In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

CENTER = PERIPHERY (INFINITUDE) 369
phor in poetry. Windows are part of the house, yet also part of the world
around the house. They contain the promise, the ever-unfulfilled illusion,
of a vista beyond themselves. Thus, within Rilke's poetic world, the
observer can never overcome the threshold of the window:
Long in place, far away from the living, set beneath the sun,
Window that celebrates and is real;
After harp and swan, last remaining
Slowly canonized picture.
We still need you, form cast lightly
Into the houses,
Promising an opening.
Yet the most abandoned window on earth often
strove for divine transfiguration.
(Rilke, 265)
Borders become spaces-sometimes even central spaces-through the
continual back-and-forth movements across the thresholds they mark.
The rhythm of oscillation thus engenders a form. This perspective on the
emergence of space as a form comes close to Einstein's new definition of
space: "In the first place, we entirely shun the vague word 'space,' of
which, we must honestly acknowledge, we cannot form the slightest
conception, and we replace it by 'motion relative to a practically rigid
body of reference'" (Einstein, 9). Einstein's favorite image for the "rigid
body of reference" is the railway car. The railway is no longer conceived
as bridging the distance between two points, but is seen as contributing
to the emergence of space. In a phenomenological rather than scientific
sense, this is also true for many athletic competitions. Of course, the
distance covered by the participants in a six-day bicycle race is important
(though not exclusively decisive) for victory and defeat. Seen from a
different angle, however, the main function of the athletes' continuous
movement around the infinite oval of the track is to constitute an intrinsically
complex area for the public's amusement [see Six-Day Races]-a
space to which neither athletes nor spectators can ever be peripheral.
For far longer than six days-in fact, for the entire year (December
1925 to February 1927)-several hundred soldiers of the Brazilian army
under the leadership of Lieutenant LUIs Carlos Prestes march through