—To be frank with you, I thought that the fucking was artificial, unnecessary, irrelevant. I was aiming to hurt someone … someone bigger.
—Precisely. Item number three: from the rear is obviously the position of sodomy, of male making love to male.
—But—
—Item number four: you associate lake with Tahoe. Tahoe, even if your conscious mind denies it, means in Cherokee “Big Father Chief.” Lake obviously means water and you associated water with bathtub. Ergo: Big Father Chief was in the bathtub.
—Wow.
—Finally, although these are but trivial confirmations of what now is obvious to you, you associate with “thirst,” “water.” You thirst not for women but for water, for bathtub, for your father. At the end, the free association seems to break down as you associate both your mother and father with women, but in fact it is further confirmation of the whole significance of your extramarital affairs and of this free association: your incestuous, homosexual love for your father.
—That’s incredible. That’s absolutely … wham … [Long pause]
… But what … what does it all mean?
—How so? I’ve told you.
—I mean … what should I do about it?
—Ah so. Details. Your urge for this woman will probably evaporate now that you know the truth.
—My father died when I was two.
—Precisely. I need say no more.
—He was six foot four and blond. The husband is five feet eight and dark.
—Displacement.
—My father never took baths, only showers, or so my mother tells me.
—Irrelevant.
—When a woman is handing a towel in to her husband and chatting with him, it’s inconvenient to penetrate her from the front.
—Nonsense.
—I didn’t know Tahoe meant Big Father Chief.
—Repression.
—I think I’m still going to enjoy making love to this woman.
—I challenge you to examine your fantasies when you do.
—I usually fantasize I’m doing it with my wife.
—The hour’s up.
32
Professor Orville Boggles of Yale tried it; Arlene Ecstein found it productive; Terry Tracy rediscovered God through it; patient Joseph Spezio of QSH thought it was a plot to drive him insane: dice therapy slowly but surely, and unbeknownst to my wife and colleagues, grew; but the Great Columbia Copulation Caper climaxed and was spent. Two Barnard College girls who had been instructed separately to enter into lesbian relations with each other complained to their dean of women, who promptly began investigating. Although I assured her that Dr. Felloni and I were bona fide professionals, members of the American Medical Association, registered Republicans and in only moderate opposition to the war in Vietnam, she still found the experiment to be “suspiciously outrageous” and I ended it.
Actually all our scheduled appointments had already been completed. Less than sixty percent had taken place as set up, and two graduate students and I were busy for weeks afterward trying to collect the manila folders with the completed questionnaires and trying to interview our lab assistants; but the experiment was finished. When I published an article on our work in the fall (Dr. Felloni declined to be associated with the article or the experiment), it created a mild stir and was one of the pieces of evidence used by my enemies to have me exiled from the AMA.
Although most of our subjects seem to have derived pleasure from their participation in the study, a few were traumatized. About ten days after my own pas de trois my office received a request that I treat one of Dr. Felloni’s subjects in our joint experiment. This Miss Vigliota maintained that she had become neurotic because of her participation in our experiment and she was requesting therapy. The appointment was set up, and the next day I was seated in my office at the scheduled hour elaborating in writing upon new dice exercises I had been creating. My office door opened and closed, a small girl entered, and when I looked up at her, she staggered forward and collapsed on the couch.
It was Terry “Tracy” Vigliota. It took me twenty minutes to assure her that I was really Dr. Rhinehart, a psychiatrist, and that my participation with her in the experiment had been a perfectly natural extension of my data-gathering role. When she had become calm, she told me why she had come requesting therapy. She sat on the edge of the couch with her short legs dangling many inches from the floor. Dressed in a conservative grayish suit with short skirt, she seemed, as she discussed her problems, more slight, nervous and intense than she had less than two weeks before. I noticed as she talked and in subsequent sessions that she found it difficult to look at me and always entered or left the office with her soft brown eyes on the floor, as if absorbed in thought.
Terry had apparently undergone an identity crisis as a result of her unusual evening with me and George. Her conversation with the professor of history and with Father Forbes had given her new insights into her Catholic faith, but her sexual experience had not been related, she began to think, to the “greater glory of God.” She found herself increasingly indifferent to the glory of God and increasingly interested in men. But lust and sex were evil, or so her whole previous life had told her. But Father Forbes had indicated that the Church enjoyed sex. But Father Forbes had turned out to be a psychiatrist, a scientist, a doctor; but they also enjoyed sex. She had felt fulfilled in relieving the loneliness of George X, but after Father Forbes had left it seems George permitted her to relieve his loneliness one more time and then began berating her as a whore and a slut. She found as a result of all this that she could no longer believe in anything. All of her desires and beliefs had been shattered by the emotions of her experimental evening: nothing new was taking its place. All seemed unreliable and meaningless.
Although anxious to begin dice therapy with her, I had to let her pour out her troubles uninterrupted over the first two analytic hours. In the third session—she was still sitting, her legs dangling, staring at the floor—she finally ran out of misery and began repeating that most human of refrains: “I don’t know what to do.”
“You keep coming back to the same basic feeling,” I said. “That all of your desires and beliefs are illusory and meaningless.”
“Yes. I asked for therapy because I can’t stand the feeling of emptiness. After that evening I didn’t know who I was. When I got you as my therapist last week I thought I must be going insane. Even my emptiness seemed empty.”
She smiled a sad, soft Natalie Wood smile, her eyes downcast.
“What if you’re right?” I said.
“Pardon?”
“What if your feeling that all desires are unreliable and all beliefs illusions is right, is the mature, valid vision of reality, and the rest of men are living under illusions which your experience has permitted you to shed?”
“Of course, that’s what I think,” she said.
“Then why not act upon your belief?”
The smile left her face and she frowned, still not looking at me.
“What do you mean?”
“Become a dice person.”
She lifted her head and looked up into my eyes slowly and without emotion.
“What?”
“Become a dice person,” I repeated.
“What do you mean?”
“I”—I leaned forward with appropriate gravity—“am the Dice Man.”
She smiled slightly and looked away and to the side.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Legs dangling, she listened intently as I explained briefly my option-creating, dice-deciding life.
“My God,” she said when I had finished. She stared some more. “That’s wonderful.” She paused. “First you were a professor of history, then Father Forbes, then a lover, a pander, a psychiatrist, and now you’re a—the dice man.”
My face was aglow with triumph.
“Actually,” I said, “I work for ‘Candid Camera.’ ”
As a matter
of fact Terry and I got nowhere at first. She was too apathetic and skeptical to obey dice decisions except in the most perfunctory way. Her apathy led her to create unimaginative options or, when I pressed her to be more daring, to disobey the die.
It was almost two weeks later that we finally had a session which led to her breakthrough into belief in the dicelife. She was the one who got to the core of the problem:
“I … I’m having trouble … believing. I have to have … faith, but I don’t …” She trailed off.
“I know,” I said slowly. “The dicelife is related to having faith, to religion, to genuine religion.”
There was a silence.
“Yes, Father,” she said, and gave me a rare smile.
I smiled back at her and continued:
“This may sound Father Forbesish, but Christ’s message is clear: you must lose yourself to save yourself.”
“Yes, Father,” she said again.
“You must give up personal, worldly desires, become poor in spirit. By surrendering your personal will to the whim of the die you are practicing precisely that self-abnegation prescribed in the scriptures.”
She looked at me blankly as if listening but not understanding.
“Listen carefully, Terry. If a man overcomes what he calls sinfulness by his own willpower, he increases his ego-pride, which, according to the Bible, is the very foundation stone of sin. Only when sin is overcome by some external force does the man realize his own insignificance; only then is pride eliminated. As long as you strive as an individual self for the good, you will either have failure—and an accompanying guilt—or pride, which is simply the basic form of evil. Guilt or pride: those are the gifts of self. The only salvation lies in having faith.”
“But faith in what?” she asked.
“Faith in God,” I answered.
She looked puzzled.
“But what happened to the dice?” she asked.
I reached into my desk and brought out some notes I’d been making lately in connection with my evolving dice theory and, after browsing a half-minute to find what I was looking for, I began reading.
“‘Verily it is not a blasphemy when I teach: Over all things stand the heaven Accident, the heaven Innocence, the heaven Prankishness, the heaven Chance. And Chance is the most ancient Divinity of the world, and behold, I come to deliver all things from their bondage under Purpose and to restore on the throne to reign over all things the heaven Chance. The mind is in bondage to Purpose and Will, but I shall free it to Divine Accident and Prankishness when I teach that in all, one thing is impossible: reason. A little wisdom is possible indeed, just enough to confuse things nicely, but this blessed certainty I have found in every atom, molecule, substance, plant, creature or star: they would rather dance on the feet of Chance.
“‘O heaven over me pure and high! Now that I have learned that there is no purposeful eternal spider and no spider web of reason, you have become for me a dance floor for divine accidents; you have become a divine table for divine dice and dice players.’”
I ended my reading and after checking to see if there might be more related material I looked up.
“I didn’t recognize it,” Terry said.
“Did you understand it?”
“I don’t know. I liked it. I liked something about it very much. But I don’t—don’t see why I should have faith in the dice. I guess that’s the trouble.”
“Not a sparrow falls to the ground that God does not see.”
“I know.”
“Can a single die fall to the table unseen by God?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Do you remember the great ending to the Book of Job? God speaks from the whirlwind and asks Job how he can presume to question the ways of God. For three long, beautiful chapters God indicts man’s abysmal ignorance and impotence. On and on God rubs it in to poor Job, but stylishly—in the most beautiful poetry in the world—and Job realizes that he has been wrong in complaining and questioning. His last words to the Lord are:
‘I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted …
Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.’ ”
I paused, and Terry and I looked silently at each other for several moments.
“God can do all things,” I went on. “No purpose of His can ever be thwarted. Never.”
“Yes,” she replied.
“We must despise ourselves and lose ourselves if we are to be saved.”
“Yes.”
“God sees the tiniest sparrow fall.”
“Yes.”
“The tiniest die tumble upon the table.”
“Yes.”
“He will always know what options you have given to the Die.”
“Yes.”
“Terry, the reason you must have faith in the Die is simple.”
“Yes.”
“The Die is God.”
“The Die is God,” she said.
33
I was sitting at a board meeting of Queensborough State Hospital one Wednesday evening that spring, when the idea of Centers for Experiments in Total Random Environments came to me. Fifteen old men, all doctors, Ph.D.s and millionaires, were seated around a huge, rectangular table discussing plumbing expansion, salary scales, medication charts and rights-of-way, while the patients in the square mile around us settled ever more comfortably into their variously defined stupors. In the middle of doing a doodle of a multiarmed, multilegged, multiheaded Shiva, whammo! It hit me: a Dice Center, an institution to convert people into random men. I suddenly saw a short-term total environment of such overwhelming impact that the principles and practices of the dicelife would be infused after a few weeks to the same degree that they had in me after many, many months. I saw a society of dicepeople. I saw a new world.
Old man Cobblestone, our tall, dignified chairman, was speaking with great deliberation about the intricacies of Queensborough law regarding rights of appropriation: six pipes, three cigars and five cigarettes were giving the green-walled room a milky, underwater effect; a young doctor (forty-six) beside me had been wiggling his foot in the same motion for forty minutes without pause. Pens lay dormant by paper except for mine: the sole doodler. Yawns were smothered into coughs or hidden behind pipes. Cobblestone gave way to Dr. Wink on the inefficiency of bureaucratic systems in dealing with plumbing problems and suddenly, leaping at me from the seven arms, six legs and three heads of Shiva, was the idea of the Dice Center.
I took my green die from my vest pocket and gave it a fifty-fifty chance that I would create such an institute. It said “yes.” I stifled a scream. Whatever sound emerged slowed but did not stop the wiggling foot beside me. Four heads turned minutely toward me then back respectfully to Dr. Wink. I was ablaze with my idea. I cast the die a second time on the doodle pad.
“Gentlemen!” I said loudly and I shoved back my chair and stood. I towered over Dr. Wink, who stood just opposite me staring at me openmouthed. The others all turned to me respectfully. Foot-wiggler wiggled on.
“Gentlemen,” I said again, groping for the right words. “Another sewer will only permit us to handle the shit better; it won’t solve anything.”
“That’s true,” a voice said encouragingly and several heads nodded.
“If we are to fulfill our duties as trustees we must have a vision of an institution which will change our patients and send them into the world as free men.” I was speaking slowly and pompously and I earned two nods and a yawn.
“As Ezra Pound wrote in a late poem, a mental hospital is a total institution: it engulfs each patient with a consistency of rule, habit and attitude which effectively isolates him from the more unpredictable problems of life in the outside world. A patient can adjust successfully to hospital life because he can count on its limiting its horrors to certain predictable patterns. The outside world holds no such hope for him. He is thus often able to adjust to hospital life and yet be frightened footless by the th
ought of having to leave. We have effectively prepared our patients to live adequately in the mental hospital and no place else.”
“Is this to the point?” old Cobblestone asked from his seat at the head of the table.
“Oh it is, sir. It is,” I said a bit more quickly. Then with dignity: “I have a dream. A vision: we want to prepare our patients to fulfill themselves happily in all environments, to free the individual from the need to lock himself away from challenge and change. We—”
“This … but, Dr. Rhinehart,” Dr. Wink stammered uncertainly.
“We want to create a world of adult children without fear. We want the multiplicity built into each one of us by our anarchic and contradictory society to break free. We want people to greet each other on the street and not know who is who and not care. We want freedom from individual identity. Freedom from security and stability and coherence. We want a community of creators, a monastery for joy-filled madmen.”
“What are you talking about?” old man Cobblestone said firmly. He was standing.
“For Christ’s sake, Luke, sit down,” Dr. Mann said. Heads turned to each other and then back to me.
“Oh we’ve been fools! Fools!” I slammed my fist down on the table. “A million years we’ve believed that the choice lies only between control and discipline on the one hand and letting go on the other; we don’t realize that both are equally methods of sustaining consistent habit, attitude and personality. The Goddam personality!” I gritted my teeth and shuddered. “We need disciplined anarchy, controlled letting go, queen for a day, Russian roulette, veto, eeny-meeny-miney-moe: a new way of life, a new world, a community of dice men.” I made my appeal directly to old Cobblestone, and he didn’t even blink.
“What are you talking about?” he asked again more gently.
“I’m talking about converting QSH into a Center in which patients will be systematically taught to play games with life, to act out all of their fantasies, to be dishonest and enjoy it, to lie and pretend and feel hate and rage and love and compassion as determined by the whim of the dice. I’m talking about creating an institution where the doctors periodically pretend to be patients, for days, for weeks, where the patients pretend to be doctors and give therapy sessions, where the attendants and nurses play the roles of patients and visitors and doctors and TV repairmen, where the whole fucking institution is one great stage upon which all walk free.”
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