Among the things that my fiancé Ryan brought into our relationship from her old apartment is a print of Ilse Bing’s famous 1931 Self-Portrait in Mirrors. She’s got it hanging in our new place next to the framed butterfly that I got for her at the craft fair in Fort Mason last fall. Maybe you’ve seen it—the picture, I mean. It’s of this woman, Ilse Bing, taking a photograph of herself in a set of mirrors. It’s simple but quite startling, because she has both eyes open, staring at you from behind the camera, and because of the angle of the second mirror, she appears to be staring both at herself and away. For a photograph exploiting a simple optical trick, Bing’s self portrait is surprisingly complex and unsettling.
It used to hang in Ryan’s old place, and it made the three-block move to our first apartment together (a damp, pre-quake dungeon on the edge of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district) in a large card stock folio, or possibly—somehow, I suppose, less romantically—in just a regular manila extra-heavyweight clasp envelope.
We hung the picture in an attempt to distract ourselves from our steadily creeping sense of claustrophobia, and shortly thereafter we discovered a large presence of mold in the closet. The wall—adjacent to a dingy cellar—was crumbling and damp to the touch. After several venomous and painstakingly worded emails to our landlord, we decided to move out as quickly as possible. I thought then about how the picture, along with the rest of our things, would have to be moved, and its functionality as an ornament reconsidered in conjunction with the almost assuredly limited aesthetic offerings of whatever space we would occupy next. At the time, we were even considering moving to Oakland in hopes that our budget might do more for us there.
Although we eventually did find a great, mold-free apartment in the city, the whole experience made it clear to me that I’m beginning to grow quite cynical about San Francisco living. As much as I love this city, I’m not convinced that I can ever make a home here. San Francisco has the ability to constantly surprise me with the ordinary while numbing me to death with the peculiar. For instance, I have gotten incredibly used to and even bored with the woman who frantically pushes her cat around in a stroller—seriously though, strapped down to the fucking thing, garbed in a velour costume complete with little plastic bells—around my neighborhood every day. There used to be another cat but there isn’t anymore. Frankly, I’m almost certain that she ran it over. That’s how fast she moves the stroller, over curbs and cracks, and in front of cars. I don’t know if she’s homeless but I do know that we live in the same neighborhood. We are neighbors.
Kant, by way of Voltaire—and further by way of my own misappropriation—tells us that the best way to deal with this sort of thing is to sleep a great deal, and, whenever not sleeping, to daydream. These seem like friendly, wise, and characteristically cheeky (referring to Voltaire, not Kant) words to live by. Bourgeois, yes, but for the inescapably bourgeois rather appropriate. The only reason that I mention Kant and don’t just go directly to the source is that Kant adds a third means by which to “counterbalance the many miseries of life”: laughter. Sleep, daydreaming (they use the word “hope”), and laughter.
But how do you learn to find the cat lady funny again? How do you go back to justifying the amount of rent you pay to live next to her? It is simple: You imagine that you are the cat, and that all of the difficult and humiliating things that you can’t change become the little plastic bells, or the leash, or—better yet—the velour costume, which you, as a result of your own genetic makeup, lack the digital dexterity to remove. These are your jobs, and your bells, and your leash, and your rent. This is your cage to decorate. Now laugh.
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Devin Asaro is a writer living in San Francisco. For more of his writing, visit DevinAsaro.Wordpress.com.