Luke Rheinhart - The Diceman

[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 horrifies 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.