Curriculum

CURRICULUM A Document Filed to the Federation Record by Evan Morse ("The Doctrine") New Wave Champion In advance of Behind Closed Doors 13 ———————————————— STRIFE — NEW WAVE CHAMPIONSHIP COURSE: NW-13 · FORMATION INSTRUCTOR: E. MORSE CANDIDATE: N. DLAMINI ENROLMENT: BY THE OFFICE. THE INSTRUCTOR DID NOT SELECT THE CANDIDATE. SEE SECTION VIII. LOCATION: THE CRUCIBLE SESSIONS: ONE DURATION: UNDETERMINED ———————————————— PRELIMINARY NOTE ON FORMAT My filings answer the opponent's medium. I have said so before and I have been consistent. Video for a man who exposed himself on video. A document for a man who keeps a journal. Marginalia for a man who writes documents, because there was no adjustment available. I intended to write that there was no precedent to answer in this case. I was wrong, and I want the correction on the record before anything else. Mr. Dlamini filed once. It is a page from a private notebook, headed "Notebook. Private.," which he then submitted to the federation site where eight thousand people could read it. I have read it several times. It is the most honest thing he has produced, and it contains a question, and the question is the only thing in this entire booking I find worth my time. He asked: would I be what I am if the early rooms had been harder. The correct response to a notebook is not another notebook. It is the thing the notebook says it is missing. I teach. What follows is the room. ———————————————— I. COURSE DESCRIPTION This course is designed for a candidate of exceptional natural ability who has never been made to account for it. The candidate came up fast. Triple jump, then Cape Town, then main events on two continents in eighteen months. He has stated on the record that he chose the fastest route to meaningful competition. He has since stated, in writing, that this was also a way of choosing not to find out what happens to a young man who spends five years losing to people better than him before he is allowed to win. That is an accurate self-assessment and I commend it. It is also the syllabus. The course will supply, in a single session, the experience the candidate elected to skip. It will not be comfortable. Formation is not comfortable. I say that as a man who selected his own, against advice, and has been asked every day since whether he selected correctly. ———————————————— II. PREREQUISITES None. That is the premise of the course and the reason it exists. ———————————————— III. REQUIRED READING 1. N. Dlamini, "The Angle You Were Looking For," sections two and three. The candidate should reread his own admission that he does not know whether his gift is real or merely untested, and that the two look identical from outside. 2. D. Pryce, "Addendum: Dlamini, N." A competent clinical assessment by a man who went on to beat the candidate. Required not for its conclusions but for its method. 3. The NO ESCAPE tape, final minutes. Note for the candidate: the man who beat you for this championship did not make you tap. The official decided. I took the championship from that man in the same way, at Behind Closed Doors 11. It has now changed hands twice on a decision that nobody in the cage made. Read that twice. It is the most important thing on this list. ———————————————— IV. LEARNING OBJECTIVES On completion of the session the candidate will be able to: a. Distinguish between courage and not yet having been corrected. b. Identify the approximately four feet of floor at the centre of The Crucible from which the instructor initiates roughly seventy-two per cent of his exchanges, and understand why that figure has not changed in eleven months despite having been published. c. Describe, from direct experience, what it is to lose options one at a time rather than all at once. d. State the single fact on which this course is built. ———————————————— V. THE SINGLE FACT The candidate's entire method depends on the one place in any room where options cannot be removed. He leaves the ground. I have not been able to take the air from anybody and I will not pretend otherwise. Above the top rope, in the six seconds a man like Mr. Dlamini spends there, he is the freest person in this building and there is nothing in my method that can reach him. He has to come down. Every exit he possesses terminates somewhere on this floor. Every line he takes through the air has a landing at the end of it, and the landing is not a choice he is making — it is geometry, and geometry is the only subject I have ever taken seriously. I will not be where he leaves from. I will be where he arrives. ———————————————— VI. SCHEDULE The session is conducted in five parts. Candidates who have studied the instructor will recognise the structure. Candidates who have not will recognise it on the third. Part One — The Floor. The candidate is permitted to do what he does. The instructor observes the landings. Part Two — The Grip. The instructor takes hold of something. It will not matter much. It is taken in order to establish that it can be. Part Three — The Removal. Options are withdrawn in the order the candidate relies on them. The candidate will notice at approximately this point that he has fewer places to land than he began with. Part Four — The Question. The candidate is offered a single remaining route, and it goes up. Part Five — The Conclusion. I want to note, as the instructor, that Part Four is the one I have thought about most. It is not a trap. It is the course. Every candidate of his kind is eventually shown a door that leads into the air, and the only thing the course is trying to discover is whether he will take it knowing where it comes down. ———————————————— VII. ASSESSMENT The federation recognises four outcomes: pinfall, submission, knockout, stoppage. I have said publicly that none of them is a lesser object and I am not revising that. Grading criteria for the session are set out below. PASS: — FAIL: — I have left both blank and I want to explain why, because it will be mistaken for arrogance and it is the reverse. I said in the cage, fifteen days into this championship, that I would defend it against whoever the office selected and that what I required was not a result but an answer. I received a result from Mr. Pryce and not an answer, and there is a document somewhere with a corner I could not bring myself to mark. I cannot write the grading criteria for this session because I do not know what an answer from Mr. Dlamini would look like. I know what winning looks like. I can describe the conclusion in Part Five to the minute. What I cannot describe is the other thing — the thing a twenty-four-year-old with no paper trail of suffering might produce that would tell me something I did not know before I walked in. I have not been able to imagine it, and a document that specifies criteria its author cannot imagine is a document that is lying. So the corner is blank. It will stay blank until the paper is finished. ———————————————— VIII. ADMINISTRATIVE The instructor did not select the candidate. The office did. My terms were that I would not choose, and I have not, and I want it on the record that the office gave me a question I did not ask for, which is the only way a champion ever gets asked anything. One further note, briefly. I am informed that the card following this one will not be booked by the office at all, and that no match will appear on it unless a competitor asks for it by name, aloud, and is answered aloud. I have publicly undertaken not to select my opponents. I note the conflict between those two facts. I have not resolved it. ———————————————— IX. CLOSING NOTE TO THE CANDIDATE Mr. Dlamini: you wrote that the unanswered question does not get a vote on what you do next. That you would go up to the top rope with it sitting there, unresolved, because that is the only courage available to a man handed a question with no floor. I respect that more than you will believe, coming from me. It is also the reason you lost to Mr. Pryce. Courage that has never been corrected looks exactly like courage that has, right up until the moment it has to land. I am not your enemy. I am the early room you did not have. I regret that it arrives this late and all at once. That is not my doing. It is simply the schedule. Class begins at the bell. — Evan Morse / "The Doctrine" New Wave Champion