`He can't hold a job, he's not home a lot of the time, he hits my mother and he seems stoned half the time only on nothing. He's always laughing like an idiot.'
Irrational laughter, a classic symptom of hysteria, is one of the most dramatic manifestations of what psychiatrists are beginning to label the 'CETRE sickness.'
Dr. Jerome Rochman of Chicago University's Hope Medical Center stated in Peoria last week: `If I had been asked by someone to create an institution which would totally destroy the human personality with all its integrated grandeur #161;the striving, the moral questioning, the compassion for others and the sense of specific individual identity - I might have created CETREs. The results are predictable: apathy, unreliability, indecisiveness, manic depressions, inability to relate, social destructiveness, hysteria.'
Dr Paul Bulber of Oxford, Mississippi, goes even further: 'The theory and practice of dice therapy both in and out of CETREs is a greater threat to our civilization than Communism. They subvert everything which American society, indeed, any society, stands for. They should be wiped from the face of the earth: Santa Clara District Court Judge Hobart Button perhaps summed up best the feelings of many people when he said to students Richards and O'Reilly: `The illusions that lead people to throw away their lives are appalling. The rush to drugs and to CETREs is like the rush of lemmings to the sea.'
Or the rush of rats into sewers.
Time was, within the necessary limits set by fiction, totally accurate. Over the course of two years five of their reporters went through a month-long stay at a CETRE. The bitterness of the article may partly reflect that three of their hirelings did not report back to Time.
Ever since money contributed by Wipple, myself and others to the DICELIFE Foundation permitted us to build our first Dice Center, our CETREs have changed people. They destroy people for normal functioning within this insane society. It all started when I realized that dice therapy worked slowly with most students because they always knew that other people expected them to be consistent and `normal'; a lifetime of conditioning to respond to such expectation wasn't being broken by the partial and temporary free environments of dicegroups. Only in a total environment in which nothing is expected does a student feel the freedom necessary to express his host of minority selves clawing for life. And then, only by making the gradual change from the totally random environment of a-CETRE through our `Halfway Houses' to the patterned society outside can we make it possible for the student to carry over his dicelife of freedom into the patterned world.
The story of the development of the various centers and of our theory behind them will be told in detail in Joseph Fineman's forthcoming book The History and Theory of Dice Centers (Random Press, 1972). The best single rendering of how the centers work to change a man determined not to change can be found in `The Case of the Square Cubed,' an autobiographical account by Dr. Jacob Ecstein. Jake's personal story was first printed in The See of Whim (April, 1971, vol. II, no. 4, pp. 17-33) but it is to be reprinted in his forthcoming book Blow the Man Down (Random Press, 1972). But for a general background, the Die has suggested I quote from Fineman's forthcoming book.
A student can enter only for a minimum of thirty days and must first pass an oral examination showing he understands the basic rules of the dicelife and the structures and procedures of the CETRE. He is told to come to the Center with absolutely no identifying personal possessions; he may use any names he wishes while at the Center but all names will be considered false ….
CETREs vary in their details. In the Creativity Rooms, the Die often commands a student to invent new and better features for our Random Environments and many procedures and facilities have been modified in this way, some changes remaining peculiar to a single Center and others being adopted by all. All CETREs are similar, however, to the original Corpus Die complex inn Southern California.
Although each of the individual rooms in a Center has a student-invented name (e.g. the Pit, the God room, the Party room, the Room room, etc.) the names vary from Center to Center. There are workrooms (laundries, offices, espy rooms, clinics, a jail, kitchens), playrooms (emotion rooms, marriage rooms, love rooms, God rooms, creativity rooms), and life rooms (restaurants, bars, living rooms, bedrooms, movie house, etc) He must spend from two to five hours a day working at various dice-dictated jobs: he waits on table, sweeps out rooms, makes beds, serves cocktails, acts as a policeman, therapist, clothing clerk, mask maker, prostitute, admissions officer, jailer, etc. In all of these the student is diceliving and playing roles.
At first we kept most of the key positions filled with permanent, trained staff members: at least half the `therapists' were real therapists; half the policemen were real staff members; our `admissions officers' were real and so on.
However, over our brief three-year history, there has been a gradual withering away of the staff. With carefully prepared structures and instructions we find that the third and fourth week students can handle most of the key roles as well as the permanent staff used to. The staff members vary their roles from week to week like the temporary students, who thus can't be certain at any time who is a staff member and who isn't. The staff members know, but they can't prove it, since anyone can claim to be a staff member. Whatever usefulness there is in having permanent, trained personnel in a CETRE rests in their having ability, not in their having `authority.'
[In our Vermont Center we experimented by withdrawing our permanent. dicepeople one by one until the center was functioning without a single trained staff member - only transient students. After two months we infiltrate permanent staff members back in, and they reported that everything was proceeding as chaotically as ever; only a small amount of rigidity and structure had crept in during the two months in which the `state' had totally withered away.]
In our structured anarchy [writes Fineman] the authority rests with the therapists (called Referees in most Centers), and with the policemen, whoever they may be. There are rules (no weapons, no violence, no roles or actions inappropriate to the particular game room in which you are acting, etc.) and if the rules are broken, a `policeman' will hake you to a `referee' to determine whether you must be sent to `jail.'
About half our `criminals' are individuals who keep insisting that they are only one real person and want to go home. Since such role playing is inappropriate in many of the workrooms and playrooms, they must be sentenced to jail and to the hard labor of dice therapy - until they are better able to function in multiplicity. The other half of our criminals are students who must play out their roles of lawbreakers even if the laws they break are the strange ones of our Dice Centers.
[After entering structured anarchy, the student, armed with his personal pair of distinctive dice, proceeds from room to room, from role to role, from job to job: from cocktail party to a creativity room, from an orgy in the - Pit to the God room, from the madhouse to the love room to the little French restaurant to working in the laundry to acting as jailer to male prostitute to President of the United States and so on at the whim of his imagination and of the Die.]
The Pit, although justly notorious, is mostly used by students in their first ten days at a Center. It is useful for persons with deep-seated inhibitions regarding sexual desires and activities; the total darkness and anonymity permit the inhibited student to follow dice decisions he could never follow otherwise. One woman, fat and ugly, spent three straight days in the Pit, coming out only to eat, wash and use the bathroom. Was she different at the end of her three days? She was unrecognizable. Instead of a slump-shouldered, eye-avoiding lump, she carried herself proudly, looked at everyone electrically and oozed sexuality.
The Pit is also helpful in breaking down the normal inhibitions about sexual contact with members of the same sex. In a totally dark room, who is doing what to whom is often ambiguous, and one may be reveling in caresses which turn out to be by someone of the same sex. Since (`anything goes') in the Pit one may be the unwilling participant in a sexual act which at first horr
ifies and disgusts but which, one often discovers, neither horrifies nor disgusts when one realizes no one will ever know.
[in the Pit our students often learn that, in the immortal words of Milton in his great sonnet to his blind wife, `They also serve who only lie and wait']
At first there was no money in any of our CETREs, but we soon relearned that money is more basic perhaps than seat as a source of unfulfilled selves in our society. We now arrange that upon entering, each student receives a certain amount of real money to play with, the amount chosen by the Die from among six options listed by the student He begins with from zero to three thousand dollars, the median amount being about five hundred dollars. When he leaves he has to cast again from among the same six options he listed when entering to determine how much his bill for his month-long stay will be. When he leaves he can take out any money he has saved, earned or stolen, less, of course, our randomly determined bill ….
Students receive wages for the work they do while in the Center and these wages are continually fluctuating so as to encourage students to work at certain jobs that need to be done.
Students who begin broke have to beg or borrow money for their first meal or else sell themselves to play some role for someone at a price: Prostitution - the selling of the use of one's body for the pleasure of someone else is a common feature of all our Centers. This is not because it is the easiest way to obtain sex - sex is free in a variety of easily obtained forms - but because students enjoy selling themselves and enjoy being able to buy others.
[It's perhaps the very essence of the capitalist soul.]
During the last ten days of his thirty-day stay the student is free to go out and eat and live in the Halfway House, a motel located near the CETRE and staffed partially by our CETRE's [maybe], but mostly by the normal owner, a sympathizer, but not necessarily a dice person [maybe]. Until one of our students suggested such Halfway Houses, students were having trouble going from the freedom from expectation within the Center of the limited ness of expectation out in the society.
[Living in a motel in which a sexy wench is maybe a dice student who knows she is roleplaying and maybe a normal one-role girl who only partly knows it, has proven to be an excellent method of transition. The surly waiter is maybe `real,' the great writer is maybe a writer and so on.]
The student has moved from -a world in which everyone knows that everyone is acting to one in which only a few realize that everyone is role playing. The student feels much freer to experiment and develop his dicelife when he knows there are a few other students around [maybe] who will understand, than he could feel in the normal world of rigid expectations.
We hope that a student comes to have two profound insights while staying at the motel. First, he suddenly realizes that perhaps he's actually at a `normal' motel, that no other dice-people are there. He laughs and laughs. Secondly, he realizes that all other humans are leading chance-dictated multiple lives even though they don't know it and are always trying to fight it. He laughs and laughs. Joyfully he wanders back out onto the highway rubbing his dice together, barely aware that he has left the illusion of a totally random environment.
Chapter Seventy-four
The writing of any autobiography involves numerous arbitrary decisions about the importance of events, and the writing about a dicelife by a diceperson involves arbitrariness multiplied to the nth degree. What should be included? To the creator of the Dice Centers - the Die determined that I devote all of 1970 to their development - nothing is more important than the long, hard, complicated series of acts which resulted in the formation of Dice Censers in the Catskills; in Holby, Vermont; in Corpus Die, California: and, in the last year, elsewhere. At other times the sexual, love and writing adventurers of my previous dicelife seem much more worth writing about.
In all cases, however, I faithfully consult the Die about how to proceed with each major section or event of my life. The Die chose that I devote thirty pages to my efforts to follow its November, 1970, decision that I try to murder someone, rather than that I write thirty pages about my efforts of that year to create the Dice Centers.
I asked the Die if I could throw in some letters from my fans and It said fine. Some dicestudents' experiences at the centers? Okay. An article I wrote for Playboy entitled 'The Potential Promiscuity of Man'? No, said the Die. Can I write in detail about my long, chaotic, unpredictable and often joyous relationship with Linda Reichman? Nope, not this book. Can I write about my ludicrous efforts to be revolutionary? No, said the Die. About the dice decision that I write a four-hundred page comic novel about sex? Nope. Can I dramatize my troubles with the law, my experiences as a patient in the upstate mental hospital, my trial, my experience in jail? Yes, said the Die, if there's room. And so on.
One thing I've learned in my miscellaneous career is that any good creating that gets done gets done despite my efforts at controlling the writing, not because of them. In so far as I'm the Dice Man I can write easily in almost any form the Die chooses, but as serious, old, ambitious Luke, I run into as many blocks as a rat in an insoluble maze. Obedience of the Die implies with every fall that rational, purposive man doesn't know what he's doing so he might as well relax and enjoy the fumbling Die. `The medium is the message,' once said the noted psychic Edgar Cayce, and so is mine.
Walk on, I've learned. I let my pen and the Die do what my mind boggles at doing. The falling Die and moving pen think for themselves and the interposition of ego, artistic conscience, style or organization usually weighs things down. These inhibiting forces removed, the ink flows freely, space is filled, words are formed; ideas spring full-blown on the page like giants from dragons' teeth.
Of course, continuity is sometimes tenuous, content thin. Digressions proliferate like weapons in a peace-loving country. I may have to rewrite the think seven or eight times. But words are written. To a writer this is fulfillment. Creativity or crap, it counts.
During my early dice writing days I would often overcome a long writing block of three or four minutes by letting the dice choose from among a selection of random writing assignments: Every writer has a message which can be gotten said around any subject. Ask me to write about democracy, apples, garbage men or teeth, and I'll give you the Dice Man. So if the flow is dammed in the mainstream of my writing, I pick a creek, a pond, a puddle. With luck I have a flash flood in no time and am back in my Mississippi.
Even if my dice-determined flow is exceptionally good I may brood that it nevertheless isn't what 1 should have written that particular day. But we must come to realize that every word is perfect, including those we scratch out. As my pen moves across this page the whole world writes. All of human history combines at this mere moment now to produce in the flow of this hand a single dot:. Who are you and I, dear friends, to contradict the whole past of the universe? Let us then in our wisdom say yes to the flow of the pen. Or, indeed, should that great-granddaddy diceplayer of us all, History, so dictate, say no. But let us say yes to our no.
I've obviously got several thousand pages of life to report, just counting my life since D-Day, but the best I can do, my friends, is random bits and pieces.
I should note finally that since my life is one devoted to disintegration, those periods when the Die had me doing long range conventional things like founding Dice Centers are less full diceliving than others. To develop my CETREs I had to be as square as the cube of a die; I had to hang my M.D. around my neck and bulldoze millionaires and mayors and town planning boards and other doctors every second of every day. Except for brief, anonymous sidetrips to various places to commit murder or rape or larceny or buy dope or help a revolution, I had to be straight as John Lindsay.
However, I sometimes enjoyed it. There is a bourgeois businessman in me that loves being given freedom to buy and sell, to practice public relations, to chair committees, to answer questions of reporters or public officials. The work of developing the CETREs went on too long for my residual self's taste, but I farmed out more and more
of the control and the work to Fred Boyd and Joe Fineman and Linda (my God, without her dieing, we'd never have gotten any of the centers and our DICELIFE, Foundation would be broke).
But though I've enjoyed living most of my roles, and enjoy writing about them all, they simply won't all fit in one book. Fortunately, I have faith that the Die will choose a good selection of events, and if It doesn't;' the bored reader can simply flip dice a few times and let the Die choose a new book for the night.
Not my will, Die, but Thy will be done.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Dr, Jacob Ecstein reports that his owe initial reaction to. 1m is of the Corpus Die Dice Center, was one of profound disgust. He could see no sense whatsoever in the required emoting of rage, love, and self-pity. He found himself unable to perform, the exercises. For rage he emitted a slight peevishness, for love a hearty bonhomie and for self-pity a blank expression. He indicated that he didn't understand what self-pity could possibly mean. To help Dr. Ecstein a teacher (an actual, as contrasted to an acting, dice teacher) spat in his face and urinated on his freshly shined shoes.
Dr. Ecstein's response was instantaneous `What's your, problem, buddy?' he asked quietly. . . - . . The teacher then went and obtained Miss Marie Z, noted television and screen actress who was in her third week of random life, to come and try to help Dr. Ecstein express love. Dressed in a lovely, soft white evening gown and looking even younger than her twenty-three years, Miss Z, eyes glistening, heads held demurely before her, said to Dr. E in her softest voice 'Please love me. I need someone to feel love for me. Will you please love me?'
Dr. E squinted at her briefly and then replied `How long you felt this way?'
'Please,' Marie begged. `I need your love. I want you to love me, to need me. Please.'
The Diceman Page 37
