groom, tx
i was on a rise in the land. the towns were very intermittent after little rock and i would often feel a flush of relief as i neared the top of a rise and saw structures flicking up into the lonely horizon. this ascent was different. down where the arc of the low point in a broad dale began to feed onto the steady incline, a silver point blossomed over the crest of the hill. as i ascended, perplexed yet curious, the point broadened into a squat pyramid and then into an even more squat obelisk. at this point i expected to see a development at the top of the rise even though i had not seen it from a distant hillock. perhaps i had missed this one. the obelisk continued to grow until a broad crossing band, catching the midmorning sun, spread out from the base of the obelisk. then the base thickened and it too had pyramidal terminations. then it too rested atop another shaft in line with the obelisk above. it was evident that i was seeing a cross. an enormous cross in the middle of nowhere to be precise. from the top of the rise i could see that the cross in fact started from the low point of the next dale and was some 20 storeys high. around its base, almost somewhere in the middle of nowhere, was a sort of pious wagon train of small buildings. they were low-slung but all relatively the same size without sharing identical physiognomies.
i approached the hamlet and was greeted by a very small welcome party. a man and woman followed by four cats stepped out of the broad side of a home covered with a printed pattern of swirling felines and brocades of yarn. they greeted me and welcomed me to groom, texas.
this place, groom, was an experiment. it was born of the same ennui that fueled everything i had done and seen in the past eleven years. yet this place dated from five years before i received the first missive from publius/3. the disillusionment these people and their long-lost neighbours suffered gave rise to a collective engagement with a company marketing modular homes. these prototypes promised a liberation from the prefigurations of the typical single family home through infinite potential configurations of both space and decoration. these people bought into the system, sold on the illusory answer.
yet the establishment of the town, with this evidently tongue-in-cheek siting, eventually signalled both the rebirth and death of their dreams. each house in fact stood 27.6° apart straddling a statue depicting a station of the crucifixion. it seemed that each statue lent something to the particular pathos captured by each home.
It became clear quickly that these poor folks had bought into yet another palliative approximation of their characters. it was humiliating. the promise of freedom last only until it was apparent that a reconfiguration of the home's panel system, once already assembled, would render the materials useless. one house, which stood by a jesus collapsed under the weight of the cross he carried, lay in flaky ruins. the promise of self expression through applied decoration suffered under the bleaching desert sun as each home's vibrant patterned skin tapered into an almost contrastless uniform mottling.
so these folks, of whom two remained, had put the labour of their bodies into the undercooked artifice of a hidden conjurer. although their sweat was in it, their spirits and desires were not truly there. they were projected upon the products. it was the illusion that their spirits and desires would pervade the construction that was the most heartbreaking to reckon with.
it was hard form me to see in these two folks who stood by this hamlet as their albatross, the continued faith that perhaps their dreams were approximate, that they were the ones who were wrong. perhaps they lived slightly out of step with the norm but it was them who had in the end failed in approximating the norm. their house stood next to a statue of jesus and a roman centurion at the instant the iron nail ran in. not before, not after. it pained me to leave them out there, at the foot of that cross, as it pained peter to look away from jesus.
