To realise that you are but fragments, that the short and the longer and the longest of times are nothing but fragments … that the lifespans of cities and of countries are nothing but fragments … and the earth a fragment … that development in its entirety is a fragment … that perfection cannot be … that fragments came about, that they continue to come about … no road to travel, only to arrive … that the end is without consciousness … that then nothing can be without you and that thus nothing can be …

Those people who die without having known their illness, their mortal ilnesses … life would then be unbearable…

The stream has frozen over, the spring has frozen over, the summer has frozen over, the winter has frozen over, people, animals, sensations, everything … that spoken word that just shuts the world off …

You open a door, a second, third, fourth, fifth, you close every door behind you and keep running … you keep opening more doors, finally they slam shut behind you, crushing you every time …

The mountains stand against man; the cruelty with which the high peaks smother man … the exercise of horror of the rock as it pressures forward into the minds of men.

Every year a drowning in the stream, wellingtons protruding from the water …

Burnt out, frozen to death, condemned to tread with head soldered to the sky …

No other way remains but the way to the graveyard; with or without book in hand … I think: the deep meaning of graveyards and of the world beyond graveyards; the countlessness of dead people … the many illnesses of young girls laid out … of dead boys, men, leukemia victims … I think of the touch of the black lips of the blue boy in the bedroom of our gardener … of the commotion caused by the corpse of the deceased gravedigger tumbling out of the glass hearse … all of a sudden the petering out and running dry of hollow phrases … the buzzing of bees in the graveyard, the colliding of flies in the mortuary air … the font that flows forever more, the wreaths that wilt forever more …

A little bit of the way up to the larches with the stranger; as if luring me into a new, mysterious snare: the uphill side-by-side of his face and me … with that sudden voice that doesn’t fit the body … and the thought that under his sheepskin the man has nothing on …

… most wish for a sudden, surprising, selfsurprising, painless death … an end to all excesses …

What shall you do when you, you who have been humiliated, die …

What often remains of the dead is nothing but the smell of urine, that nose-biting smell, tightly connatural with us … the urinous smell of the men in the forestry hut reminds me of certain dead of my childhood … on the landscape they evoke … the steep slopes, scarred each night by the Föhn’s predatory paws.

The path clearer is found dead on the road … they carry him into the hall and lay him down then on his bed; I help to undress him, to wash him, to dress him again … a great leather-clad doll … leather Wellington boots in the candlelight … the path clearer’s glassy face … by his deathbed the two woodcutters and I polish off what was his stock of schnaps; I drink two glasses then notice the blood on his left ear … an enduringly warm corpse; we eat bits of bacon with the schnaps; outside at the door the priest asks if the path clearer has been washed yet; I say: “Yes, he’s been washed, we washed him …” – “Good,” says the priest and goes inside; the two freezing altar boys fold the path clearer’s hands.

Continually seduced into memory, into the memory of memory …

To matters anatomical: yesterday in a dream I slaughtered for myself an object, alternately man and pig … As a pig, it (my object) panicked away from me through the garden … I caught up with it and hauled it back through the garden by the ears, lugged it up on to the butcher’s bench … the entire garden (in Amras) drizzled with blood … After the object (as a pig) had issued its final shriek, it suddenly (as a man) fell silent; the banging of blood-filled tin pails through the night …

Death surfacing in forms chill-inducing manifold, making to everyman every suggestion … leaking down from the station coming, shading over from Wilten coming, scaling down from the larches coming, breathing out of the air coming, residing in the forestery lodge living Death …

Death thrown endlessly into association with a certain number relating to me … with the weight of the moment.

For nothing happens … constantly touching, feeling long cooled bodies, long cooled brains, ossified nerve centres, petrified corporeal cacophonies.

Mountains, bodies of resistance, spawners of devastating decades … your own claim to suicide, ceaselessly disregarding you.

Through Aldrans by evening … nobody … I call out, no one hears me … Out of fear I start talking to the echo I produce … and so it is, with this voice that has been received by me but is perceived by no one, that nothing courts confidence.

Children of rock and ravine, nature’s pornography, we only ever lived in the foreboding, soothsaying-crazed chemistry of the Tyrolese Alps, each one of us an oracle of catatrophe…

1964

Nora Butler lives in Dublin