Welcome to the Museum of Western Culture

Strange day in the city. Xela, Guatemala. Wandered around cold grey and ugly, the bank guards with their shotguns and street kids with soot on their faces and a drunk claiming to be El Buky kissing our hands.

Went to the Museum of Western Culture, which started out with photographs of military generals and rusty swords and a white silk ball gown rotting around the edges, and then there was a room of sports heroes and musicians, with marimbas and their giant gourd-testicles hanging down from the ceiling, a black satin marimbero jacket embroidered in glass beads pressed into a frame. The hallways were jammed with typewriters, old computers, portable phones from the 1990s...

...The hallways were populated with old men, sitting, reading dictionaries, whittling at blocks of wood, around every corner kitschy magazine clipping collage signs saying NO FOTOS and, upstairs, a giant banner that read: COUPLES: PLEASE HAVE SOME EDUCATION (with a magazine ad posted on of a couple making out, selling viagra), passing below the banner into the the next room full of Western Culture, I was surrounded by a labyrinth of glass display cases of dried leaves, jars of powdered chemicals, sulfur and lye, boxes of chicle and bottles of rainbow colored "Healthy Xela" soda, plastic bags of wheat and seeds, lined up against the walls, floor to ceiling, a dead forest of national industry.

In the hallway, pottery and funerary urns and human remains. Gorgeous tiny clay heads making funny faces at us.

The next room was hot and musty and filled with rotting taxidermy, jars of formaldehyde reptiles, and the majestic skull of a whale in the center of it all, so big its bones were stacked haphazardly on top of each other. Along one wall were jars filled with floating snakes in clear liquid, looking slightly transparent. Then the lions, in the middle of the room, nipple-high and mangy, with bulging ping-pong eyeballs and plastic strips for tongues hanging out of caulky mouths. Across from them were the human fetuses. My uterus cramped up and I gagged and walked out of the room. Took refuge in the beautiful last exhibit of pinned-down beetles and iridescent butterflies and the crown jewel of the whole museum of Western Culture, perched in a glass case against a silk Guatemalan flag, a Quetzal.

Jess convinced me to return to the taxidermy room... there were the squirrels, mounting each other and baring fangs, there was the two-headed goat and the eight-legged dog, the shark fetus and the pickled octopus, the stuffed deer with its head taped on, the bug eyed cats and the 12-foot alligator skin nailed to the wall, the blow fish and the conch shells and spontaneous little altars tucked into the crevices, saints and a little turtle made of peach pit, perched on the back of a hollowed out crab. Thick boa with toads leaping frozen over it. A room full of still life.

When we left it took awhile, sitting in the central plaza, processing, laughing till we cried. Afterward, the whole city began to make sense-- it was all just an extension of the museum, ode to our great Western Culture. MacDonald's and recycled school buses, Your American Dollars Welcome Here.

(2009)