[Juenger-list] EJ - The Dreamer (feat. excerpts from "The Adventurous Heart")

[e-ensign@thing.net (Richard Brem)]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bertil Haggman" <mvk575b@tninet.se>
>
> You are dreaming politics. My advise to you would be that
> you concentrate on the mystical aspects, which seem to
> be your interest

Thanks for proving my point by again reducing what I've said to just one
aspect. But what I find really strange - and at the same time revealing - is
that you're using the word "dreaming" to denounce me. You don't seem to know
that dreams and a dreamlike perception of the world are a basic constant in
Juenger's work from his early writings like "The Adventurous Heart" to his
late diaries. "Juenger's diaries are always also dream-books", as Juenger's
former secretary Albert von Schirnding put it. Compared to Juenger's high
regard for dreams, his interest in politics is a mere episode (because it's
basically limited to the 20s and early 30s). Here are two excerpts from
Juenger's book "The Adventurous Heart (First Version)", written in 1929:

"There are three states which are keys to every experience: intoxication,
sleep and death. That is why there has never been a a lack of unbridled
drinkers of life, never a lack of cheerful and gloomy aristocrats of the
dream, never a lack of warriors, lansquenets and adventurers, never, in
short, a lack of those to whom the whole world of employer and employee, of
merchant and money, is of supreme indifference. May they never be confounded
or misled, never allow themselves to be deceived as to their rank and
status: for it is they out of whose dreams every order is created and to
whom every order again falls victim. Order itself becomes vain and useless
as soon as the great dream can no longer be realized in it."

Sounds like Juenger is "dreaming politics" here ;-) Here's excerpt #2:

"I am secretly proud to have sensed behind the mathematics of battles the
magnificent dream into which life plunged itself when light grew too tedious
for it. That is why I succeeded in snatching war out of the hands of the
bourgeois, which is not easy in a time of compulsory military service and
for which many a brave fellow has expressed his thanks to me.
But what was valid in the fiery dream-landscape of war is not extinct in the
wakefulness of modern life either. We stride on our way across floors of
glass and dreams rise up to us incessantly: they encompass our cities like
stone-faced islands and advance into the coldest of their districts. Nothing
is real, and yet everything is an expression of reality." - (all excerpts
translated by R.J. Hollingdale for The Penkiln Burn)

How come, Bertil, that someone like you, who's always referring to the
Titans is ignoring Juenger's (and Hoelderlin's) words about the importance
of dreams and dreaming in the age of the Titans. Here's what Juenger wrote
in his essay "Prognoses" (first published in the catalog of the 1993
Venice Biennale):

"The creations of the gods are timeless, but the actions and inventions of
the Titans are located within time. Their primary affinity is with
technology rather than the arts. Hence Hoelderlin's advice to the poet to
DREAM and seek consolation in the Dionysian while the 'men of iron' rule -
but he knows that the gods will return."

In closing, let me say that contrary to what you assume it's precisely the
"mystical" aspects in Juenger that I find somewhat problematic. Because to
me they're too vague and New Agey. All this talk about the Titans -- I mean,
it works as a poetic image or a metaphor, but shouldn't be taken too
seriously (I sometimes get the feeling some "Juengerians" regard his remarks
on the Titans as religious revelations). However, these "mystical" aspects
form an integral and essential part of Juenger's philosophy. There's no way
of ignoring or belittling them. Like you do, Bertil.

Regards,
RBR