The Stranger Visits

Ernst Jünger, from The Adventurous Heart, 1938.  New translation by Thomas Friese:

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I was sleeping in an antiquated old house, when I was awoken by a series of strange sounds, which rang with a humming “dang, dang, dang” and at once agitated me in the highest degree.  I leapt up and ran with a numbed head around a table.  When I pulled on the tablecloth, it moved.  There I realized: this is not a dream, you are awake.  My fear increased, as the “dang, dang, dang” resounded ever faster and more menacingly.  It issued from a vibrating warning panel hidden in the wall.  Dashing to the window, I looked down into a narrow old alley that lay in the deep cleft between the houses, over which the ragged tail of a comet twinkled.  A group of people, men with high, pointy hats, women and girls stood below, attired in an antiquated and disorderly manner.  They appeared to have just run out of the houses into the alley; their voices echoed up to me.  I heard the sentence: “The stranger is back in town.”

When I turned around, there was someone sitting on my bed.  I wanted to jump out of the window, but was spellbound to the spot.  The figure rose slowly and stared at me.  Its eyes glowed, and as their gaze intensified they grew in size, which lent them a horribly ominous aspect.  At the instant their size and red blaze became intolerable, they burst and then trickled away in sparks, like bits of glowing coal falling through a grate.  Only the black, burned-out eye sockets remained, as the absolute Void that lurks behind the veil of horror.

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Jünger’s close friend, Alfred Kubin, untitled (1900)

Jünger, from The Glass Bees

Ernst Jünger, from The Glass Bees (Gläserne Bienen, 1957; trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer).  via Varia:

“My query is this: Why are those who have endangered and changed our lives in such terrifying and unpredictable ways not content with unleashing and controlling enormous forces and with enjoying their consequent fame, power, and wealth?  Why must they want to be saints as well?

“This question had especially bothered me when I was employed as a tank inspector.  Among the few books I carried with me at that time (along with Flavius Josephus) was The Conquest of Mexico by Prescott.  The fascination of this book lies in its evocation of man’s rigid taboos and obsessions during a late stone-age civilization where priesthoods and sun temples and human sacrifices abounded.  We see, as through a narrow chink, impassive faces seemingly carved of stone, and the streams of blood which flow down through the grooves and drains of the altar in the Great Teocalli.  No wonder the Spaniards believed that one of the vast abodes of Satan had opened up before their eyes.

“But isn’t it possible that, when once again the curtain of the great world stage has fallen, no less horrified eyes may be directed on us and on our saints?  We do not know how we shall appear in the history books of future centuries or at the great judgment of the dead on civilizations.  Perhaps such a wizened old blood-priest will be preferred to any of our saints.

“For instance, our increasing speed, which began at the end of the eighteenth century like the start of a salto mortale—how shall it be judged?  At a certain point in time we can begin to speak of a dynamite civilization (it is no accident that the highest prize for cultural achievements is provided from a dynamite fund): the world is filled with the noise of explosions—from the rapid, diminutive explosions which set in motion myriads of machines, to the explosions which threaten continents.  We walk through a panorama of pictures, which, if we have not fallen under its spell, reminds us of a large lunatic asylum—here we see an automobile race, in the course of which a car drives among the spectators like a missile, mowing some dozens of them down; and there, a pattern bombing, by which a squadron of bombers rolls up a city like a carpet, in a few minutes dissolving into smoke a work of art which took a thousand years to complete.  A luxury airliner crashes to the ground, wrapping itself in red flames.  Crew and passengers—men, women, and children— are charred into mummies, within the blazing fuselage.  Beauty and radiance, jewels, silk, and diamonds evaporate in the blaze.”

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Jünger, ca. 1990’s

An aerial bombardment

from the Paris diaries of Ernst Jünger, 15 September 1943. Trans. Hilary Barr:

“I was having dinner in my room at the Raphael when at around twenty minutes to eight the sirens sounded the alert. Soon there came the sound of intense fire; I hurried up to the roof. There my eyes were met by a spectacle at once terrifying and magnificent. Two large squadrons were flying in wedge formation, from northwest to southeast, over the heart of the city. They had apparently already dropped their loads, for in the direction from which they came clouds of smoke rose in billowing masses, darkening the firmament. It was a calamitous sight and I knew at once that down there at this moment hundreds, perhaps thousands of people were suffocating, burning, bleeding to death.

“Before this dismal curtain the city lay in the golden light of sunset. The glow of evening struck the planes from below; the fuselages stood out like silvery fish against the blue sky. The tail fins in particular seemed to capture and concentrate the rays; they sparkled like Roman candles.

“These squadrons flew low in glittering wedges over the outskirts of the city, while clusters of white and black cloudlets accompanied them. I saw the specks of fire around which — first sharp and minute like heads of pins, then gradually dissolving — the globes of smoke gathered. Now and then a plane fell burning from the sky, very slowly and without a plume of smoke, as a golden orb of fire. One plunged darkly toward the ground, twirling like a leaf in autumn, leaving a trail of thick white smoke. Still another was torn apart as it went down. A huge wing hovered for a long time in the air and something sepia-brown and bulky fell with increasing velocity — here a man was plummeting at the end of a smoldering parachute.

“In spite of these hits, the formations held their course without swerving to the right or left, and the linearity of their movement gave the impression of awesome power. Add to that the loud drone of the engines, which filled the expanse and sent flocks of pigeons anxiously fluttering around the Arc de Triomphe. The spectacle wore the two dominant features of our existence and of our world: strictly rational, disciplined order and unbridled elemental force. It was at once a scene of sublime beauty and of demonic power. For some moments I lost track of what was happening, and my consciousness dissolved in the landscape around me, in the perception of catastrophe, but also of its underlying significance.

“Huge conflagrations, whose centers merged on the horizon, glared more intensely as darkness fell. Then flashes followed by explosions convulsed the night.”

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Terror

Ernst Jünger, from Das Abenteuerliche Herz, 1938.  Translation from a soon to be published edition by Telos Press.  Thank you to Simon Friedrich for posting this excerpt:

“There is a type of thin, broad sheet metal that is often used in small theaters to simulate thunder.  I imagine a great many of these metal sheets, yet still thinner and more capable of a racket, stacked up like the pages of a book, one on top of another at regular intervals, not pressed together but kept apart by some unwieldy mechanism.

I lift you up onto the topmost sheet of this mighty pack of cards, and as the weight of your body touches it, it rips with a crack in two.  You fall, and you land on the second sheet, which shatters also, with an even greater bang.  Your plunge strikes the third, fourth, fifth sheet and so on, and with the acceleration of the fall the impacts chase each other closer and closer, like a drumbeat rising in rhythm and power.  Ever more furious grows the plummet and its vortex, transforming into a mighty, rolling thunder that ultimately bursts the limits of consciousness.

Thus it is that terror ravishes man — terror, which is something altogether different from dread, fear, or anxiety.  It is sooner related to the horror realized on the face of the Gorgon, with its hair on end and mouth opened in a scream, whereas dread more senses than sees the uncanny and for just that reason is shackled by it the more strongly.  Anxiety lies yet distant from the limits and can maintain a dialogue with hope, while fright … yes, a fright is what is felt when the first sheet rips.  In a deadly plunge, the screaming drumbeats and the glowing red lights then intensify, no longer in warning but as an appalling confirmation, all the way down to the terrifying.

Do you have any idea what goes on in this space that we will perhaps someday plunge through, the space that extends between the recognition of the downfall and the downfall itself?

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Jünger in Paris, 1942, photo by Florence Henri

The Tortoises of Santorini

Ernst Jünger, 30th October, 1984.  From the translation of Stefan Jarl, which appears in his English subtitles for Neunzig Verveht (Ninety Flown By), playlist here.  Thanks to Simon Friedrich for posting the video.

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Another sunny day.  We’ve had too few of those this year.  It’s good that we went to Santorini.  The lack of full sunlight [strahlung] is conspicuous; the fruits ripen slowly and taste less sweet than usual.  The tortoises dream the days away in their straw nests, not even sticking their noses out.  Hopefully, they have enough reserves to last them through the winter sleep.  I went to have a look at them today as usual.  After many years I have reached a point where I can pick them up without frightening them, and when I caress them, they begin to wave [weben: to weave, to be about, to live] their heads.

“Thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice [weben],” Psalm 65:9.

To stride, swim, scull, fly, shake, nod, weben, are activities that reach back into inanimate nature, predating creation.  Passively, the act of breathing and the pulsation of the organs, their tension and relaxation in the living world, is all part of this.  The power of the bow, the wave and the pendulum rise up into nature and into her organisms and branch off within her.  The wave offering (Numbers 18:11) is made by means of movement.  The gift is waved about, offered and then given to the priests and their household.  One could speak of a ‘pre-cultic’ existence of the religions:  This would include holy places such as mountains, where, since time immemorial altars have been erected over and over again, but also simple movements such as the act of walking, and above all the dance.  Where this is lacking, a weakening may certainly be suspected.  In the same way as the natural law precedes and overreaches the positive law, the different religions are predated by the act of worship, in and from which they have their life, like islands in an ocean.  Here, one could also mention Augustine’s definition of the divine law:  ‘It has been revealed to the Christians, but it has also been apprehended by the pagans.’

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Horst Janssen, Porträt Ernst Jünger (1990)

Flugträume

A translation by Simon Friedrich at ernst-juenger.org of “Flugträume,” from Ernst Jünger’s Das Abenteuerliche Herz (1929, revised 1938).  Also thankful to Simon for drawing my attention to the angel frescoes at Pompeii:

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“Flying dreams are like memories of the possession of a special spiritual power. In truth, they are more dreams of floating, throughout which a sense of gravity always remains. We glide forth into the twilight, close over the ground, and if we touch it the dream breaks off. We float down the stairs and out of the house and occasionally raise ourselves over low obstacles like fences and hedges. At these points, we push ourselves up with an exertion that we feel in our bent elbows and balled fists. The body is semi-prone, as though we were lying comfortably in an armchair, and we float with legs forward. These dreams are pleasurable; but there are other horrible ones in which the dreamer flies over the ground in a rigid posture, bent forward with his face down. He raises himself stiffly from the start, in a sort of catalepsy, by tracing a circle over his toes with his body. He glides in this manner at night over streets and squares, once in while popping up like a fish before lonely passersby and staring into their terrified faces.

How effortless by contrast seems the lofty flight that we see on early floating pictures. Pompeii is a site for such finds as well. A wonderful, uplifting vortex bears up the figures here, though it barely seems to ruffle their hair or robes.”

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A Mushroom Symposium

Albert Hoffman quotes Ernst Jünger’s Annäherungen: Drogen und Rausch, in which Jünger narrates his experience with psilocybin, a hallucinogen produced in mushrooms, during a 1962 experiment with Hoffman:  (Full source here)

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… the mushroom began to act; the spring bouquet glowed darker. Everything became skin and was touched, even the retina—there the contact was light … This light was multicolored; it arranged itself in strings, which gently swung back and forth; in strings of glass beads of oriental doorways. They formed doors, like those one passes through in a dream, curtains of lust and danger. The wind stirred them like a garment. They also fell down from the belts of dancers, opened and closed themselves with the swing of the hips, and from the beads a rippling of the most delicate sounds fluttered to the heightened senses. The chime of the silver rings on the ankles and wrists is already too loud. It smells of sweat, blood, tobacco, chopped horse hairs, cheap rose essence. Who knows what is going on in the stables?

It must be an immense palace, Mauritanian, not a good place. At this ballroom flights of adjoining rooms lead into the lower stratum. And everywhere the curtains with their glitter, their sparkling, radioactive glow. Moreover, the rippling of glassy instruments with their beckoning, their wooing solicitation:  “Will you go with me, beautiful boy?”  Now it ceased, now it repeated, more importunate, more intrusive, almost already assured of agreement.

Now came forms—historical collages, the vox humana, the call of the cuckoo. Was it the whore of Santa Lucia, who stuck her breasts out of the window? Then the play was ruined. Salome danced; the amber necklace emitted sparks and made the nipples erect. What would one not do for one’s Johannes [ed. penis]—damned, that was a disgusting obscenity, which did not come from me, but was whispered through the curtain.

The snakes were dirty, scarcely alive, they wallowed sluggishly over the floor mats. They were garnished with brilliant shards. Others looked up from the floor with red and green eyes. They glistened and whispered, hissed and sparkled like diminutive sickles at the sacred harvest. Then it quieted, and came anew, more faintly, more forward. They had me in their hand …

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Jünger tickles a turtle

The Redstart

A translation by Simon Friedrich at www.ernst-juenger.org, from Ernst Jünger´s Das Abenteuerliche Herz (1929, revised 1938):

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“While breakfasting in the garden, I watched as a baby bird fell from the Redstart nest above my threshold and lay dead on the stone floor. Its body was still naked, and its large eyeballs shone darkly through the rosy skin. These and the wide, tightly-shut beak lent the small corpse a precocious, painful character.

The abrupt plummet from safety into nothingness was that much more forceful because in the same moment the little creature disappeared without a trace from the perception of its parents. They continued faithfully flying to and from their little nest with food for the surviving siblings, often passing close by the little dead body with not a trace of interest.

I have frequently made the observation that animals are equipped with a different, indeed a sharper perception for the living than we. For them, death very quickly transforms the body into an object; cases exist in which the parents immediately perceive the corpse of their young in its character as food. Animals thereby abide most decisively by Heraclitus’s maxim about the corpse, which it describes as rubbish and which I assume was directed against the Egyptian cult of the dead. It seems that animals do not grasp themselves as images but rather as life phenomena – one must visualize this relation as our own relationship to an electric lamp that illuminates us because, and only as long as, there is current in it.

The little incident led me to a consideration which I found a happy one, namely, that a common spirit is developed in the nest in a manner which goes beyond our imagining. Correspondingly, individuation is little developed; one must picture a little family like this as one in which what we call the individual is altogether absent. There is consequently no perception of death in our sense …

… We can be sure that the same thing is hidden in our own life. Here this is indeed the case, even if not within the family. In fact, this ancient form of blindness reigns where we would least suspect – namely where our own I is concerned. We are unable to perceive our own selves as individuals; an image of our own corpse also eludes our imagination. In our highly complex inner order, the I is the last stronghold into which this life-blindness has withdrawn; from there, it sallies forth …”

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Jünger on dreams

A translation by Simon Friedrich at www.ernst-juenger.org, from Ernst Jünger´s Das Abenteuerliche Herz (1929):

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“First Postscript - Casablanca.  Here we can generally add how favourable a sudden awakening is for the recollection of dream images. A nice analogy presented itself to me today near Ain Diab whose barren lands I hiked through at midday hunting for cave animals. Now, at the end of December, its cracked red earth on which white Narcissi bloom is strewn with large blocks of rock. Since these blocks are of calcareous tuff, they are easily turned over. With luck, one finds a great blue Carabus under them, an insect found only in the magical circle around Casablanca, as well as assorted other creatures escaping the scorching rays of the sun. Among many others, I caught glimpses of a sand-coloured gecko, a very slender colourful snake rolled up like a whiplash, and a great Mauritanian scorpion.

All this depends greatly on flipping the rock over with a quick movement. The company gathered beneath holds its position a short while, frozen by the sudden incidence of the light, so that one’s eye can capture them. If one turns the block over slowly, they find time to slip away through a hundred fissures and holes, and a final blurred scurrying is all the eye catches.

In exactly this manner, a sudden awakening resembles a quickly drawn aside curtain. In that moment we realize the unusual company we keep at night. A particular manner of seeing is involved here, of which we are capable for only a brief moment – perhaps not longer than the time we sit half-upright in the dark, after being forced awake. The figures then lose themselves – and everyone knows the strained effort with which we try to recall this or that detail.

In special cases it may be possible that a person can extend or exploit this form of insight at will. Such a gift reveals itself in the pictures of Hieronymus Bosch. We get the impression that the rabble on which we eavesdrop during their carousing would instantly vaporize if it realized that a human eye was regarding it. The eye observes here as if through the closed cover of a ceiling …”

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Hieronymus Bosch, detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1490-1510)

Jünger visits Picasso

From the Paris diary of Ernst Jünger, 22 July 1942 (full text here):

This afternoon I called on Picasso. He lives in a spacious building whose storeys now serve as lofts and storerooms. This house in the Rue des Grands-Augustines plays a role in the novels of Balzac, and it was there that they brought Ravaillac after he murdered the king. In one of the corners rose a narrow winding staircase with steps of stone and old oakwood. Tacked to a narrow door was a sheet of paper on which the word ICI was written in blue crayon. After I had rung the bell, the door was opened to me by a short man in a simple overall, Picasso himself. I had met him once before briefly, and again I had the impression that I was looking at a magician—an impression enhanced on that occasion by a little pointed green hat.

L’Aubade (1942)

Apart from a small flat and some storage closets, the domicile consisted of two capacious lofts, the lower of which, it seemed, he used for sculptural work, the upper for painting. The plaster floor was bricked in a honeycomb pattern, the yellow-washed walls buttressed by dark beams of oak. Also beneath the ceilings ran black ribs of oakwood. The premises seemed to me well suited for work; they had the fecundity of old attics in which time stands still.

First we looked at old papers downstairs, then ascended to the upper story. Among the paintings that stood there, two simple female portraits struck my fancy, and then, above all, a stretch of seashore that seemed to blossom before my eyes in ever greater intensities of red and yellow. While regarding it, we talked about painting and writing from memory. Picasso asked me what real landscape was to be looked for behind the Marble Cliffs.

Other pictures, such as a series of asymmetrical heads, struck me as monstrous. Nevertheless, such an extraordinary talent—whom we have seen devote himself for years and decades to such subjects—must be granted an objectivity of vision, even if it eludes our own perception. Ultimately it involves something not yet seen and not yet born, experiments of an alchemical nature—in fact, several times he used the word retort. Never was it so compellingly and so eerily plain to me that the homunculus is more than an idle invention. The image of man is magically prefigured, and few suspect the terrible profundity of the decision the painter makes.

Dora Maar au chat (1942)

Although I tried more than once to steer him onto this subject, he was evasive, perhaps deliberately:  “There are chemists who spend their entire lives exploring the elements hidden in a lump of sugar. Well, I’d like to know what color is.”

On the influence of his works: “My pictures would have the same effect if after finishing them I wrapped them up and sealed them without showing them to anyone. They are essentially manifestations of an immediate nature.”

On the war: “The two of us, as we sit here, would negotiate peace this very afternoon. In the evening mankind could light the candles.”

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Jünger in the 1930’s

Balearic Passages

A translation by Simon Friedrich at www.ernst-juenger.org, from Ernst Jünger’s Das Abenteuerliche Herz:

“… In the afternoon I located a solitary island of rock whose steep spine covered with honey-coloured wood spurge rose up out of the fields. I heard sounds everywhere in the scorched bushes – not the evenly drawn-out winding of snakes but rather the short rummaging rustle of lizards. The Balearic Islands conserve exquisite varieties. After I waited a little on a stone, they came out – often so close that they almost scurried away over my feet. I was particularly amused by one that suddenly appeared on a tree root and let its tail hang down like a bridal train. As it raised its head a little to the sun, its throat flashed like blue lapis in the light.

Encounters like these provoke a fright in us – a kind of giddiness elicited by the immediate proximity of life’s depths. The animals usually also enter our perception as quietly and unnoticed as magical visions. Through their figures, dances and games, they then present us with pictures of a highly secret, compelling kind. It seems that every animal image corresponds to a signal in our innermost depths; and I sense this all the more keenly since I no longer enjoy hunting. All the same, the ties operating here are of a most cryptic character – one intuits them as one divines the important content of a sealed letter …”

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