If twins are born, the hunter kills one so that the second may live

 Returning from the far north, Attila had brought along a primordial delight in superfluousness. The latter, he said, represented the capital whose interest nourishes the world, harvest by harvest. That was how the hunter lived amidst tremendous herds, which kept multiplying without his interference, long before the earth was notched by the plowshare.

“The hunter has companions, but tillage brought slavery, killing became murder. Freedom ended; the game was driven away. In Cain a descendant of the primal hunter was resurrected, his avenger, perhaps. Genesis supplies only a rumor about all this. It hints at Yahweh's bad conscience regarding the slayer.”

I enjoyed hearing these things when I poured the refills long past midnight. Those were spoors that the anarch repeatedly tracks down – and the poet, too; no poet is without a touch of anarchy. Where else could poetry come from?

*

Attila felt that superfluousness requires its control. When the word comes surging, the poet has not yet formed it into a poem. Countless shapes slumber in marble – but who will bring forth even one? Hard by the rich pastures, Attila had run into nomads who arduously dug their food from the earth: worms and roots.

Oolibuk – that was the Inuit's name – was still a good hunter; he knew how to wield his bow. Once Attila asked him to shoot a black-throated diver swimming some eighty feet from their kayak. The bird eluded the first arrow by diving; the second pierced its head through both eyes when it resurfaced.

Otherwise the Inuits were thoroughly corrupted by dealing with the whalers, who, next to the sandalwood skippers, were notoriously the worst villains ever to plow the seas. From them, they had learned how to smoke, drink, and gamble. They gambled away their dogs, boats, weapons, and also their wives; a woman might change hands five times in a single night.

*

Yet Oolibuk also knew about the days before any ship had ever penetrated these climes. Grandmothers who had heard about the past from their grandmothers would tell their grandchildren.

The big day in an lnuit's life comes when, still a boy, he kills his first seal. The men gather around him and his booty; they hail his dexterity and praise the seal – never has anyone seen such a strong animal and such good meat.

Killing a seal is difficult; a man is not a hunter if he fails. He has to content himself with female food, with fish, seaweed, and crustaceans. Strange tales are told about such men; one of them, finding no wife, had to make do with a mussel, and he lost his member because the shell clamped shut.

The hunter, in contrast, is a free man, around whom the world arranges itself. He alone maintains the family, richly providing it with meat and hides, as well as blubber, which provides light and warmth in the simply endless winter night. The hunter is bold and cunning, and, like all early hunters, he is related to the game he tracks. His body is plump and brawny like a sea mammal's, it is rich in blood and fat and has the same smell as the animal. The hunter will brave even the whale and the polar bear.

*

But the winter is long. It can come early and wear on interminably. Nor is the hunter always lucky. Though the pantry and storeroom of his ice dwelling can be chock-full at the start of winter, the crossing of the Arctic night remains a unique venture.

Incidentally, prior to setting up my bunker on the Sus, I studied construction plans that Captain Ross had found among the Eskimos of New North Wales. A basic theme for the anarch is how man, left to his own devices, can defy superior forces – whether state, society, or the elements – by making use of their rules without submitting to them.

“It is strange,” Sir William Parry wrote when describing the igloos on Winter Island, “it is strange to think that all these measures are taken against the cold - and in houses of ice.”

*

If the prey is inadequate, then the family will not survive the winter. It will waste away with hunger and scurvy in its glass palace. Polar bears will break open the igloo and find their meals. They will be followed by foxes and gulls.

Frost is a harsh master. Even while the Greenlander is struggling with death, the others bend his legs under his loins to make the grave shorter. If twins are born, the hunter kills one so that the second may live. The food would not suffice for both. If a mother dies in childbirth, the newborn is buried with her, or a bit later, when the father, at the end of his rope, can no longer stand the baby's bawling. “The father's grief is, of course, unbearable, especially when it is a son” – so goes Parry's account. Sometimes infants are exposed on desert islands when winter comes.

*

Why did Attila stress such details in his reminiscences of the polar night? What was his “guiding thought”? (That is what the Domo always asks when checking instructions.)

Was Attila bent on offering examples of the “power of necessity”? When worse comes to worst, a man is forced to make decisions that are hard, cruel – yes, even deadly.

Naturally, the Arctic tribes, or whatever is left of them, have long since been perishing in comfort. This is a gradual dying, over generations. But the fateful question remains in its harshness, even if time gives it a different mask.

With the discovery of oil in northern Alaska, high rises shot up there as everywhere else in those days. A traveler walled in by fire on the twentieth floor of a hotel has to choose between burning up and leaping into space. He will jump; this is documented by photographs.

*

But this did not seem to be Attila's point. His guiding thought in that discussion (which, as we recall, concerned abortion ) was, more or less: It is reprehensible to delegate a misdeed. The hunter takes his son to the mother's grave and kills him. He does not assign the task to anyone else – not his brother, not the shaman; he carries it out himself.

If a man here in Eumeswil has “made a child,” he usually hands his wife or girlfriend a check and feels he is off the hook, certain that she will take care of it. Attila obviously means that if the man personally killed his son like the Inuit, then he would know what he was doing.

As an anarch, who acknowledges neither law nor custom, I owe it to myself to get at the very heart of things. I then probe them in terms of their contradictions, like image and mirror image. Either is imperfect – by seeking to unite them, which I practice every morning, I manage to catch a corner of reality.

Eumeswil

Ernst Jünger