My Meteorite by Harry Dodge review – reflections on touch and vulnerability

What do we expose ourselves to when we touch another person? How vulnerable are we when we make our bodies porous or penetrable to others? When he wrote My Meteorite, Harry Dodge wasn’t to know how fraught these questions would be by the time it was published, or how contentious his pleas for a tactile, mutually contaminating community might become. “To wit, we’ve been on the move – mixing with each other and things – forever,” he says, assuming this is an ongoing state. It has turned out to be more complex.

To the literary world, Harry Dodge is best known as the partner of Maggie Nelson. In her groundbreaking memoir The Argonauts, Nelson gives memorably powerful descriptions of Harry arguing about the limits of language, having gender reallocation surgery (when they met he was biologically female), enduring the process of his mother’s death and having a lot of sex with Nelson. There, Dodge was presented as the one who mistrusted words, who yearned for invisibility only to be brought into lambent visibility by Nelson. In fact, though, Dodge has all along been making himself visible through his art: playfully corporeal sculptures and cryptic, experimental films.

Now he tries out a new form of visibility, following Nelson in writing a hybrid work of memoir and theory. He writes here about his parents dying, about reconnecting with his birth mother, about his abiding interests in consciousness, memory and artificial intelligence, and about ordering a meteorite by post. Along the way there are diaristic digressions that show him parenting his two sons, having sex with Nelson and other lovers, and collaborating with a series of contemporary artists.

Dodge takes his cue from high French theory of the 1970s and 80s, seeing what it looks like under the changing pressures of new historical surroundings and new versions of family. He shares Nelson’s love for the evocative phase “human animal”, and threading through the book are questions about what makes us human: what makes us different from a machine. He’s interested in robots, and in our capacity to invent machines that can destroy us. In his 2019 video Late Heavy Bombardment he showed a group of very human robots engaged in a seminar on how to injure human beings. The robots tell themselves here that they are unwilling to cause harm, but need nonetheless to defend themselves.

Dodge highlights the sleek impervious danger of machines partly to remind us of the vulnerability of the human animal. There’s a lot on death and sex in this book, because he seeks clues in these acts as to what makes us human. Penetration for both of them involves smashing into orifices greedily and violently, partly by way of revealing how strange it is for us to enter the body of another. Sex also reveals, for Dodge, how crucial the body’s “de-evolution into unreason” is to human life: how unreason is as human a state as rationality. Death, like sex, reveals our materiality, showing our bodies to be merely matter that can be touched, mangled, destroyed.

These are fascinating thoughts, and there are questions to make us think again on every page. He also has a gift for storytelling, however sparingly used, and the scene where he speaks on the phone with his birth mother is particularly moving. Sometimes the connections between ideas and scenes feel a little tenuous, especially when we’re jumping between very short sections. But throughout there’s a feeling of a singular intelligence, driven by a set of related questions about the relationship between matter and spirit, or empiricism and the occult.

I found his thoughts on climate change particularly compelling, partly because he diagnoses his own “ultra-misanthropic, radical primitivist mind-set” as responsible for his earlier belief that humans “are a scourge on the otherwise flawless, paradisiacal surface of the earth”. This is a view that is all too prevalent today, and Dodge’s realisation that it’s incompatible with his sense that humans are “not excepted from but – continuous with nature” is a helpful one.

It’s thoughts like these, together with his ideas on touch, that make me want to know what Dodge thinks, in the new age of corona in which we find ourselves. His book is salutary now, partly because he shows us that processes of human connection have always been fraught. When he vows to himself “to leave the studio sometimes – risk contact with unfamiliar humans – in order to find myself in the heaving maw, the protean, flowing haemorrhage of universal energy” he reminds us that we have always feared contamination by other bodies and other minds, while pushing ourselves to risk it. Where, then, can the human animal seek its energy in this era of lockdowns and social distancing? Dodge may help us to find out.

• My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing by Harry Dodge is published by Vintage (£14.99).