“Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important” (Pickard 269).
“What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration” (Pickard 269).
“Her goal is to craft a set of particulars engrossing enough to draw the reader further and further into the poem so that, once entranced, the reader can be pushed out, half-conscious, into the unknown. She asks the reader simply to read with Darwin's rapt attention, to achieve a "self-forgetful [...] concentration"” (Pickard 281).
I was initially interested in putting these two works of art intro conversation because as I observed one of Cartier-Bresson's photographs, I found myself experiencing a process of epiphany similar to the one outlined by Pickard. So, I decided to manipulate the Cartier-Bresson photograph to create a timeline of my observation as it coincided with the narrator’s process of epiphany in In the Waiting Room. While I aim to use this collage to outline my, and the narrator’s, “automatic observation,” “forgetful relaxation,” and “feeling of strangeness in undertaking,” it also exemplifies a relationship between one’s conscious and unconscious states in observation, epiphany, etc. (Pickard 269). By taking my own unconscious process of observation and epiphany, and forcing it upon the viewer, I overthrow their own unconscious process of viewing, and stimulate their conscious observation with annotations, phrase and word cut-outs, and a compartmentalized version of the Cartier-Bresson photograph. The slight irony in this process is indicated by my phrase cut-out on the last page of the collage – the “Without thinking at all” that is slapped onto the final version of the Cartier-Bresson photograph. While this outlines my, and the In the Waiting Room narrator’s, process of epiphany, it seems to contradict all that the viewer just experienced. I will now unpack the collage in chronological order of the poem and images, and the processes of epiphany. Firstly, I will note that my process of epiphany in viewing the Cartier-Bresson image revolved around the presence of the running girl, and her relationship with the rest of the photograph. For the majority of the images on the first page of the collage, to replicate my viewing process in which I was initially caught up by the gondola and then the surrounding landscape, I exclude the girl. This is indicative of an automatic process of observation, much like that of the narrator in Bishop’s poem in lines 1-35. In these lines, the narrator views her surroundings from a first-person perspective; everything around her is in relation to her. She describes her own waiting and reading, and the fact that she read the article straight through and was too shy to stop, much like my surface level first glance at the photograph. The narrator’s moment of epiphany begins on line 36, as she describes a sudden pain in exclamation. To the immediate right of these lines is the first image in which the girl appears - the beginning of my epiphany, that there is far more to the Cartier-Bresson photograph than that initially meets the eye. Thus marks the beginning of the process of epiphany, “the sensation of falling off the round, turning world,” the narrator’s eyes glued to the National Geographic, and my eyes glued to the running girl. I represented the sensation of falling that follows a sudden moment of epiphany, by turning the photograph upside down, not only to depict the girl as if walking on the edge of the Earth, but also to exemplify the way in which epiphany can turn one's previous perspective entirely on its head. The automatic, yet conscious observation slips away, and an unconscious, “forgetful relaxation” takes over. This is the beginning of an understanding of self, first in the most immediate sense - “you are an I” - then an understanding of how others see you - “you are an Elizabeth” - and finally in an abstract sense that Pickard compares to the abstraction of a natural historian - “you are one of them”. This process conflates the first, second, and third person (singular and plural); on a more general scale, perspectives begin to overlap and become ambiguous. We can see the image in a panoramic view, with the running girl to the far right (maybe this is akin to how others see someone). We can see the image zoomed into the girl, highlighting her stance parallel to the tip of the gondola (maybe this is akin to how one sees oneself). We can see the four of the running girls in a pop-art style (maybe this is akin to one’s abstract and anonymous relationship with everyone else in the world). Finally, on the third page of the collage after “sliding beneath a big black wave” of epiphany, and then another, and another, we return to what is now a state of semi-consciousness. The image in the top right of the page zooms into the bridge and its reflection, a somewhat circular shape that reminded me of a unified perspective - the world, and the girl on the edge of it. I doubled the bridge in the larger final image to emphasize this point, and moreover, to depict that when one returns from epiphany, they do not return to the same state of mind. Although we may only have gotten a peripheral vision in epiphany, of whatever it is that is “enormously important”, we have been entranced by our epiphany, and can now be “pushed out, half-conscious, into the unknown” (Pickard 281). The setting in the poem’s narrative is re-stated, although perhaps now the narrator sees her relationship with it differently, perhaps in a more relaxed, stranger, and less conscious state of mind, much like how I ultimately viewed the Cartier-Bresson photograph.