The School of Too Much

It caught up with me in the Gate House, the first room of the tour, forty-two years after the first time I stood in it.

Not a memory, exactly. Memory usually arrives with one small object in its hand: a smell, a song, the particular temperature of a room. This was not that. This was a ledger dropping open all at once.

Everything I have made, collected, drawn, built, hoarded, arranged, painted, wired, fabricated, or wanted since I was nine seemed suddenly to have a line item tracing back to this building. Copper tubing. Clock parts. Kettles. Bellows. Circus wagons. Automata. Dioramas. Puppet stages. Cabinet doors. Boiler rooms. Monster mouths. Rooms too full to read in one glance. Walls designed for a body standing in one particular place.

And I was standing in the room where the account was opened.

I should be honest about the boy who opened it.

At nine, I was at the height of my love for Star Wars, and this place seemed adult to me. Some of it, I admit, seemed boring. Rooms of things. Cases of things. A house you could not run in. A tour where every interesting shadow had a rope in front of it. I did not fully understand why my parents had brought me somewhere so grown-up, so dim, so packed with things nobody was allowed to touch.

That is the true half of the memory, and it matters.

Influence does not require enthusiasm. It does not wait until you are appropriately grateful. It gets in either way. It enters through boredom as easily as awe. It hides in the wallpaper of a day you only half understand and waits decades for you to notice what it has been building in you.

The other half is that I was enthralled.

And not by the thing a nine-year-old was supposed to be enthralled by. Not only the carousel or the guns or the miniature circuses or the rooms of music playing themselves in the dark. I was enthralled by the part a kid should have found dullest.

The house itself.

I was somewhere in my I want to be an architect when I grow up phase, though I have lost the order of things. Was I already deep in it, and is that why my parents brought me? Two farm parents saying, without saying it: here, look, this is what architects do. Frank Lloyd Wright’s own Taliesin just up the road, and Alex Jordan’s strange answer to it dug into the rock under our feet.

Or did the visit light the fuse itself?

There is no one left to ask.

So I hold the half I am sure of: whatever was already burning, this place poured fuel on it.

And this weekend handed me a larger version of the same question. My parents were farm people, factory people, fundamentalist Christians — simple is the word I reach for, and it is not fair, and I keep reaching for it. They took a summer vacation and aimed it at the two most concentrated hoards of worldly wonder in Wisconsin. Were they planting seeds in their son’s voracious imagination — on purpose, quietly, the way they did most things? Or am I inventing their foresight because I want them to have had it?

I do not know what they intended. I know what they did. They drove us there. They paid the admission. They bought the posters and let us paper the bedroom with giants. Whatever they meant, the aim was true.

The house buried in a mountain. The long Prairie lines, which I already loved or learned to love there. The Japanese aesthetic — and if I was not already susceptible to it before that day, that day made me susceptible. The wooden curtains. The stone. The angles. The rooms tucked low into the hill as if shelter and secrecy were the same idea. The huge bellows by the fireplace, which I went on to draw over and over for years and which I still, at fifty-one, want to own with the same unreasonable hunger. Cauldrons and kettles big enough to bathe in. Fireplaces that seemed less like domestic features than ritual instruments.

I went home from that trip and started drawing my own master house: long rooflines, hidden rooms, stairs into rock, chambers nested inside chambers. Houses you did not so much enter as discover. Houses with secrets. Houses that seemed to have been designed by a child who wanted both a fortress and a monastery and a spaceship and a burrow.

I kept drawing them for the better part of a decade.

The architecture bug left me at about nineteen.

The objects never did.

That is the strange arithmetic of influence. The vocation died and the vocabulary survived it. I never became the man who builds houses into hills. I became the man whose drawings fill up with bellows and kettles. The man whose sculptures grow copper tubing, salvaged hardware, clock-part-looking things. The man who cannot walk past a boiler without wanting it. The man who sees a rusted gauge, a broken hinge, a coil of old wire, and feels not trash but grammar.

It helped that the vocabulary was not foreign.

Our farmstead went back to the late 1860s and spoke a dialect of the same language. A cauldron in the yard. A big old boiler. Machinery rusting mid-sentence in the grass. Weathered boards. Hand-forged iron. Hinges too heavy for their doors. Tools whose names I did not know but whose shapes entered me anyway. The House on the Rock was not another world. It was our farm’s attic scaled up to a mountain. The same nouns hoarded past all sense.

One place gave me the gingerbread.

The other gave me the iron.

I would need both.

Circus World should have been where the circus got into me, and it half was. But here is the joke I only understood this weekend: the House on the Rock had more circus than the circus museum.

Miniature circuses by the acre. Wagons bigger and more gilded than the ones in Baraboo. Carousel figures everywhere — and not just horses, but creatures. Menagerie figures, the carvers call them. Jordan’s great carousel is all menagerie: two hundred sixty-nine animals and not one horse among them, the horses exiled to the walls as if the ordinary animal had been banished from the center ring. There were posters too, wagons, carvings, spectacles of spectacle. The museum of the thing out-circused by the hoard of the thing.

The circus got in anyway, through other doors.

My parents took us to the real Shriners three-ring circus in Green Bay a couple years running, and I weighed it against Circus World like a boy comparing translations. We called the Veterans Memorial Arena “the circus,” because that was where the circus happened. I did not know other things happened in that building, and honestly, why would anything else need to?

We played circus indoors and out, re-enacting acts we had seen. I played with the Fisher-Price circus train far longer than a kid probably should, long enough that it is burned into my brain at the level of the alphabet. Elephant. Clown. Cage. Train. Ring. Wagon. Repeat.

And at Circus World, my parents bought us a slew of posters — big, wall-sized lithographs, Gargantua the gorilla, Jumbo the elephant, the grand old vocabulary of ballyhoo and impossible scale. We plastered them across the walls of the bedroom my sister and I shared. I slept for years with a gorilla the size of the wall breathing over me, ink-drawn and monumental, advertising in six colors the greatest show on earth.

I paint wall-sized pictures for a living now.

I try not to make too much of that.

I do not entirely succeed.

Later, the circus gave me theory too. Barnum. The Fiji mermaid. Sideshow banners. The beautiful crooked machinery of spectacle and hoax. The place where wonder, fraud, theater, craft, appetite, and belief all stand under the same striped tent and refuse to be sorted cleanly. That walked straight into my art practice and never left.

The Ringlings were Wisconsin boys, and the greatest show on earth came home every winter to Baraboo. Levi Fisher Ames was Wisconsin too — the Monroe carver who spent his nights whittling a menagerie of impossible beasts and toured them in a tent he called the L. F. Ames Museum of Art, a cabinet of curiosities on wheels, a hand-carved bestiary of Wisconsin strangeness. A hundred years before I would make cabinets of curiosities my subject, someone in the same soil had already packed one into a wagon and hauled it from town to town.

Some inheritances come with the blood.

Some come with the soil.

This trip, the room that had me was not one I remembered.

The Organ Room barely registered when I was nine. Or if it did, it registered only as vastness and noise, one more dim cavern in a house of dim caverns. This time I could have stayed in it for hours. Just looking and looking. My group got way ahead of me. I had to speed-walk through the dollhouses to catch up, past a hundred tiny lit windows, hurrying like a man late for something forty years gone.

What I was doing in there was naming something I have done all my life without naming.

Views.

I am a man moved by views. Not scenery, exactly. Sightlines. The way one step to the left makes a whole new picture. The way you spot a viewing place across a room and feel the need to get there. The way an object is not only itself but what it becomes when seen from the corner, from below, from a balcony, through another object, through a doorway, across a field of intervening shapes.

The Organ Room is built out of that.

Layers on layers of catwalk and copper and machine. Pipes. Bells. Gears. Vast dark instruments. Cauldrons stacked like industrial planets. Depending on where you stand, a different assemblage composes itself. The clock in the middle against the tower of kettles. A catwalk slicing one machine from another. Brass shining out of shadow. Circular forms repeating until the whole room feels less collected than orchestrated.

None of it is accident.

Whoever put that room together — Jordan or his crew, or the strange collective mind that formed around his appetite — was not thinking only about how an object looked. He was thinking about how it looked from there. From one particular pair of feet. He was composing awe spatially. He was turning the visitor’s body into a camera.

At nine, I felt the awe.

At fifty-one, I could read the staging.

That is the whole distance between the two visits, and it is my trade now. I stand in front of walls and streets and courtyards thinking about one particular pair of feet. Where will the viewer first see the figure? When does the hidden object reveal itself? What happens if they come from the left instead of the right? How does the whole thing shift when the sun drops? What view makes the work become itself?

Standing on the catwalk, I was not only a tourist.

I was a maker recognizing another maker’s move.

And then the cannon.

A cannon too huge to be real, taking up a monstrous share of the room, and — this is the part I love — there is not one good view of it.

You cannot stand anywhere and see the whole thing. There is no clean postcard angle. No satisfying diagram. No official portrait. The room denies you mastery. You have to assemble the cannon in your head out of partial glimpses: barrel here, wheel there, mouth somewhere beyond the railing, mass implied more than shown. A gestalt built out of fragments, all while wondering where the hell a man gets a cannon like that.

It is certainly no medieval antique. Was it a prop? Did Jordan build it? Was it salvaged from some parade float, some fairground, some abandoned dream of war made theatrical? The room never says.

That is part of the spell.

Awe by composition, and then awe by the denial of composition. The object you can never finish seeing. The thing too large for the room and too hidden for certainty. And all of this just after a ceiling of angels and a walk in through a monster’s throat.

There is a reason I like steampunk, circus, puppets, animatronics, automata, dioramas, sideshows, theatrical machinery, old museums, fake relics, miraculous engines, handmade monsters, cabinets of curiosities, and rooms where too many things are happening at once.

I used to think of those as a list of tastes.

They are one taste.

They are all the Organ Room.

At ten, I would have told you my influence was Frank Lloyd Wright. Riding around Spring Green, you could feel his legacy on the whole valley, and I felt it. In my head I built the connection the only way a kid can: I decided Alex Jordan must have been a student of Wright’s. I was wrong, and I was onto something.

I outgrew Wright eventually, the way you outgrow the influence you can name. Or maybe not outgrow, exactly. You absorb it, argue with it, stop needing to point at it. The named influence becomes less powerful because it has become conscious. You can file it. You can explain it. You can move around it.

The ones you cannot name keep working.

Here is what I did not know, standing in those rooms at nine, and did not know at thirty-three either.

In 2008, I helped an art restorer with the work of Syd Boyum, a Madison outsider sculptor I had never heard of until the pieces were in front of me. Around that same time, the Forevertron — Dr. Evermor’s three-hundred-twenty-ton fever dream of salvaged boilers and copper domes outside Baraboo — became my favorite work of art, full stop. Not one of my favorites. The favorite. The great machine. The cathedral of scrap. The thing that felt less built than summoned from the collective unconscious of every farmyard, factory, circus, and science fiction cover I had ever loved.

What I learned only later was that before Tom Every became Dr. Evermor, he spent the seventies as Alex Jordan’s collaborator, building many of the House on the Rock’s most elaborate displays.

The rooms that rewired me at nine had his hand in them.

I had fallen for the same maker twice, decades apart, without knowing it was the same maker.

That realization felt less like learning a fact than discovering a tunnel between two rooms of my own life. Wright was the letter my parents could point to. The famous name. The respectable lineage. The architect in the valley.

But the letter that actually arrived was signed by other hands.

Alex Jordan. Tom Every. Syd Boyum. Levi Fisher Ames. Barnum. Anonymous wagon painters. Parade builders. Puppet makers. Farm welders. Men who made impossible beasts in sheds. People who understood that wonder does not always come from purity. Sometimes it comes from excess, salvage, fakery, brass, dust, theater, and nerve.

I have spent my whole life answering that letter.

From that summer on, the objects kept surfacing.

Copper and brass and clock-part-looking things crept into my drawings. Tubes and kettles became a habit of my hand. Furnaces, bellows, gauges, hinges, boilers, wheels. I drew invented machines before I understood machines. I drew rooms before I knew how rooms were built. I drew relics from cultures that did not exist, instruments that could not play, devices that looked like they might open a door between worlds if only someone remembered the ritual.

When I finally got to art school at thirty-one, the objects climbed off the page into sculpture. By 2009, I had made the cabinet of curiosities an official subject of my practice — official the way anything becomes official, years after it is already true. The artist statement catches up long after the hand has made its decision.

The account says 1984, a house on a rock.

Or earlier, a farm.

Or earlier still, some Wisconsin impulse toward the handmade impossible: the carved beast in the wagon, the boiler dragged home because it might be useful someday, the wall-sized circus poster, the shed full of parts, the thing nobody throws away because it is too interesting to die.

I turned out a baroque maximalist with a barn-wood-and-forged-iron soul.

Both places will claim me.

Both are right.

I came home from this trip with the ache to create. Not the soft ache of nostalgia, which wants the old thing back and suffers because it cannot have it. This was sharper and more useful. I wanted to draw. To assemble. To build. To make a little impossible room of my own. To drag the old vocabulary forward and see what new sentence it wanted to form.

Forty-two years, and the current is still live.

That is how I finally understood what had happened in the Gate House. Why it hit like a ledger and not a photo album.

Nostalgia wants the old thing back.

Influence wants to make the next thing.

The School of Too Much is not a place you graduate from. It follows you home. It teaches by excess, by bad taste made holy, by the refusal to choose one object when a thousand will do. It teaches you that awe can be staged. That fake things can make real feelings. That a room can be an instrument. That a collection can become a weather system. That a cannon you cannot see whole may stay with you longer than one politely displayed.

It teaches you that influence may look, at first, like clutter.

And then, decades later, like inheritance.

And then, if you are lucky, like permission.

I’m going to go make the next thing.