Where Madness Lies
Filed Under Familiar Essay, Porchy, Random, Review, Travel
Whoever it was that first wrote of the banality of evil* got it wrong. Evil, as Milton, Lovecraft, and Cronenberg would tell you, is far from ordinary it is, in fact, extraordinary. Madison, Wisconsin is an effusively polite, pastoral, ordinary college town. It is most famous, as far as I can tell, for not being Milwaukee, which in its own right is the clean, orderly, and polite version of Chicago just about an hour to the southeast. Home of Al Capone and H. H. Holmes, Chicago seems the more apt place to find “evil” as it is traditionally understood but in fact true madness lies about 40 miles due west of the intersection of W. Washington Avenue and N. Fairchild Street in downtown Madison, in a place aptly named Spring Green. Specifically one house there because that is how these stories go. That house is Alex Jordan’s House on the Rock.
St. Francis of Assisi was so beatific, so serene and compassionate, it is said, that the natural world around him bent itself to follow him. Flowers sprang to life behind him and timid forest denizens reached out to him to shower him with love. Alex Jordan Jr, the architect behind the house on Deer Shelter Rock, also overflowed his psychic cup; but what splashed out of him onto the world below was not compassion and mercy but the arrogant spite he inherited from his father and his own glorious dementia.
As the story goes, Alex Jordan Sr. was so enamored with Frank Lloyd Wright’s post-Prairie House designs that he sent or showed Wright plans for a house that incorporated similar features: waterfalls, stonework, concrete etc. Wright, sensitive to the concerns of humanity replied, “I would not hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop.” Based on the result, the reply can hardly be considered too harsh. The finished product, defiantly located just miles from Wright’s Taliesin Studio, also in Spring Green, is a memorial to something twisted and ancient inside of humans, something that most major advances in art and science have arisen to reverse or erase. The dark hallways twist and curve around uncomfortable living spaces. Little natural light permeates the cavernous, low-ceilinged rooms and passageways. Walls and counter tops are dark, rough cut limestone. Grotesque Asian statuary spot lighted throughout appear suddenly like the nightmare faces that form, deform, and unform in the minds of children as they lay in dark rooms for the first time far from the comfort of their parents. An unofficial biography of Alex Jordan Jr** unfavorably compares him to the paranoid and agoraphobic Howard Hughes. It is not hard to see why. Brochures at the house mention that the original blueprint, like the Wright houses it was based on, had more windows opening up to incorporate the lush south central Wisconsin hardwood forest. Jordan Jr sealed those off so the House on the Rock feels forever like the House in the Rock and there is nothing ordinary about it.
But the House is not the only attraction here. Tour 2, goes through “The Streets of Yesterday” and Tour 3…well I better wait to describe Tour 3. If the exhibit “The Streets of Yesterday” was accurate it would go a long way to explaining the weirder aspects of our modern world. If Jordan Jr believed that “The Streets of Yesterday” was accurate it goes a long way toward explaining the House on the Rock. “The Streets of Yesterday” is an actual street, lined with various fake stores with fake insides. Sometimes the fakery compounds itself and confounds the spectator. Take for example the story of Joaquin Murieta.
To some people in the American Old West, Joaquin Murieta was a sort of Robin Hood, but deadlier and uglier. The legend has that he stole from rich whites and gave to poor Mexicans. But he was also a rapist and a murderer. One story has him lining up an entire posse of men. Joaquin rode his horse down the line, slitting the throat of each man in turn without stopping. Murieta could not be stopped. His legend, it is believed, contributed largely to the more genteel legend of Zorro that came later. When the bounty on Murieta’s head was finally paid, the head itself (literally) was put in a jar and then sent on tour. However the legend proved too popular to kill. Mexicans denied the head was really the head of Joaquin. To prove it was him the authorities gave the tour an opening act, the hand of his lieutenant, “Three-Fingered Jack,” also in a jar. While Murieta’s face continued in death to lack the scar it had in life, the hand of Three-Fingered Jack unmistakably lacked the two fingers that lent the criminal his nom-de-guerre.
A fake Murieta’s head and a fake hand of Three-Fingered Jack both appear in the fake window of a fake sheriff’s office*** on the fake street under the House on the Rock. But if the “real” head of Murieta was also fake…where does this rabbit hole end?
The whole exhibit is filled with strangeness such as this and more: strange penny arcade animatronics that “dance” to broken calliope tunes, entire rooms set up with real instruments that play Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite,” amateurishly carved mastheads and then finally, the exhibit to end all roadside exhibits: A sculpture as long as the Statue of Liberty is tall of a giant squid grappling with a deformed sperm whale. The massive tidal waves crash over the head of the whale as he attempts to swim away, the remains of a dinghy sit shattered in his deadly jaws 30 or more feet above the tiny spectators. A staircase lined with miscellaneous nautical paraphernalia spirals around the sculpture to give the witnesses a 360 degrees view of the epic struggle from underneath, behind, and above. In its twisted vision, the “I” of this story, me, this narrator, saw the true mastery of God at work. Make no mistake about it, at least the second Alex Jordan, and probably both, were more than what southerners call “touched.” I think they may have been mad, completely and utterly mad. The madness splashed from them and filled the house so that all those that visit briefly go mad too. The labyrinthine pathway through the house, the chiaroscuro lighting, the disconnected hodgepodge of decorations all conspire to revive the dark psyche that started it all. The madness of the dark gods of this house is alive for anybody to witness and relive for $26.50. The giant squid and the whale, two symbols of the two kinds of madness that battled in the minds of the Jordans, are now frozen here for us all to witness. The calm placidity of the Asian motif–the umbrellas, carp, and exotic birds, the lacquered table tops and paper walls, the Infinity Room which instills simultaneously the peace of great distances and the anxiety of knowing your infinitesimal smallness–battles with the angry Cthulu-like genuine madness of the very deep–the choking tentacles of the giant squid that drove the architect to blot out the windows, to use dim lights, to make low ceilings, to turn every nook nookier and every cranny crannier.
Tour 3 reveals the winner of that battle.
Entering into a room so large you are certain you must have walked miles from where you started. A room this large would have been visible from the highway for sure…or it doesn’t exist at all. Gigantic whiskey stills and copper pipes fill the vision. Do they work? Did they ever work? Behind you, several clay moonshine jugs hang like skulls on the catacomb’s walls. The room is dark, it is red and gold and there are strange statues of lions and the goddess Diana. Here a pile of typewriters rest under giant clock whose gears are naked behind walls that aren’t there. Is that the right time? It must be. Over there an old milk delivery truck, or a tank. It’s hard to tell because you’re eyes have moved to the 65 foot cannon. You’re walking and the room is so large, the statues and sculptures so far apart and close at the same time, you can feel your sense of perspective physically slip away. You are a character in a movie that has just been slipped a mickey. You suddenly remember a sign you saw on the Streets of Yesterday, a newspaper headline that read “Surrender Complete.” “Yes,” you reply as you stumble on vaguely aware that you still use feet to move around. Then you realize that you haven’t seen that newspaper yet, but you will. Could that be true? From this point on, nothing is new, everything is horrible and familiar. She was right after all. Who? Hannah Arendt, in that book, evil is banal. It is every day. It is normal. It is trite. It’s everything you’ve heard before. Now you’ve walked downstairs; you’re outside. It’s very bright and sunny and people are telling you to check out the bathrooms at Inspiration Point. “You’ll be amazed,” they say. What? The bathrooms? Could that be right? You mutter something in reply, “Will do,” something you’ve said a million times before, “Will do,” but it sure sounded like somebody else. The voice of Alex Jordan Jr. Who was he talking to when he said “Will do.”? And then there’s a sign on the wall, “Check out the bathrooms at Inspiration Point!” it says, “Be AMAZED!!!” And then there they are, the bathrooms, my god! It’s limestone walls and a waterfall. There are stuffed grizzly bears just like in the restroom in the lobby where you bought your tickets. I’m back in the House on the Rock. What somehow freaked me out hours ago is strangely touching, comforting, like a smell you remember from your youth. And then the trail leads back into the huge red room. Did I mention you got to this room initially by going through a Hell Mouth that stood silent next to the world’s largest working carousel? Because you did. And you get it. You can’t leave. Now you’re in another room and then back into the big room. Then you go see the circus area, as if this place needed one. And you’re back in the big room. Then you move down a hallway filled with intricate and huge dollhouses and giant dolls that could never fit in them no matter how big they got. And then your back in the big room. But this time you are passing a doll carousel. Did we see that doll carousel before? Is it modeled after the world’s largest carousel? I think I recognize that horse with Cortez’s head. I think I recognize that naked woman with the glowing eyes and the goat legs. Up and downstairs, around corners, there’s the big clock again but now we’re below it and there are more angels from the carousel room. Did they follow us here? Where was that display room with all the jewelry store displays? A big sign declares “Final Exit.” It might mean home or oblivion, both are better than this. You walk on. If a giant ravine appears on the other side of this last door it will seem reasonable to jump into it. There is nothing new down there.
But you’re outside, and that was the best time you will ever have for $26.50.
Jordan was mad but he was a genius. The oompahloompahs that currently manage the estate and continue adding to the delirium are geniuses too. This place is a museum but also completely not a museum. The madness is engrossing and, as strange as it may seem, is exactly what you are purchasing for your Jackson, Lincoln, and your three Washingtons (one green, two shiny). Somewhere in there, you’re brain stops working and something visceral and entirely you takes over. The logical mind cannot make the connections required to enter the House on the Rock and survive. That is pure zen; that is pure breathing. Some zen master once said that in order to be enlightened you only have to be quiet for one moment. Somewhere in that broken carnival, I left Jordan’s mind and entered my own. At the end of the dollhouse exhibit in front of the banner advertising the Frog Girl, I experienced a quiet so sudden and real and complete I might have been there for a hundred years, I might have been there for ten seconds and then my friends showed up to rescue me.
If you are anywhere near Madison, Spring Green, Arena, or Sauk City, you simply have to see this place. As my mythology teacher told me ten years ago when talking about the importance of reading the Bible, I don’t care if you want to or not, it’s simply part of your culture to know the stories. The same holds true for the House on the Rock.
* Hannah Arendt in 1963 in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
** House of Alex by Marv Balousek, which I didn’t read. There is also one approved biography of Alex Jordan, Alex Jordan: Architect of His Own Dream by Doug Moe, which I didn’t read either.
***For a picture of the fake head and hand, check out this site.
Comments
8 Responses to “Where Madness Lies”
Why did you make me go back into that room? I thought that I was out. I mean, come on, I’m back now, right?
I don’t think you ever leave once you’ve gone in. I expect that at any moment I will turn the corner of a familiar hallway and instead of finding myself in the kitchen or the office breakroom, I will be face to face with a pile of broken typewriters. If I turned on a radio I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear the Oriental bars of “The Mikado” chiming away.
Hannah Arendt first coined the term “banality of evil”. i only know this because it was on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
I can’t count the number of facts I know thanks to Alex Trebeck and the team over at the Jeopardy studio.
Also, be sure to check out Fickle Foe’s review of the House on the Rock here: http://ficklefoe.wordpress.com. And Special Agent Dale Cooper’s review should be forthcoming, somewhere over here: http://specialagentdalecooper.wordpress.com.
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