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

The decay of language is not so much a disease as a symptom

 As a grammarian, Thofern sets great store by the verb “to nurture,” and it is here that I, as a historian, concur with him. The historian's task is a tragic one; ultimately it has to do with death and eternity. Hence his burrowing in rubble, his circling around graves, his insatiable thirst for sources, his anxious listening to the heartbeat of time.

What could lie hidden behind such disquiet? – I have often wondered. How understandable the terror of the savage who, upon seeing the sun disappear, fears it will never return. The man who stored the mummy in the rock hoped for the mummy's return, and we rob it of its bindings in order to confirm his – no, our – hope. When granting life to the past, we succeed in conquering time, and a subduing of death becomes apparent. Should the latter work out, then it is conceivable that a god will breathe new life into us.

13

“The decay of language is not so much a disease as a symptom. The water of life is dwindling. Words have meaning still, but not sense. They are being replaced largely by numbers. Words are becoming incapable of producing poetry and ineffective in prayer. The crude enjoyments are supplanting the spiritual ones.”

That was what Thofern said. In the seminar, he went into detail: “People have always delighted, more or less clandestinely, in the argots, the books sold under a coat or read with one hand. Then they are praised as models. The Third Tone dominates.”

By the “Third Tone” he meant the lowest level for naming things and activities. They are addressed in a lofty, a current, or a common manner; each manner is good in its place.

“If the common becomes normal in colloquial speech or even in poetry, then it involves an assault on the lofty. Anyone who likes to gobble and boast about it forestalls any suspicion of viewing bread as a miracle that is celebrated in the Supper.

“Profanation sets off lower forms of merriment. A head can ascend to a crown, a face to a countenance, or it can twist into a mug. Profanation can provoke merriment when it appears in Pandaemonium; the gods, too, laugh at Priapus. The merry-andrew has his place in the intermezzo. But if he rules the boards as a buffo assoluto, then the stage becomes a distorting mirror.

“At the opera comica, I always saw a few spectators departing once the laughter began to roar. This is more than a question of taste. There is such a thing as a collective gusto, also a jubilation, announcing imminent danger. The good spirits leave the house. In the Roman circus, the effigies of the gods were draped before blood flowed.”

*

Now and then, I, as a student of history, was permitted to help Thofern prepare his lectures. Thus, when dealing with the decay of language, he asked me to gather material about the contributions of the Eumenists.

Those things go back quite a way, and it may be said that no one cares two hoots about them anymore. At the luminar, however, the number of titles that I tallied up was enormous, even for the limited area of our city. As in any work on a scholarly apparatus, the main issue was to survey the cardinal points. Whatever has moved the Zeitgeist cascades in a chaotic flood; one has to catch the historical meaning concealed behind opinions and events.

The linguistic decay that the professor was talking about occurred during the final period of the wars between nations, a time that heralded great coalitions. First, the regional gods had to be disempowered worldwide; the fact that the father was also affected indicated a planetary agitation.

The disempowering of the father endangers the heavens and the great forests; when Aphrodite bids farewell, the ocean goes dim; once Ares is no longer in charge of wars, the shacks of flayers multiply, the sword becomes a slaughterer's knife.

In a period of decline, when it was considered glorious to have helped destroy one's own nation, the roots of language were, not surprisingly, likewise pruned, above all in Eumeswil. Loss of history and decay of language are mutual determinants; the Eumenists championed both. They felt called upon to defoliate language on the one hand and to gain prestige for slang on the other hand. Thus, down below they robbed the populace of language and, with it, poetry, on the pretext that they were facilitating speech; while on the heights they presented their “mugs.”

The assault on evolved language and on grammar, on script and signs, is part of the simplification that has gone down in history as a cultural revolution. The first world-state cast its shadow.

*

Well, that lies behind us now. In this area, we have been released from wanting and wishing and can render unbiased judgment to the extent of our abilities. In Eumeswil, this applies, I feel, to Vigo, Bruno, and Thofern. Different as they are, these three are able to have a conversation without promptly serving up the trendy claptrap. One often has the impression in Eumeswil that it is not the person but the swarm that answers. Of course, there are raised platforms, as with my dear father, and also flounders of the deep, which unite in schools.

Eumeswil

Ernest Jünger 

The brass city

 How had he hit on Damascus and then the leap to Spain, through which Abd-ur Rahman had escaped being murdered? For almost three centuries, a branch of the Omayyads, who had been exterminated in Syria, flourished in Cordoba. Along with mosques, the faïences testified to this branch of Arabic civilization, a branch long since withered. And then there were the castles of the Beni Taher in Yemen. A seed fell into the desert sand, managing to yield four harvests.

The fifth Omayyad, an ancestor of Abd-ur Rahman, had dispatched Emir Musa to the brass city. The caravan traveled from Damascus through Cairo and the great desert, into the western lands, and all the way to the coast of Mauritania. The goal was the copper flasks in which King Solomon had jailed rebellious demons. Now and again, the fishermen who cast their nets in the EI-Karkar Sea would haul up one of these flasks in their catches. They were closed with the seal of Solomon; when they were opened, the demon spurted forth as smoke that darkened the sky.

Emirs named Musa also recur subsequently in Granada and other residences of Moorish Spain. This emir, the conqueror of Northwest Africa, may be regarded as their prototype. His Western features are unmistakable; of course, we must bear in mind that the distinctions between races and regions vanish on the peaks. Just as people resemble one another ethically, indeed become almost identical, when approaching perfection, so too spiritually. The distance from the world and from the object increases; curiosity grows and with it the desire to get closer to the ultimate secrets, even amid great danger. This is an Aristotelian trait. One that makes use of arithmetic.

It has not come down to us whether the emir felt any qualms about opening the flasks. From other accounts, we know that his step was risky. For instance, one of the imprisoned demons had sworn to himself that he would make the man who freed him the most powerful of mortals; he had spent hundreds of years thinking about how to make him happy. But then the demon's mood had soured; gall and venom had concentrated in his dungeon. When a fisherman finally opened the flask centuries later, he would have suffered the fate of being ripped to shreds by the demon had he not resorted to a trick. Evil becomes all the more dreadful the longer it is deprived of air.

In any case, Musa, needless to say, could not have recoiled from the unsealing. This is already evidenced by the uncommon boldness of his expedition through the wastelands. The aged Abd-es Samad, who possessed The Book of Hidden Treasures and could read the stars, guided the caravan to the brass city within fourteen months. They rested in deserted castles and amid the graves in decaying cemeteries. At times, they found water in wells that Iskander had dug while trekking westward.

The brass city was likewise dead and was enclosed by a ring wall; it took another two moons for blacksmiths and carpenters to build a ladder all the way to the battlements. Anyone who climbed up was blinded by a spell, so that he clapped his hands, and crying “Thou art beautiful!” plunged down. Twelve of Musa's companions perished, one after another, until at last Abd-es Samad succeeded in resisting the witchcraft by incessantly calling out Allah's name while clambering up and, after he reached the top, reciting the verses of salvation. Under the mirage as under a watery surface, he saw the shattered bodies of his predecessors. Said Musa: “If that's how a rational man acts, what will a madman do?”

The sheik then descended through one of the turrets and, from the inside, opened the gates of the necropolis. However, it was not these adventures - although they have their secret meaning - that prompts the mention of Emir Musa; rather it was his encounter with the historical world, which becomes a phantasm vis-a-vis the reality of the fairy tale.

The emir had the poet Thalib read aloud the inscriptions on the monuments and on the walls of the deserted palaces:

Ah, where are they whose strength has built all these

With unbelievably lofty balconies?

Where are the Persian shahs in castles tall?

They left their land - it did forget them all!

Where are the men who ruled the vast countries,

Sind and Hind, the proud hosts of dynasties?

To whom Sendge and Habesh did bend their will

And Nubia when it was rebellious still?

Await no tiding now from any tomb,

No knowledge is forthcoming from its womb.

The times changed, weaving death from every loom; 

The citadels they built brought naught but doom.

These verses filled Musa with such profound sorrow that life became a burden for him. As they wandered through the rooms, they came to a table carved out of yellow marble or, according to other reports, cast in Chinese steel. There, the following words were notched in Arabic letters:

At this table, a thousand kings have dined whose right eyes were blind and a thousand others whose left eyes were blind: they have all passed on and now they populate the graves and catacombs.

When Thalib read these words aloud to him, everything went dark before Musa's eyes; he shrieked and rent his garment. Then he had the verses and inscriptions copied down.

Eumeswil

By Ernest Jünger

Books and Cities

 

76

The listless, nocturnal circling and wandering of drunken masses through sprawling, bleak quarters is a frightening scene, similar to those depicted by De Quincey and Jack London in their memoirs. A cheap bar beckons on every corner; people drink on their feet, and the strong potions have an almost violent effect on the weakened constitutions. Swarms of streetwalkers, among them children, drift along in the current with drunk women and homeless people. Lurking between them are the types whose livelihoods depend on the intoxicated and the will-less: pimps, smugglers, pickpockets, and villains of every kind.

They do not drink for nostalgia or to get closer to others here; they drink to escape and to forget, and the awakenings are terrifying. The demon is ever present; with his unsurpassable nose, Dostoyevsky sensed this almost physically. His travel journals are veritable demonologies, the wanderings of a ghost-seer through the world. With the same certainty that a Tocqueville captured the political structures, he captured their boundless backgrounds—as if the one had occupied himself with the musculature, the other with the pneuma of a being. In Paris, Dostoyevsky found a great “stillness of order, so to speak! . . . a colossal, internal, spiritual regimentation having its source in the very soul . . . ,” it could have been a “Heidelberg on a colossal scale.”22London seemed to him the titanic negative image of civilized Parisian humanity, reposing in itself despite all the outward movement. A “fear of something or other” began to seize him during his walks through London, a city in which “on Saturday nights half a million working men and women and their children spread like the ocean all over town, clustering particularly in certain districts, and celebrate their sabbath all night long until five o’clock in the morning, in other words, guzzle and drink like beasts to make up for a whole week. They bring with them their weekly savings, all that was earned by hard work and with many a curse. Great jets of gas burn in meat and food shops, brightly lighting up the streets. It is as if a grand reception were being held for these white negroes. Crowds throng the open taverns and streets. There they eat and drink. The beer houses are decorated like palaces. Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly, gloomily and heavily, and everyone is somehow strangely mute. Only curses and bloody brawls occasionally break that suspicious and oppressively sad silence. . . . Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility . . . wives in no way lag behind their husbands and all get drunk together, while children crawl and run about among them.”23He then describes a walk through a glowing hellhole of lust. Léon Bloy expresses a similar aversion to London, vented in his extreme manner to the point of wishing for a cannon that could finish off the “capitale infâme” with one shot. Bloy comes at it from a different angle: that of a Spanish-flavored Catholicism observing Protestantism, analogous to the relationship between a cat and a dog.

Protestantism, without which our technological new world is unthinkable, finds it more difficult to spread into the wine-producing countries than into the northern ones. Transition zones often bring unexpected manifestations. Think of Geneva.

77

Dostoyevsky’s vision, which could penetrate into even the Parisian “stillness,” was nevertheless not confused by the storm of images that frightened and unsettled him in London. He might have called the chapter in which he describes these impressions something like “Splendor and Misery of the Machine World.” He chose a different title: “Baal.” Evidently, he had perceived something more there: a power enthroned in the midst of the crowd.

A person looking for a way out never exits into a void; something is waiting at every possible egress. Fleeing is a fatal movement in itself. We can include suicide in this, with the exception of its stoic forms, which should not be regarded as evasion. “In certain circumstances, exiting life may become a duty for the brave.”24

78

From the perspective of intoxication, scenes like those described by Dostoyevsky represent a meeting of narcotic and stimulating effects. Something gets forgotten, like a curtain with graying images painted on it being rolled up and away. Then another world appears behind it where a new master has been busy. The lights become harsher, the colors more vivid. Naked desires step forth. There were glowing embers deep under the ashes—now flames shoot up, as if stoked by bellows. The heart and lungs respond.

The senses also sharpen, for the smell of blood too. The masses scent blood on the wide streets and squares like ravenous predatory fish in a bend on the Amazon. There the river begins to boil; here it is the foaming of yeast. Twenty years before Dostoyevsky, Dickens had witnessed a similar scene: at the execution of the Manning couple who had been sentenced to death for a carefully planned murder and robbery. He presented his impressions in a letter to the Times:

“Sir, I was a witness of the execution at Horsemonger Lane this morning. I went there with the intention of observing the crowd gathered to behold it, and I had excellent opportunities of doing so. . . .

“When I came upon the scene at midnight, the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting that they came from a concourse of boys and girls already assembled in the best places, made my blood run cold. As the night went on, screeching, and laughing, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on negro melodies, with substitutions of ‘Mrs. Manning’ for ‘Susannah’ and the like, were added to these. When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians, and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly—as it did—it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil.”2579

Nothing good emerges in this spectacle. Yet it cannot be attributed to intoxication, for the altered state only reveals, as if a curtain were lifted or the door to a deep crypt opened. It is one key among others.

In seeking out this event and spending the night there, Dickens obeyed a higher curiosity to which the author is not only entitled but even obliged. When, as he says, he felt shame, that also is part of the course and especially important in an era like the Victorian, during which everything always came up smelling of roses.

Such cannibalism is after all innate in man, and it does not need an execution to express itself. Cruelty is almost anatomically inborn in man, like the blind spot in our eyes, and it is just as little noticed. In every epoch, there is an ostracized element on which the general aversion concentrates. These elements are branded as heretics, it is considered commendable to persecute them, and when something bad happens to them people feel gratified. This kind of gratification is also present in good people, even in Pickwickians.26 It begins as early as kindergarten or first grade.

80

Here I need to resist the temptation of a long literary digression. Its theme would be the manner in which the attention of different writers focuses on these ostracized elements. It is significant whether this attention originates from outside—be it sympathetic or even benevolent—or from within. In this regard, the light that Dostoyevsky brings to bear on evil is fundamentally different from that of Dickens, Victor Hugo, or, to name an extreme case, Eugène Sue.

Dostoyevsky enters into Raskolnikov’s inner universe; he thinks, feels, and suffers with the murderer, and he is resurrected with him. He follows the great “Thou art that.”27 This is enlightening in the highest sense since the reader is included in the process of identification; but it does make the reading a purgatory for entire chapters—for instance, in Marmeladov’s confession or Raskolnikov’s plea of guilty.

This book, often described as a crime novel, is actually the opposite. The crime novel is fascinating because a human being is hunted in it; the chase, the clever tricks, the manhunt in the big city jungle: elements of a Great Hunt. Dostoyevsky takes us a floor deeper; the murderer appears as his own persecutor, but also his own self-conqueror. This touches us more intimately.

I also have to restrain myself here from bringing in Joseph Conrad: as a phenomenon of transition not only in East–West relations but also in the moral sphere, where his illumination of the ruined existence is unsurpassable. One might say that the roses begin to lose their sweet smell here. A ruined existence is an ambiguous case—a person no longer belongs to society, but he still recognizes its laws.

81

I don’t think we have strayed too far from the theme with this; at worst, it has been a circumscribing of it. The pure observation of man, also when accompanied by sympathy or even compassion, only ever nears its subject imperfectly.

Something entirely different occurs when the author begins to enter into his subjects, to identify with them. Lavater once said that to truly understand someone else one has to imitate their face28—we can agree, assuming that this does not stop at the mask. This is the touchstone that separates the authentic from the simulated—it can also be applied to actors. Blood will always be called for, and the most faithful imitation, the finest character study, will never achieve what passion can. Then art becomes identical with nature, the mask melts into the primordial substance. The distinction can be found in all the arts, including the healing arts, and it always involves what no school or technique can teach.

Raphael said, “Understanding means becoming one.” We should include the animal in this relation; the ancient hunters always knew this. It applies not only to blood forms of hunting but also to the higher hunt with its spiritual, deathless capture of the prey. Here again the religions of the Far East distinguish themselves from those of the Middle East. Many other eras, including the most ancient, were closer to and understood the animal more profoundly than our own, despite all the sophistications of modern-day zoology. And never have there been such shameful ways of treating animals as in our day.

The poet, too, knows the mystery of the Great Hunt. As the ancient hunters invoked the animal with masks and dances, so he invokes it with words that do not stop at impressions of movement and patches of color. Brothers should generally not sing each other’s praise; nevertheless, I cannot ignore Friedrich Georg’s success in this domain—with the peacock, the owl, the snake, the hare, and others.

We return here to early, pre-mythical times, to the transformative powers of the Great Mother. Her dress may have many patterns and pleats, but it is made of a single fabric. This unity becomes clear in fairy tales; poets and artists in general remind us of this. More important than what they make us see and hear is what they help us forget. If they succeed with this One, all else is left behind: the fragmentary, the disputable, the separate—that is, time and its shadings.

82

Dostoyevsky apparently saw something reassuring in the looser constitution of Paris and something frightening in the order of London. This attests to his penetrating but humane look. He saw Baal enthroned behind the spectacle on the Thames, and it frightened and fascinated him as it had inspired the portrayals of many others before and after him.

Dostoyevsky was likely thinking of the Bal or Bel who also appeared as a dragon and whom King Cyrus demanded of Daniel that he worship: “Thinkest thou not that Bel is a living God? Seest thou not how much he eats and drinks every day? . . . thou canst not say that he is no living god; therefore worship him.”29 Blake saw a green dragon manifesting in the form of the London Treasury Building.

The enduring reputation of this god Bel is of a hard and merciless master. The name Babylon, its principal seat, became synonymous with the metropolis as such, especially in its night side. Beyond this, Dostoyevsky also saw something specific: the stamp of puritanism in which enormous deployments of energy were coupled with an unwavering conscience. Hence, it is no coincidence that it was precisely in those puritanical zones that machine technology and its related forms of exploitation brought forth the precedents and model cases for critical reflection on these same phenomena.

If we look closely at this picture of London, the night side that is present in every metropolis and even in every small city is particularly bleak here. Like everything on offer in big cities, the varieties of vice are also more specialized and openly marketed. While the streets and quarters used for the purpose are similar in their essence everywhere, there are variations according to time and place: they are different in the capitals than in harbor or garrison towns, different where Hogarth studied them than where Toulouse-Lautrec did. There are cities with the age-old reputation of a Capua, and others that were founded expressly as centers of intoxication, gambling, and the sex trade.

In his Paris days, Dostoyevsky was undoubtedly also in Montmartre, but it was not there that Baal appeared to him to reign. He saw an orderly fabric in the Parisian ambience, in London an obscene disorder. We might have suspected the opposite impression, yet it is precisely here that his artistic incorruptibility is demonstrated—the artist whose gaze penetrates through the social veneer, through the varnish on a masterpiece, to its ground.

83

Again, the question arises: why do the altered states produce sadder, gloomier images in northern countries than in the south? There is no wine of course, but that also has its reasons. The same is true for the sun and for the climate in general. Poe is from a southern state, but he is nonetheless the perfect example for all the horrors of the Anglo-Saxon “blackout.” Poe’s hells are different from Baudelaire’s because in Poe the machine appears no longer in its economic but in its demonic power. The enemy of the artist, indeed of man, is mechanical movement; Bosch had already seen that.

In the north, the separation from all that the altered state is supposed to provide is greater; much of the natural, innate cheerfulness is lacking. On the other hand, northerners have a greater talent to reflect this into skepticism; masters of irony, satire, and the grotesque thrive more naturally in the north.

The separation entails greater effort. To forget something, to flee from something, or, conversely, to want to achieve or gain something—the whole problem of intoxication moves between these two poles. The poorer the substance, the wider the gap to be bridged. The way home from a Victorian family dinner passed directly by a brothel. Works and doctrines become “edifying” when the foundations of the edifice have become too weak. What should be is reflected into the mere appearance of it.

The comparison with the desert keeps coming to mind. Nietzsche pondered the matter thoroughly and roamed the oases and mirages himself. His evaluation of crime is part of this picture, along with the historical projection into the Renaissance. But caution is called for here; optical illusions had already crept in with Jacob Burckhardt, a confounding of strengths and weaknesses the consequences of which are difficult to judge. This leads back to Gobineau. “Nostalgia for racial purity is a distinguishing trait of the half-breed”—another of those maxims by which I did myself no favors.

Nietzsche’s relationship with altered states is that of a hyper-sensitive; the sun, the air, even the barometric pressure can have euphoric effects on such constitutions. He shares this with his readers above all in The Dawn of Day. In its preface he speaks of the person who “desires a long period of darkness, an unintelligible, hidden, enigmatic something, knowing as he does that he will in time have his own morning, his own redemption, his own rosy dawn.”30

Here again we are in an approach.

84

When the separation has become very great and the supervening element that we depend on very rare, then the intermediary zones and underworlds become more alluring—because things do not become absolutely barren. Now demons inhabit the crumbling altars.

The desolation must be grasped in the depths and not in the symptoms, for our visible world has no lack of outward variety. But this variety is bound to time and place, is dynamic in nature. We fly to the poles and even to the moon, and we bring our wastelands with us. So long as we stay in motion, the flood of images presses upon us. Why is it so insatiable, this hunger for images? It is a sign that the images are ultimately not satisfying. A real deficiency drives us to get beyond time and space.

Only where this hunger is no longer perceived as such can the mere images suffice; there they will seem complete in themselves, lacking nothing over, under, or behind them. They will no longer reveal their secrets to us. At this stage, people enjoy the contentment of the “Last Man” described by Nietzsche and after him by Huxley.

85

Where life becomes very impoverished, intoxication is one of the last remaining resources. This is one reason why alcoholism also cannot be dealt with by priests. The alcoholic can be helped neither economically nor morally; it is a problem of being, something theology has become increasingly incapable of resolving.

The alcoholic drinks not only to escape his own misery. Above all, he yearns to approach a place in which not only hisneeds but need as such has been removed, where grief itself does not exist. His euphoria conceals more than comfort and the absence of pain. Dostoyevsky grasped this too with brilliant insight. How else could he have put this sentence in the mouth of his unhappy hero, Marmeladow: “I drink so that I may suffer twice as much.”31

86

Natural cycles with their ebbs and flows are opposed to technical monotony: here the beat of the heart, there the cadence of the motor; here the poem, there the machine. The impulse to celebratory self-dissolution operates on both base and sublime levels—as much in those who drink away their weekly salary in the tavern as in the person who wants to say, “Once I lived like the gods!”

The cyclical rhythms are perceived more strongly where people still know the meaning of festivals and their joys; they are thus felt more strongly in untouched, archaic regions than in urbanized ones, more strongly in the country than in the city. The city is a single continuous fairground, it is light day and night. For this reason, the return—the real mystery of periodic cycles—is limited to only very big occasions. A return happens when the unmoving appears in the moving, the invisible in the visible—that is, when it is intimated in them.

There are thus more addicts in the city than in the country. One characteristic of addiction is that it tries to reduce the periodicity of the pleasure to a minimum, or even better, to a continuum. This flattens the peaks.

Cities also conceal addicts better than the countryside. They can live more anonymously, find shelter, change territories; the drugs are also easier to find.

In a small town, the village drunkard or the morphine addict are quickly identified and known to most, even when they try to hide their condition. This succeeds only when the transition from a strong habit to an unconditional addiction is not yet manifest. This is simultaneously the passage from open and approved consumption to a secret and suspect one.

Soon enough there is nothing left to hide; an inevitable loss of reputation and respect follows, apart from the economic, social, and health costs. The degeneration in the subject’s usual social manifestation, observed and suffered by family and friends, is perceived by the sufferer himself in the irrevocability of his demon. This is one of the saddest spectacles, described perhaps nowhere better than in some of E. A. Poe’s short stories.

Approaches : drugs and altered states / Ernst Jünger

what is the real in this case?—a number of marks in black printer’s ink on a few white sheets of paper

 Books and Readers

An essential monument of any city of dreams is that dedicated by the unknown reader to the nameless author in gratitude for the inspiration that has helped him attain a second, brighter existence. For myself, in any case, it appears that for long stretches I lived more intensely in books than in the intervals between them. I was not moving from Leipzig to Halle but from one chapter to the next. Between them lay the synchronized cadence of rails and ties, punctuated by the passing telegraph poles—the emptiness of the technical world. This had been the case even at school and then as a soldier—a life “to be continued.”

The palace of readers is the most enduring of all. It survives peoples, cultures, religions, and even the languages themselves. Earthquakes and wars do not shake it, nor even the burning of libraries, like the one in Alexandria. Markets, fellah towns, colosseums, skyscrapers, islands, and countries grow up in it and disappear, as though washed away by rain. Reality is charmed; the dream becomes real. A door is opened to a magical world.

I think that I have somewhere already mentioned the mandarin waiting for his execution in a line of wrongdoers, engrossed in a book as the beheadings proceed ahead of him. A reader is generally distracted, not because he could not cope with the world but because he simply takes it less seriously. This happens even more when a world is cheapened and its offerings devalued.

The Trials and Tribulations of Fontane has a firm place in my memory. I can relate details from it more precisely than what happened on the day I came to know the book. It was the day the Otago Rifles, fresh arrivals from New Zealand, were sent in at us, and we shot and blew each other up. During the breaks in the battle, I returned to the Brandenburg lake district of the Wilhelminian times.

In June 1904, as a nine-year-old, I first began reading One Thousand and One Nights, that immortal gift of the magical world to the West. I had found the book that month among the gifts on my mother’s birthday table. It was Gustave Weil’s four-volume translation, to which I repeatedly fled as to an oasis in the desert—that is, until I moved on to Littmann’s twelve-volume edition. The fables engraved themselves profoundly in my memory, as did the pictures in the richly illustrated edition. I sensed them again now in Taroudant, a Moroccan city with a strong oriental character despite its proximity to the coast.

One Thousand and One Nights: the ideal model of an at once collective and anonymous authorship. The work could have been created by a demon—fashioned overnight like one of its phantom castles. We could also think of the mother-of-pearl in a seashell—of cerebral traces that hardened into iridescence.

From: Approaches : drugs and altered states / Ernst Jünger

**

(I know, for my own part, that I am far more strongly moved by episodes in books than by those in real life, which usually leave me cold. This, of course, is what the author of the book is aiming at when he uses what Kierkegaard calls ‘the foreshortened perspective of the aesthetic’, which leaves out unromantic details—the hero’s interview with his bank manager about his overdraft; the heroine’s visit to the dentist to have two decayed teeth stopped—in order to heighten the reader’s emotional tension. My emotional reaction is entirely in the sphere of the imaginary; for what is the real in this case?—a number of marks in black printer’s ink on a few white sheets of paper.)

Nanavira Thera

Internal Exile

 

It was by chance that the writer Julien Gracq discovered On the Marble Cliffs at the newsagent’s of Angers station,133  at the darkest time of the Occupation. He opened it while waiting for a train and could not tear himself away from it. He would later state that the novel was ‘Jünger’s masterpiece’. In La Littérature à l’estomac,134  a famous 1950 pamphlet that targeted the commercialisation of literature, he would add the following:

I would readily give up on almost all the literature of the past ten years for Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs.135 

At a later time, he would expand further and write:

This book, which saw the light of day at one of the turning points of history [1939], tells us not only about Jünger himself, but, through him, also about ourselves and our era […]. I believe that one should read On the Marble Cliffs as a quintessential book. It is filled with great imagery, with images that have been, and still are, those of our lives as men of the mid-twentieth century, of our joys and disasters. […] Those are the different faces of our very situation: whether moving or terrible, they are the framework under which the cards of destiny were dealt to us.136 

The Warrior Who Withdrew from the World  

These thoughts, expressed by Julien Gracq, summarise to a certain extent the purpose of our current book. Ernst Jünger is indeed the witness of the successive faces of European destiny throughout the cruellest of centuries. However, On the Marble Cliffs only relates this fate in a fleeting manner. This coded novel cannot be separated from the era that witnessed its birth, independently of any artistic judgment.

In the text that we have just quoted, Julien Gracq briefly points out the highlights of Jünger’s career as both an author and a soldier, a career whose successive stages we are well-aware of: the endless reading endeavours during his childhood and adolescence, punctuated by adventurous outings into an untouched sort of nature; the founding ordeal of the Great War; the insolent heroism of a young assault troop officer covered in scars and forever marked by the exhilaration of the military attacks and the unrelenting harshness of the trenches; and the birth of the writer from the very moment that he removed his helmet. And what a writer he was! He would first become an author of war books and then a writer of political works that would turn him into the intellectual beacon of new radical thoughts that would be collected in his sensational manifesto entitled The Worker. And it was then that the one that people sometimes considered a herald of the victorious movement of 1933 suddenly turned away from it all in the most abrupt and unbridled manner. In response to the pleas made to him, he would dryly reply, ‘There is no room for me in an army where Göring is a general.’

Jünger thus becomes a sort of inner emigrant. He travels and meditates before penning his breakthrough novel, On the Marble Cliffs, in 1939, a novel whose meaning was immediately understood in Germany. As the first copies come out of the printing house, a new war breaks out. Although Jünger is mobilised, the enthusiasm of the past has given way to resignation. The opportunities to wage battle would be rare and he would not complain about it very much. Having ordered his men to always respect the vanquished in the aftermath of the French campaign, he is appointed to the headquarters of the occupying forces. Apart from being on leave a few times and a three-month mission in the Caucasus, he spent the rest of the war in Paris, establishing friendly relations with all that the French capital had to offer in terms of talent. Indirectly involved in the plot of 20 July 1944, he evades the fate of a great many other officers. During a long life in which he would also experience other, less dramatic developments, he had overcome many a mortal peril while enjoying a strange privilege of invulnerability.

Summarising Jünger’s life in his own words, Julien Gracq compares him to ‘those mediaeval warriors who had one day chosen to hang their sword on the walls of a cloister’. Although the image itself is beautiful, the fact remains that Jünger’s long existence was punctuated by a greater number of transmutations than this single change. It is, of course, true that On the Marble Cliffs did mark a clear break in the middle of his life, heralding the immense rift that would soon befall the mind and destiny of Europeans. We shall return to this later.137 

This break in Ernst Jünger’s life and work is a source of more than one enigma. The warrior, tempted by the dreams of a violent revolution, suddenly withdraws from the world and transforms into a humanitarian and pacifistic hermit, collecting plants on the heights of the Marble Cliffs. And it is the unexpected that drives even the least curious onlooker to ask questions.

Ernst Jünger

A Different European Destiny 

Domminque Venner

Carl Schmitt, Jünger’s Unlikely Friend

 

Unlike Jünger, Spengler and Ernst von Salomon, several renowned intellectuals belonging to the same hard-to-define movement of the Conservative Revolution had initially hoped that the new chancellor would be the providential actor that would bring about their country’s national recovery. I am thinking of the jurist Carl Schmitt, the writer Gottfried Benn and the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was, for a long time, part of the circle of Jünger’s close friends. They had met at the beginning of 1930 and the mutual appeal exerted by these two superior yet different minds had been so great that Jünger would often speak of his ‘unfathomable friend’ and his ‘invigorating’158  company. What had also brought them closer before 1933 was their shared distrust of Western democracies. On the other hand, the two men would have divergent standpoints as soon as Hitler had risen to power.

The great jurist had published his major works at the time of the Weimar Republic: his criticism of political romanticism (1919); his book on dictatorship (1921); and his studies on political theology (1922), on the political form of the Roman Catholic Church (1923), on the notion of the political (1928), and on the concepts of legality and legitimacy (1932). Remaining rather on the fringes of the Conservative Revolution, he was hostile to any and all organismic thought and even rejected an entire part of the German political tradition in order to draw inspiration from Italian (Machiavelli), French (Joseph de Maistre), Spanish (Donoso Cortès) and English (Thomas Hobbes) authors. His Christian faith, which Jünger did not share, and his counter-revolutionary Roman Catholicism served as a basis for his philosophy of the State. He criticised liberalism, as well as the economic and moral doctrine of individualism, which he deemed incompatible with genuine democracy owing to the fact that the latter presupposes a political homogeneity of citizens and a similarity of views between the governing and the governed. In July 1932, he called for a vote against the NSDAP headed by Hitler, whom he considered dangerous due to his ideological and political immaturity. Supporting Chancellor von Papen, he even spoke out in favour of the Reichswehr-based national dictatorship project, arguing for a ban on both the Nazi Party and the Communist Party for being in breach of the Weimar Constitution159  .

Following in von Papen’s footsteps, however, he would align himself with the new power from the beginning of 1933. On 1 May 1933, he would even join the NSDAP, whose ban he had called for shortly before. With regard to this reversal, the question remains open as to the role of Schmitt’s opportunism and career concerns, which may or may not account for this. Appointed to the Prussian State Council in 1933, he also became the head of the National Socialist Association of German Jurists. His ambition was, in fact, to become the official jurist of the new Reich. Philosophically, he hoped to promote the idea of the State (the ‘total’ State, as he himself wrote) at the expense of the notion of Party. His theory was that there is no totalitarian state as such, only a totalitarian party whose ambitions are to be limited by the State.160  At the same time, he firmly upheld the distinction, a fundamental one in his eyes, between what is political and what is not; between the public sphere and the private sphere.

These conceptions would be rejected by the Nazis, who would regard them as a surrendering of the prerogatives enjoyed by the Party and its leader in favour of the State, all the more so since Schmitt was also opposed to any biological racism that contradicted his own philosophy of history. For this reason, he would be targeted by ever-increasing criticism from 1934 onwards. In 1936, he is forced to resign from his official functions, before being subjected to a public trial by the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps,161  in two front-page articles published in December 1936.162  Realising that he had deceived himself, he confines himself to his academic work, adding to the number of those who had embraced ‘internal emigration’, to which Ernst Jünger had long preceded him. This would not stop him, however, from being arrested by the American police in 1945. He would thereafter be imprisoned in Nuremberg until May 1947. In the meantime, he had been expelled from university and was without pension, depending on a few friends to survive. Plummeting into the blackest bitterness, he would thus indulge, on the pages of his own Journal (Glossarium), in venomous attacks against his friend Jünger, reproaching him for his apparent detachment and his gradual return to grace.

Dominique Venner

Ernst Jünger - A Different European Destiny