"i learn by going where i have to go"

Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Waking” ends:

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go. (16-19)

This last line, “I learn by going where I have to go,” is one that followed me as I walked beside and behind Vivian and Mama. It’s the journey through blocks of text and white space and dialogue and silence and in and out of time that we learn by going where we have to go, and a most important lesson, it seems, is that we don’t go alone, don’t learn alone. And sometimes, we let others tell it. Sometimes, perhaps, we have to.

In the context of Soldier, we discussed a bit about the narrator surrendering voice. As we know, this discussion – what the syllabus calls “changing p.o.v.” – can extend to Gornick’s Fierce Attachments (and perhaps a lot of what we’ll read). Like the attention to living space in terms of a literal floor one lives on (and thus in relation to others) – “We hardly knew each other, any of us, sometimes we didn’t talk to each other at all. But we lived on top of one another, we were in and out of each other’s house. Everybody knew everything in no time at all. A few months in the building and the women were, well, intimate – this surrender of voice, changing point of view, happens in layers, and its through these layers we learn about self, relationship of self to others, and how this manifests itself into meaning (5).

To achieve such voice surrender and change in point of view Gornick utilizes multiple approaches, one of which is with a most direct usage of conversation domination. That is, Mama talks a lot. Entire paragraphs (often most of a page) are dedicated to Mama and her storytelling. It’s through this experience that we get to know her, how she views a larger world (regardless if the view is “small”), how she reacts and responds. What such conversation domination always allows for is reaction and response, most notably from her daughter. For instance, we walk beside Vivian as she and her mother recount the story of uncle Sol and how he tried to sleep with Mama. We learn with Vivian: “Each time [Mama] tells the story it is both the same and different because each time I’m older, and it occurs to me to ask a question I didn’t ask the last time around” (7). Such instances reflect life’s processes; also, regardless of mother/daughter distance, these retellings, comings together, allow realization of a certain intimacy between the two.

Another moment of domination is what I sometimes call “the takeover,” and this happens during dialogue. At this, Mama’s a master. Consider the day Vivian visits the museum and recognizes something completely alive in herself: “Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion…I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her” (103). The subsequent “takeover”:

“Oh, Ma! What a day I’ve had,” I say.
“Tell me,” she says. “Do you have the rent this month?”
“Ma, listen…” I say.
“That review for the Times,” she says. “It’s for sure they’ll pay you?”
“Ma, stop it. Let me tell you what I’ve been feeling,” I say.
“Why aren’t you wearing something warmer?” she cries. “It’s nearly winter.” (103-4)

Regardless of the form domination (voice surrender, pov change) takes, we’re constantly students of the relationship. And we have to keep in mind this is crafted with purpose.

(I also consider here the moments when the narrator does indeed speak but not about the character. In other contexts I might simply consider this narration, telling and showing, but I wonder, in the context of surrender, if we call this something else, when we learn most about the character through the narrator’s telling and showing of others, e.g. page 81, the Dorothy Levinson and clan rant.)

And like Mama’s many voices. Yes, we are exposed to them through dialogue but also through more direct address. On page 34 we get the “rough I-really-mean-this voice.” Again on page 76: “[Mama] spoke minimally, and when she did speak her voice was uniformly tight and miserable, always pulling her listener back to a proper recollection of her ‘condition.’” Similarly, there are many types of alone: “[Mama’s] alone inside that faraway look on her face, but this alone is different from the alone I’m very familiar with, the one that distorts her features into a mask of bitterness, the one in which she’s counting up her grievances and disappointments. This alone is soft not bitter, full of interest, not a trace of self-pity in it” (61). Perhaps this balance between showing and telling is what moves the narrative like a walk.

Another point of interest voice-wise: the “potential response avoided.” Mama and daughter search for a cup of coffee on a Sunday. They arrive at an “upwardly mobile greasy spoon.” “‘All right?’ my mother says brightly to me. If I said, ‘Ma, this place is awful,’ she’d say, ‘My fancy daughter. I was raised in a cold-water flat with the toilet in the hall but this isn’t good enough for you. So, okay, you pick the place,’ and we’d go trudging on up Third Avenue. But I nod yes, sit down with her in a booth by the window, and prepare to drink a cup of dreadful coffee while we go on with our weighty conversation about children and parents” (43). It all seems a weighty conversation about children and parents, and in this moment of avoidance, we still are allowed glimpses into voice of mother, of character, of narrator.

I’ll say Mama – her talking, silence, rambles, etc. – reminds me much of my own: I get (and got while reading) annoyed, enraged, shot down, silenced. But a realization came for me toward the narrative’s close, when what dominates is the character’s relationship with/against Joe: I missed Mama, I wondered where she had gone, waited impatiently for her to return, be it through domination, “the takeover,” avoidance of. It seems “what falls away is always. And is near.”

michellelouisegeck