The theater of these incursions is the Mediterranean, here understood in a more than a geographical sense: agora and labyrinth, "lost sea of the Self", archive and sepulcher, current and destiny, twilight and dawn, Apollonian and Dionysian.
di Andrea Scarabelli
originally posted on the Author's blog on The newspaper
«Island, islet, island, Island - words that name a secret, something separate and concluded ": Ernst Jünger wrote these words to Carloforte. He arrived there for the first time in 1955, passing from the island of Sant'Antioco, attracted by the presence of an insect that lives only there, the Cicindela campestris saphyrina. His impressions of the island are reported in the essay Saint Peter (1957), published in Italian in 2015 in the translation of Alessandra Iadicicco. Entomology aside, he was struck by the place, spending his holidays there until 1978, at the age of eighty-three. Jünger was a lover of the islands, and his diaries (many of which, unfortunately, are still unpublished by us) prove it; of the Mediterranean basin he especially loved Sicily and Sardinia. The charm of the islands dates back to the beginning of time. For characters like Jünger's, every island is blissful, in the sense of Hesiod (The works and the days):
«On the blessed islands, near the deep whirlpool of the ocean, live the happy heroes with a heart free from trouble. The fertile earth offers them the fruit of honey which ripens three times a year. "
Also DH Lawrence, among many others, he had been in Sardinia, precisely in the summer of 1921, together with his wife Frieda. He had arrived there from Taormina and had visited Cagliari, Mandas and Nuoro. In his book Sea and Sardinia, containing the story of this journey, gives an excellent definition of insulomania, the disease suffered by those who feel an irresistible attraction to the islands. "These born insulomaniacs are direct descendants of the Atlanteans and their subconscious yearns for insular existence ». A diagnosis that fits perfectly to Jünger, a lover of the sea and what the sea surrounds, separating it from the mainland.
As already mentioned, the future Goethe Prize arrives in Carloforte in 1955, but its first contact with Sardinia dates back to the previous year. The diary of his month spent in the small village of Villasimius it came out in various editions, with the title At the Saracen tower. Translated - masterfully - by Quirinus Prince, will be inserted together with the other "Sardinian writings" The solitary contemplator (Guanda, 2000) and in Sardinian land (The Maestrale, 1999).
Here is the itinerary of that first trip: departing from Civitavecchia on the evening of May 6, 1954, our boat arrives at the port of Olbia in the early hours of the morning. Reached Cagliari by train, a couple of hours by bus separate it from Villasimius (in the diary indicated as Illador): a bumpy ride on bad roads. Few farmhouses, the small village of Solanas. Behind each bend, breathtaking views unfold, with a sapphire sea. He immediately understood that he was in a place cut off from civilization, also due to an epidemic of malaria and a famine which up to that moment made Villasimius impervious to mass tourism.
For a little while longer, however: precisely in the days of his residence, the workers are setting up the electricity grid, thus giving way to the modernization of the town, which will end with the invasion of televisions, radios, cinemas, traffic, chaos ... it will come, leveling every difference between sexes and generations, demolishing a millenary culture and going to constitute that culture broth thanks to which modernity will triumph even in Illador. But at that moment there is still no trace of all this. The town is located at a crossroads, and the writer has the opportunity to photograph it for what it was, "A more cosmic than terrestrial place, far from the world". In reality these words refer to Carloforte, but could extend to the Villasimius of the time, indeed to all of Sardinia, which in some way acted on him as a "detonator of emotions", according to the definition of Stenio Solinas, who signed the introduction a Saint Peter.
Crossroads for Sardinia, the fifties are also for Jünger: after having seen Europe put on fire by the unleashed forces of technology, which he had somehow celebrated in his The worker, at the beginning of the Thirties, his gaze changed radically, giving life to works such as The treaty of the rebel, which came out in 1951, and above all The book of the powder clock, published the same year as his first Sardinian trip. If the first is an invitation to shelter in a completely internal wood, sheltered from the barbarity of technology and tyranny, the last is a comparative study dedicated to natural clocks (hourglasses, sundials, gnomons and so on) and mechanical ones. , together with the notions of time they convey. Just as there is a historical time, marked by mechanical clocks, there is also a cosmic one, measured by the shadows cast by the sun and from the bundling of wheat grains in the hourglasses. It will be this co-presence, as we will see, to mark his first Sardinian stay.
Let's go back to the Villasimius of the fifties, whose houses are still lit by candles, a semi-dilapidated town surrounded by immense deserted beaches and ruined towers, whose guests are not billionaires or actresses or parvenu but shepherds, electricians, cobblers and fishermen, along with civil servants transferred there for some obscure bureaucratic settling of scores. In their company, he will note in Saint Peter,
“The man of the mainland is treated with a benevolent superiority. He lacks that imprint of the elements that has left its mark here. "
These simple figures, with their leathery skin beaten by the Sun and tested by the wind, will be the companions of those long days, also because the protagonist of our story has been careful not to carry around a book, a newspaper or a human company. He loves being with ordinary people and takes part in parties and banquets, dinners and hunting trips, walks and fishing sessions, knowing full well that it is possible to study a place even without literary-philosophical trappings. The boarding house where he is staying - managed by a certain Signora Bonaria - thus becomes the scene of endless discussions (but also of long silences, punctuated by a wine as black as the night and gargantuan lunches).
With the locals, Jünger talks a little about everything, but mostly he listens, about the past and the present - the future, that, May - from local customs to history, which obviously also passed through those bodies. After dinner, sometimes, the customs officers sing the song of "Duce Benito", not without first having taken off their uniforms. One of his interlocutors tells him that he was wounded in the First World War and that he lost a son in the second. He also knows something about it. He reclines his head while his thoughts turn to the marble cliffs of Carrara, where his son Ernstel fell.
The days pass and Mr. Ernesto - as they call him in Illador - takes long walks, crossing fields covered with cereals, walls of prickly pears and a Mediterranean scrub heroic hoisted under a lashing sun, which darts the coast, sprayed by the sea. From time to time her gaze rests on the Isola dei Gabbiani and on the Isola dei Serpenti (now Serpentara), near Castiadas, respectively topped by a ruined castle and a lighthouse. To hit it is the abundance of nature, which does not economize or skimp on wastefulness ("it is far beyond functionality", words that Georges Bataille and Marcel Mauss would have subscribed to), the same that made the Nietzschean Zarathustra exclaim on the other side of the sea:
«I learned this from the sun, when the very rich set: he throws the gold of his inexhaustible wealth into the sea, so that even the poorest fisherman row with oars of gold! I saw this once and at the sight I was not satisfied with crying. "
If it was a Ligurian sunset that dictated these words to Nietzsche, who wrote to them in Rapallo, Jünger sought the Great Afternoon of Zarathustra in Sardinia, as Banine once said, his proofreader and traveling companion in Antibes. But the sun and the Mediterranean sea whisper to him, above all, that he still has an immense reserve of time. And time will prove him right, making him live until 1998, at the age of one hundred and three.
The enigma of time, which enchanted Borges and the most chosen spirits of the twentieth century: this is what Jünger meets in Sardinia in that late spring, not yet summer. The Solitary Contemplator dives into the miracle of history in the nuraghi near Macomer, adorned with lichens, which must have already appeared ancient to the Phoenicians. His gaze broadens, breaking through modern historiographical horizons, going beyond his Pillars of Hercules, a feat completed five years later in what is perhaps his best book, At the wall of time, treatise on the metaphysics of history which analyzes historical time as a parenthesis, born from the ban of mythical forces that are about to return.
Well, the passage from the history of the world (World history) to the history of the earth (Erdegeschichte) takes place perhaps for the first time in the presence of a nuraghe which, as Henri Plard, curator of de The solitary contemplator, reminds Jünger of the original phenomenon of which his teacher Goethe spoke, which is hidden behind all natural manifestations. From it will be born the tower, the granary, the castle… Archetypes? Not at all. The archetypes are many, the original phenomenon is a.
This coexistence, in his eyes, chooses the Sardinian one as the chosen territory. It is as if in certain places geography forced history to come out, exhibiting their fundamental characteristics. Also because here the past lives in an absolute, plastic contemporaneity. Jüngerian Sardinia is able to heal and heal ancient wounds. Here everything is present, eternity coexists with time: "History becomes a mysterium. The temporal succession becomes an image spanned in space ", words which - as Quirino Principe writes - recall those of Gurmenanz delParsifal Wagnerian: "My son, here time becomes space". The circle closes.
The seal of that journey is an escape from history not conveyed by ratio but from the contemplation of forms, of their style. It is in the continuity of forms, in their metamorphosis, the original phenomenon. Which is not an abstract idea, but something immanent to reality, the shaping of a destiny and at the same time its highest goal. Contemplating the real and not dissecting it, as modern science does, we reinsert ourselves into the mechanisms that regulate the cosmos. This is very easy in Sardinia - and in Italy - writes Jünger, where the coexistence of present and future it is visible at a geographical, territorial, elementary level, but also at a physiognomic level. There it can happen, walking through crowded places, to meet a particular face, with unusual features. Then we stop, crossed by a thrill. The glimpsed features are ancient, perhaps even prehistoric, and the observation then goes further and further back, into the depths of the centuries and millennia, to the extreme limit of the wall of time.
"We feel that an original, primordial being passed by, who came to us from times when there were no peoples or countries". But the same thing happens even if we start reflecting on ourselves: why are we not all the same, but we have peculiar inclinations for hunting or fishing, for contemplation or action, "for the fight in battle, for the occult magic of exorcisms? By following our vocations, we consume our oldest part of the legacy. We leave the historical world, and unknown ancestors celebrate their return in us».
It is contemplation and not analysis that allows this departure from time - the same one he spoke of Mircea eliade, which among other things he directed with Jünger «Antaios», from the beginning of the 1963s to the mid-XNUMXs. Well, in the columns of that marvelous magazine, in XNUMX, the Jüngerian writing appeared The Spanish beetle, always born in Sardinia. Here the meditation on a scarab glimpsed on the narrow river (Riu Campus) becomes an opportunity to reflect on the transience of things. Everything dies and passes into the inorganic, but woe to those who do not place it in a higher context. Woe to those who are exhausted in the present, in history. Woe to not see in the transient the footprint of the eternal. Whoever has the courage to venture into the labyrinths of contemplation, however, will discover new scenarios, within which man too acquires new faculties:
« Everyone is king of Thule, he is sovereign at the extreme borders, he is prince and beggar. If he sacrifices the golden cup of life to the depth, he bears witness to the fullness to which the cup refers and which he embodies without being able to understand it. Like the splendor of the Spanish scarab, so the royal crowns allude to a lordship that no universal conflagration destroys. Death does not penetrate into his palaces; she is just the door keeper. Her portal remains open as bloodlines of men and gods alternate and disappear. "
Venturing into this Babel of historical dimensions and planes of being, the same language ends up by revealing its own insufficiency and is shipwrecked, where the trajectory of an insect is able to repeat the planetary motion. Using an ancient image, discursive language is like a canoe useful for crossing a river, but which once this task has been completed must be abandoned on the shore. The path must continue in another way. So are the names, which do not limit themselves to designating things, but always refer to something else,
“Shadows of invisible suns, footprints on vast bodies of water, columns of smoke rising from fires whose site is hidden. There the great Alexander is no greater than his slave, but he is greater than his own fame. Even the gods there are only symbols. They set like the peoples and the stars, yet the sacrifices that honor them have value. "
As already mentioned, the Illador-Villasimius diaries are dedicated to Saracen Tower of Capo Carbonara; it can be reached easily, along a path - nothing particularly challenging - which leads from the long white beach to the slopes of the ancient lookout tower. On 11 May, at the foot of the solitary building heated by the sun (today known as Torre di Porto Giunco), Jünger warns "A breath of naked power, of pale vigilance". A hint of perennial insecurity, of instability. He understands that he is in a border place, a two-faced Janus that unites and separates at the same time, the borderline between East and West, history and meta-history. A liminal sign between land and sea that imposes a either-or, he comes back about ten days later, together with a certain Angelo (mercurial man), armed with a hammer and chisel. It leaves a trace, as it was - and still is - I use to do. That trace is still there, after more than fifty years: EJ, 22.V.54.
Then the path goes back down to the beach. Looking at it from above, he noticed that it has unusual pink streaks: they are crushed shells. Searching, he finds a semi-intact one, the shape of which frightens him. It is a heart-shaped shell, whose formal perfection refers to an order that is of this world but is not exhausted in it. It is as if the wand of an invisible director had given the la to a performance whose echoes we hear only. And, once again, here is emerging from contemplation the original Earth, in a magnificent absence of humanity. It is to it that the small object refers: a property, notes Jünger, well known to those ancient peoples who used shells as money instead of gold. Its shape could lead us
"To flaming suns. He who wanders our land exhibits it as a hieroglyph. The guardian of the gate of flame sees to what sublime configuration the dust swirling on this star is suitable. Something immortal illuminates him. He gives the signal for him: the shell is transformed into incandescent ardor, into light, into pure irradiation. The door swings open. "
We have said that Sardinia in some way marks Jünger's arrival in the great spaces of ultra-Euclidean historiography, showing him a territory innervated by a destiny prior to that of the manuals. The nuraghi precede the pyramids, the walls of Ilium and the palace of Agamemnon. One day he is near Punta Molentis, off which it is said to be there an ancient submerged port. Who knows, maybe a city also corresponds to this port, according to an ancient legend spread throughout the Mediterranean coasts. It is a very powerful image of the sense of history. As he wrote Predrag Matvejević in its magnificent Mediterranean Breviary,
“A sunken port is a kind of necropolis. He shares the same fate of submerged cities or islands: surrounded by the same mysteries, accompanied by similar matters, followed by the same admonitions. Each of us is sometimes a sunken port in the Mediterranean »
Still near Punta Molentis, where a thin strip of sand separates the two seas, he finds an ancient cave, even older than the nuraghi themselves. He is amazed: in order to frame this rudimentary house, it is necessary to adopt much wider time scales than the historiographical ones. Places of this kind encourage the visitor to confront himself with submerged regions of his own ego, abandoning the usual mental trappings:
« At times, man is forced by the urgency of fate to leave the palaces of history, to come before this primitive dwelling of his, to ask himself if he still recognizes it, if he is still at his height, if he is still worthy of it. Here he is tried and judged by the Immutable who persists at the bottom of the story. "
Man tends to push this Immutable back into a very distant past, in the dawn of time. Nonsense: it is "In the center, in the innermost point of the forest, and civilizations revolve around it". Like the myth which, as he had written in Treaty of the rebel three years earlier, it is not the narration of the times that were but one reality that reappears when history falters from the ground up.
Meditating on what he has just seen, with a mask and breathing tube, he throws himself into the shallow water and swims across the small lagoon. It is one of his favorite activities, especially in Sardinia. At that time none of the inhabitants took a bath, but he is used to other latitudes, and wastes no time. There is an old epitaph, engraved on the ruins next to the port of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, which reads: «I swim, the sea is around me, the sea is in me, and I am the sea. On earth I am not and never will be. I will sink into myself, into my own sea ". In these ancient lines, there is all Jünger, suspended on the water surface of a crystalline sea, reflecting on the subtle links between past and present, myth and history.
The theater of these raids is the Mediterranean, here understood in a more than a geographical sense. Agora and labyrinth, "lost sea of the Self" (janvs), archive and sepulcher, current and destiny, twilight and dawn, Apollonian and Dionysian, «It is a great homeland», writes Jünger, «an ancient dwelling. With each new visit I notice it with ever greater clarity; that a Mediterranean also exists in the cosmos? ».
If it is true, as Matvejević writes in his aforementioned book, that "The Mediterranean has long awaited a new great work on its destiny", Jünger's could be the draft. A destiny observed on the rocks and on the plants, a gateway to Homeric gods and heroes, simulacra of cosmic battles that have taken place since the dawn of time. All this is reflected in the faces he has the opportunity to meet, in the coves he ventures into and in the insects he observes, with the discretion of a professional entomologist. All masks of one thing:
«Sardinian land, red, bitter, virile, woven into a carpet of stars, from time immemorial blooming with intact flowering every spring, primordial cradle. The islands are home in the deepest sense, the last terrestrial locations before the flight into the cosmos begins. Not language is suitable for them, but rather a song of destiny echoing on the sea. "
A sea from which he will take his leave on June XNUMXst, but only for some time (Mediterranean is also, in an eminent sense, the certainty of return). Jünger packs his bags, and goes back on his journey. On the way to Cagliari, he comes across the bunkers built by the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Perhaps the forest will swallow them. It is unlikely that they age well, as they do Michelangelo's Fort in Civitavecchia, Leonardo's war machines or Piranesi's prisons...
He takes the train to Olbia. After weeks of abstinence from modernity, he buys a newspaper, just to see how little the world has changed. The argument à la page it is the atomic bomb, the tone is «as always boring, irritating, indecent. Sometimes one wonders for what purpose the honorarium is paid to philosophers ». Who knows what he would say today, in front of certain controversy from the tavern ... Then, by ship to Civitavecchia, where a train awaits him, heading north. The line passes through Carrara, while on the left there is always the Mediterranean, a silent spectator of a pain that has not yet healed. "The sea is an ancient language that I can't decipher" wrote his friend Jorge Luis Borges in 1925 (in the essay Navigation, out of it The nearby moon).
Jünger's leave from Sardische Heimat it is only temporary. He will return there several times, as long as his health permits. Born under northern constellations, in that distant 1954 he suffered a fascination which is very difficult to escape, and now he can only periodically respond to this appeal. "Sea! Sea! These words passed from mouth to mouth. Everyone ran in the direction of it ... they began to kiss each other, crying " reveals to us Xenophon in Anabasis, describing the reaction of the Greek soldiers, after a long wandering on land, overlooking the Mediterranean. Perhaps these were the same words that echoed in the ears of the Solitary Contemplator aboard that bus, between one bend and another, between one sea and another, up to Illador, an oasis of a tormented past and a mysterious prefiguration of a destiny. to come.
Vielen Dank für diesen zeitlosen, unzeitgemäßen Text!
Vielen Dank für Ihr freundliches Interest, Jünger ist meiner bescheidenen Meinung nach einer der unverzichtbaren Gelehrten des letzten Jahrhunderts. Ein Gruß!