1913issue6online

10 Ditto surfaces whose doubled motions stick them in conundrums of locality. You look out, while I search the premises or scan the box. Museumed in, we think ourselves agents of the apartment’s perilous fix. “I want to be alone at home more than every other night.” And one door makes the studio liveable. Something is where nothing might otherwise be. But we’ve heard his infrathin is the difference between identical things. It cannot be defined, but we’re told to consider the warmth of a chair recently abandoned. Or marry the smell of the mouth and the air that welcomes the words. How we will collect this stuff seems beyond us. Meanwhile, the woman is a man looking into cigar smoke—leading us to suspect the ultimate infrathin is not just an “interval” but something that exists opposing faces. Maybe whoever possesses it sees the future as it forms? Even with a key (provided by the landlord) we cannot find a threshold. Two sides do not cancel but form a third: those “thin films drawn from the outermost surface of things which flit about hither and thither through the air,” that Lucretius spoke about. Heat, smoke, dust, mark, print… quite akin to this “infrathin.” Materially, an interface, or third-body, is a zone of changed composition, a boîte-en-valise velocity between solids; these “certified true copies.” Into the air we strain to see a difference that defies measure, we strain to imagine the “cointelligence of contraries” (like the recto and verso of a hollow sheet of paper) “an infinitesimal surface pertaining to two worlds at once.” Expert tribologists model departing motes and increase the lifespan of parts, revealing the shape that will form as the wooden wheel wears against iron axle, or the door hinges or the glass spins, and they tell how slippery a banana skin will be. An adjustment of half the width of a hair can make all the difference in the wearing.

1913issue6online

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