Mountains are high and obnoxious. They’re made of very large stone, and they just stand there, imposing themselves. Mountains are incredibly self-absorbed and domineering. If you anger a mountain, it’ll launch an avalanche. In winter of snow, and in summer of mud and rubble.
The mountain’s little friends are the mountain streams. They’re the only entities tolerated by the mountain. It loathes all others. The mountain streams have managed slowly over millennia to swindle a modicum of affection from the mountain. Although “swindle” isn’t quite correct. They were simply there and stayed on without dissenting, not even once. They went along with its game for so long that they became outright lackeys of the mountain. The mountain streams do everything that the mountain commands them to do.
On the mountain, you realize who you are. Some say you forget yourself up on the mountain. Those who say that, have also surrendered to the mountain. They accept, even pay homage to, the dominance of the mountain. They say they think it’s fantastic, and put on their snowshoes. Fear causes them to do this. Humanity’s love for the mountain is a constant prostration of ourselves before it. Humans cower before the mountain, even though the mountain is much taller than humans. It should be the one cowering.
It’s a sad existence for the young people who grow up in the shadow of mountains. It’s why some of them die through suicide. Others, who spend their adolescence directly on the mountain, strap slats to their feet and build ski jumps.
They use the slats to hop over the ski jumps and they listen to loud skate punk, and they delude themselves into believing that they’re having as much fun, if not more, as adolescents in faraway places. Adolescents who know nothing of mountains, only wide-open plains and oceans and big cities where they can thrive and evolve.
The fact that young people on the mountain regard their youth—with slats, ski jumps, and skate punk—as blissful has to do with the manipulative nature of the mountain. It rarifies the air around the humans who romp on it, so they become mentally challenged and think they’re having a good time.
People who have grown older in the vicinity of the mountains, those who haven’t killed themselves in their perpetual shadows, are by now so distraught that they manufacture humans out of clay, who are even smaller than they themselves are. They dress these smaller humans in colorful caps and give them small garden tools to hold. And then they embed them in sheltered places in their gardens, which provides them with brief moments of mirth.
In reality, their behavior is merely an outlet for their inferiority complexes, caused by a sense of the total vulnerability one feels in the presence of the power emanating from the mountain. It is not a brief moment of mirth that the middle-aged, plateau humans perceive while contemplating their garden gnomes. In reality, it’s about them also wanting to feel like a mountain. Humans do not love their garden gnomes: they loathe them. Just as the mountain loathes humanity.
It’s not that the mountain wants to be left in peace by humanity. On the contrary, it often preens and beautifies itself, and the mountain streams and the clouds, those subservient creatures, prettify it so that humans feel drawn to it. So that they will go forth to it, so it can mock them.
Those who spent their youth in the mountains, building ski jumps while wearing slats on their feet, get thick brown skin when they’re middle-aged. It’s leather, which isn’t processed commercially because humans prefer to peel off skin from animals. This too, in order to cope with their complexes regarding the mountains. Middle-aged humans in the mountains prefer building ski lifts instead of fabricating handbags from their own faces and forearms. The ski lift is an invention that allows one to earn a maximum amount of money from an adolescence spent building ski jumps while wearing slats on one’s feet.
Through the ski lift, and through technology in general, humanity tries to impress the mountain. The mountain doesn't give a shit. Some people, especially those who possess a personality structure that is almost as power-oriented as that of mountains, are driven to rage by the imperious indifference of the mountain. They feel all the more proud about technology, because it was invented by humans and not by the mountain.
These humans, often from the Central Plateau and therefore not manipulated into debility by the mountain’s alpine air, seek out higher positions from which they condescendingly feel somewhat larger than other humans and much, much larger than garden gnomes. But that is not sufficient enough for them, because what agitates these humans is their deep, all-pervading self-esteem complex regarding the mountain. This is why they use technology to drill large holes into the mountain. They say It’s because of import–export, because import–export connects, and tunnels also connect.
The romantic notion, which once prevailed behind this statement, is that even more humans might exist on the other side of the mountain, who suffer just as much due to the mountain, and with whom one could then jointly strive to insult it in its vanity.
But the sole entity that might offend the mountain in its vanity is the ocean. This is because the ocean has a much greater sexual allure than the mountain. At the seaside, songs with soothing sounds are written, causing everything in the world to immediately sway in the hips. But the ocean is very, very far away from the mountain and the Plateau that lies in an eternal shadow. People here continue to regard their garden gnomes with hatred, while those in higher altitudes, debilitated by the air, operate their ski lifts, and never does anyone wonder how the mountain snails are actually doing.
No one really knows how the mountain snails are doing.
Cheese
It’s cheese by which you can grab a Swiss. If you pull long enough on one end of a Swiss cheese, a Swiss will be stuck to the other end. This lies in the self-image of the Swiss—they stick to their cheese.
The Swiss eat enormous amounts of it. Mostly in winter. For a Swiss, a winter without cheese would be like emigration, like the SRF TV show With the People—Up and Away, you can plan ahead as much as you want: it will all get screwed up anyhow.
The Swiss feed on cheese right at the beginning of winter because they haven’t had fondue yet this season. Then they feed on it because they haven’t had raclette yet this season. Then they feed on it because it’s Christmastime. Then they feed on it at Christmas dinner at the in-laws. Then they feed on it on New Year’s Eve. Then they feed on it because they haven’t yet had cheese in the new year. Then they feed on it because it’s 50% cheaper at the Coop Supermarket. Then they feed on it because it’s briefly cold again in March and it might be the last opportunity for fondue this season. Then they feed on it because it snows again in April, and that’s definitely the last chance for raclette this season. By “season,” a Swiss means ski tourism and liquified cheese.
In the summer, the Swiss feed on jacket potatoes with cheese. Liberal, “multiculti” Swiss feed on Greek salad in the summer, with plenty of feta. Then they say, “Ooh, I like feta sooo much,” and stretch their mouths out in a peculiar way because they have to stretch out the “e” in the word “feta,” and as proof of their culinary open-mindedness, a bit of feta falls from their teeth and out of their mouths. A small fragment remains hanging off of the lower lip, because a bit of cheese always hangs somewhere on the face of a Swiss.
In the summer, down-to-earth, homebody Swiss feed on sausage-and-cheese salad with their barbecued meats. For Swiss National Day on August 1, they ignite a few rockets and prepare fondue to show their camping site neighbors what allegiance to the Swiss cross through Swiss cheese looks like. To show that Switzerland is the nation of cheese. Switzerland and no other. When does a Frenchman ever feed on cheese as a main meal? When does an Italian?
Switzerland has a proud history. A long time ago, when Switzerland didn’t yet officially exist, cheese already did. Back then, primordial cows, beautifully decorated beasts like the cattle in ceremonial autumn drives from mountain pastures, still went up and down mountains without us humans. They fed on the good grass of the Alps and also on the grass of the Alpine pastures and also on the grass of the Central Plateau. The primordial cows always swayed their heads and torsos a little bit, so their magnificent golden bells could chime, and as they did this, a small amount of milk kept dripping onto the rich, fertile Swiss soil. And thus grew the primordial cheese, whose mycelium traces the exact contours of Switzerland.
Soon thereafter, the population of Switzerland came into being. For when the splendidly adorned primordial cows swayed over the cheese-rich soil and dispensed drops of their precious milk, the first generation of Swiss sprang from the earth. The first humans were made of cheese.
Even today, every region has a different cheese. It’s a combination of the characteristic composition of local soil and the momentary emotional state of the particular primordial cow as it was creating the primordial cheese human. After which, the primordial cheese people and the primordial cows led a wonderful life together. The primordial cows showed the humans the mountains and led them up to the Alpine pastures. The primordial cheese humans idolized the primordial cows because they were so beautifully adorned and knowledgeable. And if the primordial cheese humans got hungry, they simply devoured each other. These were happy times, until Friedrich Schiller appeared on the scene. In a coach-and-four, pulled by powerful Rottweilers, he crossed the German border into Switzerland. Unfortunately, the Rottweilers bred and immediately spread endemically, killing the primordial cows until they almost became extinct. The primordial cheese humans then built castles in which they imprisoned the last primordial cows for their own protection. Soon, the primordial cheese people had a clever idea and began to systematically exploit the primordial cows. This was the dawn of the modern cheese industry.
The Swiss recognize themselves in their cheese. In Switzerland, everyone has ancestors who once made their own cheese. In the past, cheese was made in the Alps and on Alpine meadows and in the Central Plateau, and cheese was also made in the lowlands; and in some places, they also quickly made a few clocks on the side. As a Swiss gets older, the outer rind toughens, but in their heart the cheese continues to seethe, hot and liquid.
