"The Adventurous Heart": Solitary Sentinels

ON SALE FROM SEPT 1

One last appetizer has been conceded by the publishers before this new Jünger translation goes on sale Sept 1....

Solitary Sentinels - Berlin 

Swedenborg condemned the “spiritual stinginess” that locked away his dreams and insights.

But what of the spirit’s contempt for minting and issuing itself into general circulation, what of its aristocratic self-sufficiency in Ariosto’s magical castles? The inexpressible is degraded when it expresses and makes itself communicable; it is like gold that must be mixed with copper to make it useful as currency. A dreamer, attempting to catch his dreams in the light of dawn, watches them slip away through the mesh of his thoughts, like a Neapolitan fishermen watching the fleeing silver shoals that occasionally stray up into the surface waters of the bay.

In the collections of the Leipzig Mineralogical Institute, I once observed a foot-high rock crystal won from the inner depths of the Sankt Gotthard during tunneling work – a most solitary and exclusive dream of matter. Among the things that Nigromontanus taught me was the certain existence among us of a select group of men who have long withdrawn from the libraries and from the dust of the public arena, who are at work in the innermost spaces, in the obscurest of Tibets. He spoke of men who sit alone in nocturnal rooms, immobile as the rock through whose hollows that current flashes, which keeps all the mill-wheels and hordes of machines running in the outside world - but here it is liberated from all purpose and captured by hearts, which, as the hot, trembling cradles of all forces and powers, have withdrawn forever from the outer light.

Ernst Jünger - Goethe Preis Rede

Und hier den Radio Vatikan Artikel dazu.

From "The Adventurous Heart": The Combinatorial Inference

One more appetiser from the forthcoming Jünger translation "The Adventurous Heart. Figures and Capriccios". I might be permitted to add one or two more, then it will in any case be September and you can order the book yourselves from Telos Press!

The Combinatorial Inference - Berlin

Higher insight does not live in the separate compartments but in the structure of the world. It corresponds to a mode of thinking that does not move around in isolated and parceled-off truths but rather in meaningful connections, whose power to order lies in its combinatorial faculty.

The tremendous pleasure that comes from engaging with such minds resembles a walk through a landscape distinguished as much by the span of its boundaries as by the richness of its particulars. The viewpoints alternate in a whirl of multiplicity, yet all the while the glance takes them in with an even serenity, never losing itself in abstrusity and malformations or in pettiness and eccentricity. Despite the plethora of variations that the mind is able to generate and the ease with which it can switch fields, it perseveres with effortless rigor in making its connections. Its powers appear to grow as much when it turns from the motif to the execution, as when it returns from execution to motif. Using a variation on Clausewitz’s fine image, we can compare this mode of movement with a walk through a convoluted garden in which we are able from every point to see the high obelisk erected at its center.

The Adventurous Heart - Figures and Capriccios. Publisher's information sheet

Download here - for easier viewing, and to help spread the word to some certainly grateful ears.

Drogen-Experimente des Ernst Jünger - radioZeitreise

Von radioZeitreisen (Bayern 2, 01.07.2012) kommt diese kurz und bündige Zusammenfassung des "Annäherung. Drogen und Rausch" (1970) von Ernst Jünger.  Eine wesentliche Seite Jüngers, die fast nie erwähnt wird!

From "The Adventurous Heart": Terror

Another short appetiser from the forthcoming publication of The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios from Telos Press:

Terror - Berlin 

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.

New publication! "The Adventurous Heart - Figures and Capriccios"

I am at last able to share the happy news that this fall Telos Press will publish the first English translation of "Das Abenteuerliche Herz. Figuren und Capriccios" - as The Adventurous Heart. Figures and Capriccios. The volume will additionally contain the translation Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon.

Telos has kindly given me permission to publish a few appetisers in advance. Here's the first:

The Gravel Pit - Goslar

We so reluctantly pick up our own books again because we appear to ourselves as forgers in their regard. We were in Ali Baba’s cave and have only brought a measly handful of silver back to the light of day. There is also a sense of returning to a state that we have since shed like a yellowed snakeskin.

This is what I am going through with these notes that I am opening again for the first time in almost ten years. I am told that for a long while now they have found their fifteen readers or so per quarter with astonishing regularity. A reception like this brings to mind certain flowers, like the Silene noctiflora, whose calyxes, while open a single hour one single night, are orbited by a tiny company of winged visitors.

Nevertheless, precisely this reconsideration of already concluded works has special value for an author – as a rare opportunity to grasp its language as a whole, to some extent with a sculptor’s eye, and to work on it as a single corpus. In this manner, I hope to hit still a little more precisely on what may have captivated the reader. For a start, there should be no economizing on deletions; what is thereby saved can then be filled out from the reserves. A few forbidden pieces that I once put aside might also be appended – because when it comes to spicing a dish, we only gain a sure hand with the course of time.

Hörspiel - "Das Abenteuerliche Herz"

SWR Radio Hörspiel "Das Abenteuerliche Herz" - nach Texten von Ernst Jünger. Ursendung 16.02.2012. Etwas übertheatralisch aber trotzdem unterhaltsam.

Hauptsache, es knallt! Ernst Jünger und Drogen

Aus der Wochenzeitung Freitag:

Rauschzustand | 15.05.2012 | Sebastian Dörfler

Hauptsache, es knallt! 

Krieg war ihm nicht alles: Ernst Jünger experimentierte auch mit ­Drogen – zusammen mit dem LSD-Erfinder Albert Hofmann.  

In Afrika sollte alles besser werden. Mit 18 Jahren meldete sich Ernst Jünger bei der französischen Fremdenlegion und reiste in den Kontinent, der von der ihm verhassten Zivilisation noch verschont geblieben schien. Hier musste es noch sein, das Wunderbare, das Magische – das Leben, das Wissenschaft, Technik und Maschinen zu Hause auf ein bloßes Funktionieren reduziert hatten.  In Afrika erwartete Jünger das Besondere, und zwar in jeder Ritze. In Algerien angekommen setzte er sich vor den ersten Steinhaufen. Mindestens eine goldene Schlange werde sich schon zeigen, hoffte er. Er wartete, bis es dunkel wurde. Doch es passierte nichts. Der Steinhaufen in Afrika unterscheidet sich nicht von dem in der Lüneburger Heide, hält Jünger in seiner Erzählung Afrikanische Spiele enttäuscht fest – „so begann ich mich zu langweilen.“

Anarch im Widerspruch: Über Ernst Jünger zum 100 Geburtstag. Video

Und hier noch ein Video zum 100 Geburtstag von Ernst Jünger - "Anarch im Widerspruch", BR 1995