qu'il faut bien citer ce qu'on ne comprend point du tout dans la langue qu'on entend le moins

"Because," answered the scholar, "one must quote what one doesn't understand at all in the language one understands the least."

The Sternenverlag book-store in Düsseldorf, near Graf Adolf Platz, offers, on their fourth floor, what is called an antiquariat. First I purchased Ernst Jünger's Annäherungen, his book on drugs and psychedelic experimentation which I had considered the stuff of legend and somehow lost to the world. It cost 44 Euro, I think. After, I bought a smaller volume, Ein Inselfrühling, regarding the Jünger brothers' trips to Rhodes and Sicily (in the attached Aus der Goldenen Muschel). That exhausted the supply of books I was currently desirous of. However, I had enough curiosity in the (younger) Jünger brother, Friedrich Georg, to buy the green-covered former library copy of his Dalmatinische Nacht. That, and Hölderlin's Hyperion. I should have known enough, however, to purchase all of their Gottfried Benn.

Now, in the states, I continued this buying spree with EJ's Siebzig Verweht, a five-volume diary begun at the age of seventy, and Zwei Schwestern, Gespräche, Die Perfektion der Technik, Grüne Zweige, and a translation, Homer's Odyssee, all by FG Jünger.

Just this moment I finished Grüne Zweige, Ein Erinnerungsbuch, so thought I could write some account of what I have found out from the new reading. I began in Düsseldorf, obviously, at the kitchen table of my subsection of the Clemens' house, to read Annäherungen while waiting for Spongebob Schwammkopf to play on the little thirteen inch screen. Over a couple days I read through the introduction to the first section regarding beer and wine. I should explain that the book covers drugs (caffeine and tobacco through LSD and mescaline) and intoxication, not excepting such endeavors as battle, gambling, etc. The title means, roughly, approximations -- and in the sense of moving ever closer to something. Many of his thoughts escaped me, but I was entranced, as intended, by his first encounter with beer, when his troop of youthful wanderers (the Wandervögel), something like a more loosely organized boy-scout group, happened upon a brewery in some distant forest and secured a visit. They found themselves soon drinking freely and singing with the Braumeister.

Ich hatte bis dahin kaum Bier getrunken; der Stoff erschien mir bitter, fade, unangenehm. Hier war es anders: der Durst, aber auch die Gesellschaft, veränderten den Geschmack. Zugleich wurden ungeahnte Kräfte frei. Ich machte neuartige Beobachtungen. [I had until then hardly ever drank beer; the stuff seemed to me bitter, flat, unpleasant. Here it was different: the thirst, but also the company, changed the taste. Immediately, powers unsuspected were set free. I made new kinds of observations.]

Maybe one more quote can illustrate something of the neo-Platonic observations he primarily concerns himself with -- the type of "approximation" he thinks of: "Im Wein ist Wahrheit" -- das bedeutet nicht, daß sie in ihm verborgen ist. Das Wort meint eher, daß er etwas gewahren läst, das immer und außer ihm gegenwärtig ist. Der Wein ist ein Schlüssel -- das Gegenwärtige wird zum Eintretenden. [In vino veritas -- that does not mean that truth is hidden in the stuff. The phrase means, rather, that it lets something be granted which is always present outside of it. Wine is a key -- that which is present turns into that which enters (enters, initiates...; or perhaps... that which is present penetrates(?)).]

Anyway, I stopped because I realized it was an important book that I should return to with better ability. I turned instead to Friedrich Georg and found what first seemed like a German Hemingway -- at least regarding his simplicity of style -- combined with a Robert Aickmanesque sense of the strange. Anstatt mir das Mysteriöse klar und deutlich zu machen, war ich damit beschäftige, mir das Klare und Deutliche mysteriös zu machen. [Instead of making the mysterious straight and clear for myself, I occupied myself with making what was straight and clear mysterious.] I read Dalmatinische Nacht at the kitchen table and finished it sitting outside in the sunlight of the Clemens' garden.

The setting of the small garden proved the best; I don't think I have enjoyed a better climate in mid-day than that of Düsseldorf at that time. Whitish birds flew ahead, so fast I could not tell what they were. I saw plaques for award winning Tauben on the walls of the porch -- so those must have been doves that flew overhead. Apparently, Herr Clemens had tagged and tracked doves as a hobby his whole life long. He had just stopped because of his bad back. Later, he showed me an antique wooden Uhr with which he somehow tracked and recorded these birds that flew at least as far away as Barcelona. Frau Clemens explained, as he walked away, that the sight of the Uhr now made him very sad.

Dalmatinische Nacht was simple to read; the short stories within are as follows: Laura, Der Sekretär, Der Wechsel, Felizitas, Dalmatinische Nacht, Beluga, Major Dobsa, and Zwischen Mauern. The title story immediately provokes the most passion and thought. From 24 February 1952, Heinrich Wiegand Petzel's dialogues with Heidegger: "At the end we spoke about Friedrich Georg Jünger's Dalmatinische Nacht. I told of the impression this novel had had on Gertrude Eysoldt. When I recently visited her in Ohlstadt, she re-created all the events of the book as a sequence of dramatic events -- seen with the eyes of a great actress."

The story itself is simple, as I recall it. A man walks down a mountain, returning from a pleasurable exploration of the peaks and trails to his friend's estate somewhere on the wild Dalmatian coast. The man is, like all Jünger main characters, calm, intellectual, adventurous, and self-preserving. The friend, Aleksandar, is described as large, a bear, something primal, both powefully friendly and hospitable, yet easily disdainful or injurious to those that impinge upon himself and his freedom. The estate gives the impression of classical proportions, with a grand terrace overlooking the sea. Stairs lead down to the vineyards and gardens; the estate produces wine (called Opolo), olives, and other local foods which Aleksandar is fiercely proud.

To sum it up, the main character swims in the ocean, the two eat and drink the local fish and delicacies late into the night, and talk. A monk and a marine gendarm stop by, are lightly mocked by the drunken Aleksandar, and pass along. Eventually Aleksandar needs to sleep, and Jünger's character helps the two servants carry him beneath a tree. By this time the wine has coursed through our protagonist's body, and he finds himself transformed, or taken to an elation with which he finds himself silently enraptured by the entire locality -- the sea, the night, the place and its food and drink. Eventually, I believe, the sun rises and he takes himself off again for the mountains.

If EJ's On the Marble Cliffs was German magical realism, as I've heard it is classified, then this must be the apotheosis of the genre. One reads it not knowing the precise year; Aleksandar seems like a benevolent local sovereign or warlord of sorts, whose independence is necessary to the proper cultivation of the land. Yet one is always and already asking how long this independence can last. It's a perfect moment, and at once tragic. So, the novella sets up a visit, a stop-over, in the essence of this Dalmatian locality -- in an episode or an Aufenthalt, all too ephemeral, in which the true essence of the place shows itself. The perception of this essence owes a lot to tourism and travel, the kind of spiritual wandering that EJ took part in with the Wandervögel and the Jünger brothers continued, often together, after WWI. In EJ's collected journals, one can find the Dalmatinischer Aufenthalt, which would probably deepen a reading of the novella.

Further regarding travel, Petzet's book tells us that "when Ernst Jünger was about to start his trip to East Asia in 1966, Heidegger included a saying of the old sage [Lao-Tsu] in his letter to Jünger." The quote is as follows:

Nicht zum Tor hinausgehen
und die Welt kennen,
Nicht zum Fenster hinausspähen
und den Himmel ganz sehen:
Geht man sehr weit hinaus,
weiss man sehr wenig.
Darum der Weise:
nicht reist er,
doch er kennt,
nicht guckt er,
doch er rühmt,
nicht handelt er,
doch er vollendet.

In Jan Ulenbrook's translation:

Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world,
Without looking out the window
One can see the whole heavens:
The further one goes
The less one knows
Therefore the sage knows without having to stir
Identifies without having to see
Accomplishes without having to act.

I think the last line might have some more to do with the sage becoming complete without engaging in forms of business or exchange, though I am not entirely sure. In any case, this makes me think about my own travels. There is a pride and comfort in mapping out one's favorite worldly landmarks. I know if someone told me to go where the via Orazio overlooks the old man's bocce ball field, I could be there in half a day. Or I could go to where Conrad IV was beheaded. And maybe I could still find the abandoned train station near the horse corral, or where the English teacher and his daughter lived, in Ramadi. And one wonders how certain things change. If I were to go to that old tower on the hill across from Caserta Vecchia, would the stone rubble inside still be strewn in that certain way? Are the occult books still on display in the lower chamber of that 7th century church in Procida?

At one level, for me, travel resembles some old computer games. Think of Bungie Corp, releasing, first for the Mac, one excellent game after another. Pathways into Darkness, Marathon (1, 2, and 3), and the Halo games -- they are all the same, really. You begin with a point, which is you, and you move yourself around until you have brought light to all twists and turns in the map. The pleasure is in knowing each room, each artifact, and entity. You know what corpses are where and how to talk to them. There is comfort in tracking the unique touches the creators let fall here and there; a crack in the wall, a piece of stone on the ground.

And usually an artificial intelligence assigns the missions. Other artificial intelligences fight to control you and what missions and locations you are teleported to. So you travel from planet to ship, discovering and destroying. I remember a long time ago telling Gallagher that life really and truly should be like that. A weapon, a uniform, and worlds, with strange beings and scripts, to explore at the behest of an artificial intelligence -- perhaps itself a cover for something more mechanical than human, or perhaps pure contingency -- who can teleport and ship you anywhere. In retrospect, one should truly be careful of what one wishes, even in some apparently affectless suburbia.

I read recently, though have forgotten where, that the antidote against a proclivity to exoticism is to get to know people rather than just scenery. I think that's very wise and true. However, that originary New Englander, H.P. Lovecraft, has it in a letter to his aunt: "It may be taken as axiomatic that the people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me, except as components of a general landscape and scenery. My life lies not among people but among scenes. My local affections are not personal, but topographical and architectural. I am always an outsider; but outsiders have their sentimental preferences for visual environment. I will be dogmatic only to the extent of saying that it is New England that I must have, in some form or other. Providence is part of me. I am Providence."

How often have I felt like that? There is pleasure in such a mien, but inside it, and making it as pleasurably sad as it is, is the thought that it isn't entirely right. Or that there is a lack. On some level there must be something, a providence, demi-urge, artificial intelligence, world contingency, military command, that can lead you around the world in such a way that it is revealed to you as a giant waiting room, perhaps entirely undifferentiated from the chambers of the computerized Marathon ship or Mayan pyramid. Perhaps this is a necessary step in thinking, should one seize it rightly. After all, one already knows the stories of the holy grail, and of countless other "artifacts"; one has already read, with the Jünger brothers, Orlando Furioso and Orlando Innamorato, having tracked the travels, gains and losses, of the knights around the known world. Does Heidegger's proferred words from Lao-Tsu represent a maturity? If so, how far was Friedrich Georg along the path to this maturity in his Dalmatinische Nacht?

***

Aside from this unintended digression I should mention that I also read Grüne Zweige, Gespräche (in which I first heard the word Schirokko -- there is a conversation in which EJ and his Napolitano girlfriend fight and he accuses her of being affected by it), Ein Inselfrühling (Rhodes sounds like an amazing place to go), and Zwei Schwestern. This last I should write about in another entry. It is a bizarre novel with another typical Jünger character living out a long stay in Rome during the early part of Mussolini's rule.

http://www.blauenarzisse.de/v2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=353&Itemid=35

Oh, uhh, here's Milva and Vangelis. Sorry.