The Last Post: How it felt on the day I discovered that I did not have a distinction…

I’d started to believe I would never know my MA marks; and a bit of me preferred it that way – with Schrödinger's Cat and the flask of cyanide snugly boxed up I could imagine whatever I like.

And what I like to imagine is that I’ve been awarded a distinction.

I could have tried to discover the marks – I could have contacted the person who will know or the administrators who frighten me – but that was daunting, and a bit like temping providence.
Then – one Tuesday afternoon five weeks ago – I was in the library and I happened upon the person who will know.
I have been in a dark funk since that day. I saw the term ‘dark funk’ in an article and it is a perfect description of the way I feel; a sad mix of gloom and craven passivity.

One darkening Tuesday afternoon, five weeks ago, I meet the person who will know my MA marks in the library.


It is impossible (for me at least) to ignore the bulky cat-box on the floor between us. So, when we have established how well we both look, I ask the question. I ask the person who will know when we might find out about our marks.

‘The Board met last week,’ the person who will know says, ‘your dissertation is with the administrators who frighten you and ready to collect.’ (she doesn’t actually call them that – I’ve never admitted to the person who will know that I am afraid of the administrators, although she might easily have guessed).


So I walk - limping slightly; the limp returns for the walk - very, very slowly, across the winter concourse that separates the library and the student centre, where the dissertation is ready to collect. The distance is about two hundred yards and the journey takes at least two hundred years. The student centre is jolly with light. Students and tutors, bathed in radiance from the windows, crisscross my path. They are chatting, and frowning and smiling and behaving as if nothing is odd.


I am waiting for the dissertation to be retrieved and there is a tap on my shoulder. It is the person who will know, again.

‘I just thought I would come across and tell you…’

I nod.

‘…we discussed your mark profile at the Board…’

I watch her mouth.

‘…and we decided to award you…’

I wait. It is like the ticking tense pause they do to be cruel on talent shows.

‘…a merit…’

And the cat is on its sad side at our feet. Its eyes are part open but milky-glazed and its body is a stiff as a branch.

‘…well done!’

‘Thank you.’

She speaks on, saying encouraging things about not letting the writing go and about not being disheartened by rejections.
I wonder – 'Is merit what they call a distinction at this university?' I wonder if the cat is merely in a black catty-funk, which would be understandable after being closed up in that nasty box for all those months.
The administrator who frightens me hands me the dissertation and I dare to touch the cat lightly with the toe of my shoe.

‘erm… So – does it go Pass, Merit, Distinction?’ I ask the person who will know.
‘That’s right.’
And there was really no need to check, we all already knew that the poor catty-sod had gone - you have been weighed and proclaimed kind-of ordinary.
I take the dissertation and sit in the disabled toilet and I look at my mark and I try to read the comments. 70%. I clawed my way to a 70% with the dissertation but it wasn’t enough to raise the mark profile.
70% is good. I have done nicely. I should be proud.
I stare at the comments with milky glazed eyes and I ask my self what did I expect.

What did you expect?

A spectacular dissertation mark to raise your mark profile?

An invite from the external examiner to meet his literary agent?

A handwritten request to join a prestigious writers' group?

A special prize?

A big clock?

Well no. Well yes. I don’t know – not the clock anyway, that’d just be ridiculous.

Aren’t you grateful to have passed? To start with you didn’t even know if you would pass.

I was being disingenuous when I thought that - I always knew I’d pass, I always knew I could get a distinction.

And how wrong you were. Why did you think you’d deserve such an accolade, why did you think you’d earned a distinction?

Because I worked a lot, because I tried so hard, because I wanted it – very much.

Ah! So. How do you think it all went wrong? Why do you think you weren’t awarded a distinction?

I don’t know. Maybe because I make fun of people to get cheap laughs?
Maybe because I don’t recycle plastic bottles if they’re oily and difficult to wash out?
Maybe because I added an espresso to my latte without telling the lady at the till?

It’s none of those things, is it?

No.

What about you weren’t awarded a distinction because of these things:
You didn’t make yourself write when you reckoned you were in pain; too weary; you needed to tidy drawers out, urgently?
You sometimes wrote lazy self-indulgent drivel rather than answering the question?
You sometimes cited smartass paragraphs from hard books pretending you’d read the whole smartass book?
Well?

Could be... But still, I really did want it – very much.


The person who will know makes such a point of how nicely I have done that, after a day or two, I am able to bask in the assurance that at least no one will have a better mark profile than mine.
Then – I meet the friend whose dissertation mark is so spectacular that it qualifies her for the big clock (were such a thing not ridiculous). And, with a sickening sickness, I realise that there are people with much better mark profiles than mine; that the person who will know followed me from the library to the student centre to save me from myself, to save me from my own stubborn delusions.
The person who will know knows me too well. She realised that when I saw my 70% dissertation mark I would continue to nurse vain hope until the official results were posted. The person who will know opened the cat box and showed me the merit to stop me making any more of a fool of myself. Better for me to be in a dark funk than for students and tutors to see me cutting a confident swath across the light-drenched concourse between the student centre and the library pulling a branch-stiff dead cat lashed to a set of old pram wheels.


I have friends with distinctions and I must be glad for them. I am glad for them, but I wish it was me. And it will always be this other thing now – on the record, on the lips, in the mind, until I am gone. No, even after when I am gone.

So, 70% for the dissertation is good. I have done nicely. I should be proud of myself.

But that is not how it felt on the day that I discovered that I didn’t have a distinction.

ps my friend, Valerie, did her MA at Manchester was awarded a distinction and I am very, very proud and pleased for her!
pps The official results have just been posted and my overall average (by my calculation) is 69.11111111 (the 1s go on for ever).  A number that has a spectacular quality all of its own.

The marks and unacceptable use of determiners. Wednesday 18 February 2009.

It was very like Jenny Diski’s cat in the box motif. Until you open the box there might be a cat in the box or their might not be a cat in the box or both things might be true. Right up to getting the two portfolios back and turning them over to look at the marks it might have been possible for me to get 70% or over for all my MA modules. But now I’ve seen the marks and it can never happen. I’d clawed my way up with one submission and but I didn’t with the other. I know they’re what I’ve earned but I’m still sad about the poetry, sad that I never really got it.

My feedback sheet had gone astray so I was convinced that the poetry mark reflected the effort I put into the commentary rather than the poems. But the Poet emailed me my feedback the day after and he used lovely terms like powerful and fine; who could ask for better than powerful and fine? Me, I’m deluded and I wanted 70. The criticism relates to my overuse of verbiage, too many adjectives and adverbs. And to the way I allow obsession with form (villanelle, I think rather than my best-sort pantoum) to interfere with what the poem is saying.

How true, how frustrated I am with myself, and who the hell do I think I am to deserve 70 for me peavey poems, Rimbaud? My sage friend urged me to fail better next time.

If I’d calmed down at the time I’d have stopped trying to make a villanelle out of my eldritch list - hedgehogs, giant clockwork, ziggurats, labyrinths, migraine, warts, Poll na bPeist, all that scary stuff, and just done something else with the words, insread of overwritting ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ with my verbiage and hoping it might work.

Jenn Ashworth has been picked by Waterstone's as one of 12 new writers predicted to dominate the literary landscape in the years to come. Bloody Hell Jenn! How Wonderful.




Now Flo has been poorly too. Get well soon my mother-in-law Flo.






This week’s homework is to submit a stylistic analysis of the impact of language and grammatical decisions through a series of drafts. It is very difficult - but I’m enchanted by the notion that:
‘Unlike adjectival modifiers, determiners in the narrower sense are mutually exclusive, (really - no wonder I’m muddled!) ie they cannot co-occur with each other therefore, “The my new car”, is unacceptable in English.

Maybe unacceptable but I'm thinking powerful and fine and now I can’t stop trying to formulate other unacceptable phrases,
‘a your glass of tizer’,
‘that his tartan jacket’.
Perfect displacement activity.

So now I’ve seen the marks and it can never happen – unless of course, one of them was a mistake.