The Pulsating Onion of Spacetime

It doesn't get any more basic than this. On page 1 of Cinema 1 Deleuze writes "Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering." How exactly does it do so? What is the moving? What is the direction of forward motion and where is the behind that is being left?

The process of movement transforms the space in which it happens: it re-texturizes it as it ripples through. In order for covering to take place, there must be displacement. Isn't that particular and curious all at once? The words actually say it as we use the spatializing metaphors of language as in “to take place”. Yes, exactly. How exactly does movement cover space? It doesn't, it stays put and shakes like hell; the speed, hence time is in the shaking. It's the pulsating onion of spacetime doing its thing! Space is voluminous background whereas movement happens through it, within it, without going anywhere. Or is it time? The movement is within the space but is not a part of it, nor constitutive of it. Why should space be divisible? And why should it only become “visible” when there is a change, when there is an acceleration? When there is light? This would mean that there is a difference between motion as displacement and motion as vibration. Particle or wave? Space can only be when there is change and the only motion that allows this is vibration because it is in vibration that change occurs. A constant state of displacement, i.e. constant velocity does not allow space to form because the relativity is constant and does not allow the observed/observer relation to take hold. What moves relative to what? Who moves relative to whom? Is it the space that is covering the motion or is it the motion that covers the space? The term displacement hides a variety of “things.” What does displacement displace? Space? And where is it displaced to? To think of displacement, one must conceive of a substantial body that occupies all void not occupied by other entities. As the body is moved from one place to another, ethereal space fills in the volume immediately which our object has just vacated. Displacement also hides the heterogeneous nature of movement except in ideated circumstances—displacement happens when one feels acceleration or change in the temporal or spatial representation of the event. Apparently, photon inertia covers these bases.

Newtonian time conceives of itself as homogeneous and continuous and Newtonian space as a homogeneous and continuous entity that is somehow anchored at its origin and allows an ideal displacement to happen homogeneously relative to a static background, just like time. But if both “entities” have the same properties, does that not make them not necessarily the same, but alike? We tend to think of time as linear, and space as voluminous. What’s that about? Is time the textural difference between one location in space and another? Is time the how-happens as opposed to the when-happens of the where-happens? Is time simply the qualitative change of being?