Really good books never leave you. They infiltrate your consciousness and influence your perceptions, challenging and enhancing your worldview. I categorize these gems under the realm of “kaleidoscopic literature”, or literature that alters your vision in colorful, ever-shifting ways. Insomniac City by Bill Hayes was the first kaleidoscopic read that I had the pleasure of being irrevocably changed by. Here is why.

INSOMNIAC CITY BOOK REVIEW

I stumbled across Insomniac City through an old teacher of mine and could not put it down. Where many writers try to explain their experiences of the world, I found that Hayes grabs you by the hand and pulls you inside of his. The memoir opens with him transplanting his grief-stricken body from San Francisco to New York City where he meets and falls in love with neurologist Oliver Sacks. Each page is saturated in awareness, alternating between original journal entires that Hayes copied into the book and short essays meditating on love, loss, and the ache of change. Hidden between those pages are his own stunning photographs, mostly comprised of beautiful strangers that he photographed organically on the streets of New York. Through each torn out journal entry and stolen photograph, you watch as heartbreak opens the door to deeper love, over and over again. That’s one idea that stuck with me. Here are a couple more.

trees as reflections of our flesh

One of the earliest conversations that Hayes records having with Sacks was over trees. Hayes would send Sacks his photographs of bare tree branches and they would discuss what they looked like. To Hayes, they resembled vascular capillaries. To Sacks, they looked like neurons. Now every time that I stand under a tree, I cannot help but see the inner workings of my own flesh reflected in the limbs. This started a domino effect, where more and more elements of nature began to parallel the human body in my mind. The veins of a leaf look like the veins of my palm. A walnut resembles both the lungs and the human brain. Hold an orange slice up to the sun and see your own capillaries Slice open a tomato and see the chambers of your heart. The world has never been the same.

cities as lovers

Heartbroken by San Francisco, Hayes fled to New York. He writes that, alone, he formed his first NYC relationship with the city itself. By taking long train rides through each borough and asking perfect strangers if he could photograph them, he began to fall in love. He would go out alone and simply observe the world around him. Much like Colson Whitehead, he saw the subway as a beautiful social experiment of chance, where you never know what amalgamation of humanity you are going to get momentarily mixed in with. He walked through the city, through skateboard parks, dry cleaning shops, busy streets at rush hour, and he saw it all as inspiration. In other words, he saw it all as art.

Years after reading his love letters to New York, I had my own rendezvous with the city. For two weeks I wandered New York completely alone, getting perfectly lost and finding my own visions of art on every corner. It was the most intensely passionate love affair that I have ever known. I distinctly remember stepping out of the MoMA and down into the subway and feeling just as, if not more, moved by what I witnessed in that underground world as I did by every piece of fine art that I had just spend hours devouring. I credit that to Hayes. I credit that to Insomniac City showing me that the city becomes your lover the first time you step inside of it and that the relationship that follows is often primal, organic art.

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