, I told him, Ill be back tomorrow. And now there is no tomorrow for Dad.