"Your drawing," said the woman with a shaved head, after several minutes of silent contemplation, and paused again. "Is beautiful," she continued, tucking her hands into the sleeves of her long robes. "It is beautiful in how completely pathetic it is."
Slam. Revolving slowly away from the drawing tacked to the wall, she nailed her eyes on my friend Hilary, and raised her voice slightly so that the entire class would benefit from the forthcoming edict.
"On your next assignment," she said slowly, "I want you to work so hard that you forget to eat."
Silence descended, for the rest of that class. What? My friend and I exchanged frantic looks. What just happened? Did she just call us FAT?
Ruth was an ascetic minimalist, a definite clairvoyant and a visiting professor from Yale University. Her Drawing 1 class was the weirdest, hardest and most influential course I've ever taken at this godforsaken school.
Those of us who do eat food might have called Ruth a human fortune cookie. After the first day, I started writing down each and every crazy word.
"You should have many erasers," she said, "for you will make many mistakes." Hi, hangovers.
"You should always have a pair of scissors. There will be much to sever."
Hi, slamfrags.
"Think of the smallness. Think only of the being small. Make your drawings so small they become poems."
Hi, alien planet of transcendent creativity: Beam me up, please.
But even more impressive than her ability to make every moment into a metaphorical microcosm was that Ruth absolutely demanded self-discipline clear evidence of her being an alien on Planet Dartmouth. Self-discipline is something basically absent here, in the land of grade-inflation and shooting-fish-in-a-basement. Or at least, it's totally absent from my microcosm of here.
Ruth, however, really did work so hard she forgot to eat. She spent nearly as much time deciding what to say about our drawings as we spent drawing them and this was Drawing 1, remember. I could hardly even handle circles, let alone humanoids.
I would slave for hours and hours, through the night, remaking a self-portrait, only to have her tell me: "You don't look enough like dust."
It was a bloodbath. Ruth was impossible to please and nearly as impossible to understand. But nevertheless, her advice keeps coming back to me.
All winter the fever among my fellow seniors has been rising: Grad school? Wall Street? Prostitution? Where will we go and what will we do, when the sky falls, come June?
There is a soothing rhetoric, handed down by our ex-hippie parents, that you don't need to know what you want to do with your life, yet. There is another soothing rhetoric, handed down by our still-banker parents, that, since you don't know what you want to do, you should make a lot of money until you figure it out.
Ruth, it occurred to me, would scoff at both of these ways we console ourselves. I think she would nail us to the wall with her bald-headed gaze and say: "Quit being a little bitch. You know what you want to do. Now work so hard you forget to eat."
I secretly agree with her.
I know there are a lot of kids who know what they want, and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. I aspire to be one of them. But more often I find myself among those who claim not to know what they want to do with their lives but I don't believe it. I think we're just afraid to admit whatever it is (especially if it's something besides to make a lot of money) because then we would have to face the fact that we might fail.
Well, here goes: I want to be a poet. I'm not even kidding. I want to publish books of poems. And these days, when I sit down to in the stacks to work on my creative writing thesis a manuscript of poems guess what I tell myself? "Work so hard you forget to eat."
Clearly, since I have not yet starved to death, Ruth's self-discipline is a lesson I am still struggling to internalize. In fact, I am already hurtling towards failure. Every revision seems to get worse; the harder I work to put this book together, the more it seems to fall apart.
Sigh. I am writing this column to avoid the manuscript.
And so, at our 30 year reunion, if I have wifed a Tuck grad (Hi, the Mirror's actual theme this week) and done nothing but yoga with my life, feel free to remind me that I am nothing but a taxidermied trophy-failure. If the smile I attempt through my silicon face comes out as a grimace, well, alright.
Publishing the sentence, "I want to be a poet" already seems like a mistake.
But it has just occurred to me that maybe the most brilliant thing about Ruth, what I admire most, is the stakes. The stakes were so high in every statement she made you can reverse them entirely, and they're still important, just in another way: "Do not think of the smallness. Do not think of being small." Or, "Forget that you are dust."
"You will make many mistakes," becomes: "Many mistakes will make you." Either way, that one certainly rings true.
