Instead, I found the Wild West version of Barnum’s museum. The rustic room was large and square, with unpainted walls and unfinished wooden floors. Saddles and holsters and lariats hung from aging rafters, along with other worn and weathered items that I could not identify. Beneath the dangled vestiges of history, a miniature maze of counters topped with smudgy glass revealed a chaotic collection of old bottles, straight razors, tin badges.
The sawdusty floorboards creaked as I strolled from showcase to showcase, wondering who had owned each item, how was it lost, how found, how longed for. How many forgotten stories would never be told? Lifetimes worth, in that one room.
The second floor of the barn was completely different. Unlike the jumble of the lower floor, the upper floor was a museum for the film Dances with Wolves. Sets and props used in filming had been painstakingly arranged in a series of dioramas, each one depicting a scene. The largest display showed a Civil War surgical tent and medical implements. In the movie, Kevin Costner, playing Union Lieutenant John Dunbar, escapes from the medical tent, steals a horse, and gallops along Confederate lines in a suicide attempt that spurs his Union compatriots.
Walking through that building was like traveling through a mind, not the ganglia and neurons of a brain but the virtual aggregation of mentality: the creaky barn the persona; the silent clerk the sensory gatekeeper; the lower floor the random hodgepodge, bits and bytes, of memory. The top floor transformed these elements into the recollections, the crafted ceremony of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Invisible all around was the organizing homunculus: the transcendental Director.
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