Wisconsin, Part Three: The House on the Rock

Speaking of rocks, the most memorable feature of my visit to Wisconsin, and indeed of the last ten years of my life, was the extraordinary House on the Rock. It is little known outside of Wisconsin, and for that, all people everywhere should be ashamed. There should be a ten-lane highway to this thing.  

Even if you and I were to astrally project into the same DMT hallucination, I still could not adequately convey to you the experience of a day at House on the Rock. It makes no sense that it is where it is, or that it is from when it was from, or how it is how it is. To call it a massive, meandering journey through the cavernous prop room of America’s fractured national psychosis would not scratch the surface of the experience. It is everything that a child born in 1910 might have seen in a nightmare, but it is also, simultaneously, a sideways stumble through opaque wallpaper made of steam, into the place where scattering shadows have satirically regurgitated our crude machineries into distorted, gothic-scale reimaginings that quietly say, “See how near the chaos, see how fragile your trust in light.”  

The House on the Rock sits squarely opposite the fulcrum from the smothering normalcy of the rest of the state. In the same way that the emotionally abandoned children at Phillips-Andover masturbate coldly into teapots — or simply at them, if they are female — so is this beautiful pinhole into our limited eternity a proportional response to the midwest’s structure of unremitting homogeneity. I will not spoil it for you with specifics, save for the observation that you will immediately share of the place, which is that the people who run it have no idea what they’re dealing with, how to advertise it, or even, to glorious and unintended effect, how to keep up with the maintenance demanded by its innumerable complexities. Real chaos preys slowly upon the theme of chaos, adding a beautiful layer of life, a nod of respect to the dutifulness of old man Decay, to many of the installations. If you don’t get this place, the failure is squarely upon your noggin, and not these acres of discomfiting fever-dream mockery.  

I will present no pictures of the site itself. Do not seek any. Simply book your travel, and a nearby hotel, for when you are exhausted.