In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

PRESENT = PAST (ETERNITY) 401
and interpreted-at least with traditional formulas and artistic genres:
"It will take thirty or more years before this overwhelming transformation
of our intellectual and moral values is turned into the small coin of
everyday interactions" (Blei,402).
There are only a handful of types of behavior and professional roles
that are synchronized with this new rhythm: reporters, who replace
interpretation by sheer surface-perception; brokers, who never possess
the object of their mediation; the rapid and perpetual movement from
one tavern or bar to the next-a movement that, when sustained, prevents
stagnation and alcohol addiction. All these activities, working in
concert, seem to push life to the level of a colorful surface. [see Bars,
Reporters, Authenticity vs. Artificiality] Only at this level, if at all, can
one hope to keep pace with relentless, widespread change. But even if it
is possible (though by no means easy) to maintain a minimum of orientation,
the rapid pace inevitably affects the ways in which time is experienced.
Such secondary change-that which results from an acceleration
of change-leaves seismic traces in the texts of the poet Johannes Becher.
As a Marxist, Becher has certain expectations about the ways in which
Past, Present, and future should relate. This may be why he registers so
precisely a process in which these three temporal divisions increasingly
overlap and which ultimately makes it impossible to keep them apart (let
alone to deduce "laws of change"). Becher's favorite word for this collapse
is Ineinander-Geschehen ("event-merging"):
To sink, sinking worlds
like hammer-blows a leaden thunder surrounds
the mouth of a dream-singer, sounding of the
lips, lips connecting themselves
to the lips ... Beamswhispering.
0, event-merging of all worlds!
(Becher, 46-47; also 57ff.)
An alternative repertoire of images stages the same crisis from the opposite
angle. Instead of emphasizing the blurring of the boundary between
Past and Present, these images present the border as a sometimes dangerous
gap. For Becher, such metaphors of discontinuity have the virtue
of offering an associative link with the Communist notion of revolution: