Insanity

He strode down the street with his hat tipped back,

He looked each man in the eye and nodded,

He paused in front of every shop window (and everyone knows he is lost)

–Bertold Bercht, ‘A reader for those who live in cities’, 1928.

Perhaps this is the only joy my bred circumstance can bring me – a weak vain groan belongs to a kind of anxious joy.

I have forgotten when did I start to be anxious, but it did not disturb me. I remembered, each time I wandered in the streets of New York City, when I tried to hear the pulse of this city from the sole of my feet when I took a deep breath carelessly for some air from this city in the dizzy, burning sun, a sore of puzzling confusion, variable illusion a tricky phenomenon close to nightmare then spread upon me greedily like a great cover of universe, confined me in this endless jail … where the time span is prehistoric, present and seems also the space of future.

Reflections, memories, and omens conversed and chanted constantly to one another in that space. An everlasting roaming and changeable scenes grew, performed a broken, shattered, fragmentary vision continuously and repeatedly, like the visions of tower babel described in the Old Testament – neither one knows when and who constructed this tower, nor one knows when and why this tower ruined into hundreds of thousand pieces.

The remains of the tower, just like a skeleton of prehistoric gigantic animal, lay peacefully and gracefully on the land where provoked the God successively for a voiceless pant. Gradually, it disappeared its top once towering onto the clouds where is the end of glorious sunshine. – despaired, hopeless, hysterically, Kafka stylized, Camus stylized, Satres stylized……, one though horrible but might be forgotten space twisted, screamed in the breath filled with pestilence and destroyed endlessly.

Haw Hsu, June 1995, New York City