a package was delivered to your door | hannah rubin
December 1, 2020
Early in quarantine, maybe week 2, I choreographed a performance piece that entailed sterilizing blocks of clay and dropping them off on people's doorways. I sort of knew these people, but not very well. I then asked them to touch the clay with their body in some way and return it to me a week later.
I wanted both to provide this mushy touchy cathartic material to people who were scared and isolated, and I also wanted to have little ziploc bags filled with people's germs and the ghosts of their fingers, because I was scared and isolated.
i had all of this clay,
restless manic energy of being trapped, couldn’t shake the chaotic heart needed to be elsewhere, not so wrapped up, spiraling in information and tragedy, anticipatory & grief all over coating my vision spoke to my parents for the first time in a while, had to, nightmares or dreams or seeing people on zoom, it’s all slurring together like these high contrast sunsets in magenta, salmon, raucous orange. i have a car full of clay, dense 300 pounds of body so full my seatbelt alarm goes off every time i drive, wants me to strap it in. i carried the heavy logs of clay up from the garage, put on gloves, mask, etc. sliced them up with wire and bagged them in the ziplocs i had on hand: XL leftover from a summer camping trip. i wrote sterile with a sharpie and made a note. i performed the inadequacy of sterile all across the city, mapping all of your addresses and driving to each one, with a package. sneaking through locked gates and trying to seem casual. i was anxious, afraid of violating “how dare you show up to my house!” and in two months, i’ll be out of school & out of my job and running deliveries for money, waiting in line at grocery stores for other people so they can stay safe. i tried to find everyone’s door but sometimes a gate was really secure and i had to leave the ziploc bag of mushy clay on a ledge, or security pole. it looked like humid shit. someone moved out of their apartment an hour before i delivered, maybe the clay’s still sitting wet and wanting on their mat. a week later, i asked for it all back. all the clay, back. and went back, re-tracing the city, finding ziplocs in new contortions waiting for me on door mats and stone ledges. some people wrote notes or gave me gifts. some people wanted to deliver to my house and i let them, wanted them to see where i live, get as close as my very door. i show up like skin and remind myself that we’re wrapped in plastic now but we won’t be computers forever. because even though my room is filled with sterilized clay-bloated plastic bags, inside is living wet germs, molded, waiting. what is immunity? i read that our dna is littered with ancient viral matter, we are viral matter, and as a community we speak in many languages other than this one. and who knows, maybe touch is a matter of dimension, and we’ve already been caught in this very slow, very static one where gravity and rotations mean we can’t rightly fly. maybe we can fly and it’s just a matter of sticking our hands in clay and wanting it. our whole bodies wanting it.
hannah rubin is a queer writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. They work in the tension points of language and perception—invoking language as a site of desire, magic, intimacy, manipulation, and violence. They run Poetry in the Dark, an intimate listening experience that happens occasionally in small spaces, and coordinate 20 lines a day, a durational daily writing collaboration with sixteen artists. Together with Noelle Armstrong they co-host the radio show mellow drama, where mysterious voices call in to read from long books of poetry.
