National Geographic

In the Waiting Room

In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuelo to keep her dentist's appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room.

It was winter. It got dark early. The waiting room was full of grown-up people, arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines.

My aunt was inside

what seemed like a long time and while I waited I read the National Geographic (I could read) and carefully studied the photographs:

the inside of a volcano, black, and full of ashes;

then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire.

Osa and Martin Johnson dressed in riding breeches, laced boots, and pith helmets.

A dead man slung on a pole – ―Long Pig,‖ the caption said.

Babies with pointed heads

wound round and round with string;

black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs.

Their breasts were horrifying.

I read it right straight through.

I was too shy to stop.

And then I looked at the cover:

the yellow margins, the date.

Suddenly, from inside, came an oh! of pain – Aunt Consuelo's voice – not very loud or long.

I wasn't at all surprised;

even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman.

I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me:

my voice, in my mouth.

Without thinking at all I was my foolish aunt, I–we– were falling, falling,

our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic, February, 1918.

[…]

(BISHOP, 2008, p. 149-150)

The first stanza of ―In the Waiting Room‖ makes abundantly clear that this is a poem told from a very defined and singular first-person, unlike anything we have previously discussed in this dissertation. The poem‘s opening verses, ―In Worchester, Massachusetts, / I went with Aunt Consuelo‖, already reveal its memoir-like quality. Unlike ―One Art‖, there is very little restraint in displaying the poem‘s more subjective qualities from the start.

Travisano (2019, p. 212) identifies that Aunt Consuelo stands in for Bishop‘s aunt Florence Bishop, her late father‘s unmarried sister. He also finds that Bishop, in the poem, conflates two 1918 issues of the National Geographic into one. Anne Stevenson, in her follow-up study on Bishop, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, first published in 1998, refers to

―In the Waiting Room‖ as ―the last poem Bishop completed for which she took material straight out of childhood experience‖ (STEVENSON, 2006, p. 40).

Tonally and structurally, ―In the Waiting Room‖ resembles that of the already mentioned ―First Death in Nova Scotia‖ in its child-like language. Bishop, once again, makes ample use of enjambment, which, linked with her use of short two- or three-stressed lines and prose-like narrative, makes the poem flow incredibly fast. Stevenson, when comparing the two, finds the tone in ―In the Waiting Room‖ to be ―even more colloquial and relaxed than in the earlier poem [‗First Death in Nova Scotia‘]‖ (STEVENSON, 2006, p. 40).

Perhaps an interesting aspect of the language Bishop employs throughout this first stanza is her lack of qualifiers for most of the material, outside elements her speaker mentions. The waiting room, the grown-up people, arctics, overcoats, lamps, magazines… not a single one of these elements is studied with the same detailed accuracy than, for example, Bishop‘s map. This refusal to elaborate on these objects also recalls ―One Art‖, in which Bishop, uncharacteristically to her, did the same thing. In this first stanza, the only element that draws Bishop‘s speaker towards Bishop‘s usual scrutiny towards the world is precisely the February, 1918 edition of National Geographic magazine and the images conjured from it.

Besides the magazine, the other external aspect that brings description to Bishop‘s speaker is Aunt Consuelo herself. It is interesting that the woman‘s first passing mention in

the poem is is done without ceremony: ―I went with Aunt Consuelo / to keep her dentist's appointment / and sat and waited for her / in the dentist's waiting room. […]‖. Here, Bishop remarkably does not give this character any distinctive features or qualities. When looking at National Geographic and coming across a photograph of a volcano, Bishop‘s speaker appears to have a much more interested eye to it than to the world around her, her aunt included:

―studied the photographs: / the inside of a volcano, / black, and full of ashes; / then it was spilling over / in rivulets of fire. […]‖.

Bishop then goes on to describe the photographs featured in the magazine with acute imagery and detail: ―Babies with pointed heads / wound round and round with string; / black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs.

[…]‖. If the grown-ups that accompany the speaker in the waiting room get no detail of their own, the images of these people and places, so removed from Bishop‘s actual external perception, are presented vividly. Only after she immerses herself in perceiving the world from within the magazine, the speaker turns to their real world, once again, and finds the details once missing: Aunt Consuelo, mentioned only by name and by the fact she was at the dentist, now becomes a ―foolish, timid woman‖, her voice ―not very loud or long‖ – this movement is only possible after Bishop‘s speaker begins their existential epiphany upon examining the photographs on National Geographic. The I only becomes aware of the world – and themselves – after perceiving the world, and themselves, through the lens of the magazine.

When Bishop, then, places the voice, ―not very loud or long‖ as being of her own speaker, instead of the aunt‘s, she starts the poem‘s long, existential and ontological movement of perceiving one‘s own place in relation to the world. She does, that, primarily by way of her body, as suggested by the speaker‘s awe at ―the black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs.‖. The critic Catherine Cucinella, one of the most prominent readers of the body in Bishop‘s work, argues that, for Bishop, ―the body emerges as ambiguous and problematic as it slips between metaphoric and metonymic representations often occupying liminal spaces‖ (CUCINELLA, 2010, p. 55).

Perhaps more interestingly, Cucinella also calls attention to the way ―Bishop evokes an essentialist and universalist standpoint regarding the body‖ (CUCINELLA, 2010, p. 56), which recalls our preview notion of Bishop evoking a similar universalist standpoint when talking about travel.

If we take Cucinella‘s view of the Bishopian body as ambiguous and universalist, we might see why exactly Bishop‘s speaker in ―In the Waiting Room‖ would mistake themselves

for Aunt Consuelo when hearing the painful cry. Cucinella, on that confusion, comments how

―paradoxically, the child has lost a sense of herself while simultaneously becoming aware of her being-ness.‖ (CUCINELLA, 2010, p. 58). Cucinella remarks on body recall Merleau- Ponty as he attempts to make sense of the divide between the body and the world:

Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?

Where in the body are we to put the seer, since evidently there is in the body only "shadows stuffed with organs," that is, more of the visible? The world seen is not "in" my body, and my body is not "in" the visible world ultimately: as flesh applied to a flesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is surrounded by it. (MERLEAU-PONTY, 1968, p. 138)

―In the Waiting Room‖ seems to be precisely testing the limits between the body and world as highlighted by Merleau-Ponty in the quote above. Bishop, however, chooses to explore the world not through simply looking at it directly, but through its representation from a magazine, a movement similar to what she did in ―The Map‖ – taking an object away from its intended, practical use and marveling at it in an unusual way. Through National Geographic, Bishop‘s speaker is able to conjure her epiphany of world and body, and finds in her epiphany of corporality a place of both individuality and universality: ―Without thinking at all / I was my foolish aunt, / I–we-–were falling, falling, / our eyes glued to the cover / of the National Geographic, / February, 1918.‖.