But So Briefly!

The days you left early, your head would leave behind a hollow on the pillow. Over time, in my slumber I had begun to dream of this shape. However, upon waking up—every time I wished to touch and hold the hollow, it would be difficult. Even impossible. My hand would enter that small basin of warmth and the linen would give up right away, on a weight that was gone while its remnant lingered on. It wasn’t you I was touching; it wasn’t even a touch as the body knows it. It was presence moving away at the lightest pressure. Marcel Duchamp calls this the infrathin—an interval so slight in time and a phenomenon so delicate and fleeting that it can barely be named.

When I lift a glass from the table, it leaves behind a rapidly fading ring, a brief geometry in condensation. I watch it as I continue speaking, aware that it is undoing itself even as I look. The edge feathers first, then the circle slackens, its clarity slipping into the grain beneath. There is no instant I can fix as its definite end. It simply passes; quietly, without declaration. The eye follows but cannot hold on to it. In attempting to describe infrathin, Duchamp returned to these small discrepancies: the warmth of a just-vacated seat, the afterglow of a cigarette butt left carelessly on the ground and smoldering briefly even after the smoker is gone, the difference between two casts drawn from the same mold. These are moments at the threshold of perception, where the senses receive something momentarily, by noticing a trace of it that is rapidly vanishing.

 When someone dear leaves, even as the door closes it appears that the room has withdrawn with it. I stay where I am, held by a contour lingering where presence had just been. Thinking of you, I take off the hoodie you had given me. For a moment, it holds my shape. The shoulders keep their slope; the cloth carries the faint salt at the collar; warmth still caught in its folds. Lifted, it looks inhabited, as if a body still stands inside it. But as I put it down, it gives in. The sleeves fall inward. What held shape loosens into slackness. Infrathin describes what happens between what the body presses into and quickly it lets go.

During my childhood, my friends and I would sometimes stand near the railway tracks at the edge of our school. Every time a train would pass without stopping, for a few seconds we would be lifted off into its speed, even though our feet remained anchored to the ground. I would be fascinated by what I saw and felt. The air strikes first, then the windows—faces flaring and gone before I can take them in—each one complete, and already elsewhere. I am neither inside the train nor entirely outside. My body registers an impact without encounter, a proximity without relation. 

Infrathin keeps showing up, as we go about our lives. But we may not notice it often in view of its ephemeral nature. I have read other words that seemingly come close to it, but not quite: thresholds, liminality, residual sensation. I know such moments pass through me without asking, each carrying its own vanishing. As I stay with them for that brief moment of time, something in me alters—quietly, and without any clear mark of when it began and ended.