-----Mensaje original-----
De: Rebing
Enviado el: domingo 7 de junio de 1998 21:10
Para: ernst-juenger-l@maillist.ox.ac.uk
Asunto: Die Schere #15: Notes
DIE SCHERE #15: Notes
This is a strikingly enigmatic text, inserted -- there is no evident (1)
connection to the previous not to the following texts -- before EJ returns in #16
to the topic taken up in #12. The language, both its grammar and its images, is
so compressed that only the initiated will grasp what EJ means to say or rather
to intimate here. You may, though, become one of those initiated if you study and
compare other passages in EJ's works where he speaks in a similar fashion about
what he addresses here. His topic is what is, to my mind, the secret centre of
his later writings: what is beyond the Wall of Time ("Zeitmauer") and the ways
how to get closer to it. Here he mentions collective memories of mankind
("gemeinsame Erinnerungen") and experiences shared by all humans -- pain and
bliss -- which may take us to the threshold or may signal that beyond there might
be ("sollte es...geben") something we can only surmise as being greater and more
wonderful than anything we know here. As usual EJ presents this idea as an image:
beyond there might be a text of which we have only read its traces on blotting
paper. (2)
I am aware that this is a brazen simplification of a text which is deliberately
enigmatic. The grammar, to begin with, is ambiguous: who is the subject, the "we"
of this text: every human, or exclusively the few initiated readers of this text
who understand it and are on the same wavelength as its author? Or does a
visionary speak here for all mankind? Moreover, the image "Kreuzwege" is
ambiguous as well: it can mean 'crossroads' but also 'stations of the Cross';
without further qualification it is almost empty of meaning -- unless the
initiated knows what specific "Kreuzwege" the Master has in mind. Similarly, the
statement, "we have very often encountered each other there", is vague or banal
for the common reader, But for those who know their EJ intimately it will be a
shorthand symbol for -- well, I have not yet done enough close and comparative
reading of EJ to dare to go on.
(1)You may detect, however, a link between "Doch wird jeder Punkt bedeutend -- ob
er merkt wird oder nicht" in #15 and the concept of the foreboding signal which
can be sensed and decoded by the sensitive or the elect only, in ##13 and 14.
(2) A noteworthy new visualization of a concept expressed e.g by Plato (Politeia,
Book 7) through the image of the shadows on the cave wall or in St Paul's
"through a glass, darkly"(1 Corinthians 13, 12)
Günter Rebing
[Roberto Calvo Macias] Amazing again Gunter, your notes are very useful to the read.
Crossroads is an ambivalent word -as you say. To me, it means much things. It can be refered to those epochs where fate and liberty get closed to one. It also could mean the point where Die Schere dont move, the centre, the quiet point.
The second part of the praragraph could referes to archetypes and common senses of human - and universe: pain and bliss. This community of senses can assert us there is something more: a complet text.
Best wishes
roberto
Markup © John King, 2008. Web archive generated Tue, 21st August 2007.