by PV
Then, surprise, the laughter must be my hallucination.
I sat back in my chair and tried briefly to block it out, but the laughter continued to flow. When I looked up, I saw very far away and high up a fat man shaking with laughter and pointing a finger at me. He seemed to think that my effort to find the right defense was the play of a, silly fool. He also found amusing my effort to smile at the realization that I was a fool. He thought my seeing his laughter at my smiling at his laughing was also funny. When I finally frowned, he laughed even harder. ��nough,’ I said loudly, but began to laugh myself.
The old woman with the bushy brows stared at me coldly. The two men at the other table turned their heads. My attendant turned a page at last. The fat man above shook again with laughter, and I laughed harder, my big belly bumping against the table; I was almost out of control. The people stared, even the attendant. At last I stopped.
So did the fat man, although he still smiled, and I felt very dose to him. I thought again of the spectacular, nonsensical options that I’d been considering and decided I’d throw them out. The fat man began laughing again. I looked up startled, smiled socially at him and decided that I would instead use all three non-rational options. He laughed harder. With a flush I realized that I would have to abandon the dicelife completely, but the fat man laughed on and was joined by three, four other fat men all pointing at me and laughing joyously.
My mind was filled suddenly with the vision of thousands of fat men sitting up there in that fourth dimension watching the antics of human aspiration and purpose, and laughing - not a single one sober or compassionate or pitying. Our plan, hopes, expectations, and promises; and the realities of the future which they could also see: only a source of laughter. The men (they were both men and women actually, but all fat) often crowded together to look at one particular human whose life seemed to evoke special ironies or humor.
When I realized that neither abandoning the dicelife nor retaining it would end the eternal amusement of the fat people in the sky I felt like a man on some television show who is asked to guess what’s behind the green wall. No matter what he guesses, the audience, which can see what is behind the wall while he can’t, laughs. All my writhings in the present to find a future which will please me evoke only laughter in the audience in the sky. `The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft astray,’ said Napoleon with a chuckle on his return from Moscow.
I was laughing again with my fat men, and the woman opposite me and my attendant with a finger to his lips were both hissing violent `shhhhshes.’
`Look!’ I said with a huge smile, and pointed off toward the ceiling and the fourth dimension. ��t’s all there,’ I went on between chuckles. `The answer - up there.’
The old woman glanced sternly up at the ceiling, adjusted her glasses twice and then looked back at me. She looked embarrassed and a little guilty.
�� … I don’t see it, I’m afraid,’ she said.
I laughed. I looked up at my fat man and he laughed at my laughing. I laughed at him.
`That’s all right,’ I said to the old lady. `Don’t worry about it. You’ll be all right.’
The two men from the next table were firing: `shhhs,’ and my attendant was standing nervously beside me, but I raised my hand to silence them. Smiling warmly I said `The great thing about the answer…’ and I began again, big belly bubbling and joyous, `The great thing is that it doesn’t do us any good at all.’
Laughing, I thumbed my nose at the laughing men in the sky - who laughed - and began walking through the library, trailed by my attendant and leaving behind me like a big boat a wake of `shhhhhs’ as I passed.
��t’s all right,’ I said loudly to everyone. `Knowing the answer doesn’t matter. You don’t have to know.’
Interestingly enough, no one approached me as I walked on through the central reading room of the New York Public Library, my belly booming out its Answer to the stack upon stack of answers and the row upon row of seekers. Only at the exit did I find someone who responded to me. An ancient portly library guard with flushed face and huge Santa Claus pot came up to me as I was about to leave and, smiling as if his face would burst, said in a louder voice than min��gotta tone dawn the laughing during hours,’ and then we both roared out into new laughter louder than ever until I turned and left.
Chapter Forty-seven
The Die is my shepherd;
I shall not want;
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, I lie;
He leadeth me beside the still waters, I swim.
He destroyeth my soul
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
For randomness sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Chance is with me; Thy two sacred cubes they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me In the presence of mine enemies Thou anointest my head with oil;
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy and evil and cruelty shall follow ma All the days of my life
And I will dwell in the house of Chance for ever.
from The Book of the Die
Chapter Forty-eight
The meeting of the executive committee of the Psychoanalysts’ Association of New York took place early on the afternoon of 30 June, 1969, in a large seminar room at Dr. Weinburger’s Institute for the Study of Hypochondria in the Dying. Dr. Weinburger, a bushy-haired, thickset man in his late forties, sat impatiently behind a long table with Doctors Peerman and Cobblestone on one side of him and old Dr. Moon and Dr. Mann on the other. All the gentlemen looked serious and intent except for Dr. Moon, who was sleeping quietly between Chairman Weinburger and Dr.
Mann, occasionally sliding slowly sideways to rest against the shoulder of the one, and then, like a pendulum that badly needs oiling, after a hesitation, sliding slowly back across the arc to rest against the shoulder of the other.
The table at which the five sat was so long that they looked more like fugitives huddled together for mutual protection rather than judges. Dr. Rhinehart and Dr. Ecstein, who was present as friend and personal physician, sat on stiff wooden chairs in the middle of the room opposite them. Dr. Ecstein was slumped and squinting, but Dr. Rhinehart was erect and alert, looking extremely professional in a perfectly tailored gray suit and tie and shoes shined to such a luster that Dr. Ecstein wondered whether he hadn’t cheated by using black Day-glo.
`Yes, sir,’ Dr. Rhinehart said before anyone else had said a word.
��ne moment, Dr. Rhinehart,’ Dr. Weinburger said sharply. He looked down at the papers in front of him. `Does Dr.
Rhinehart know the charges being brought against him?’
‘Yes,’ said Doctors Mann and Ecstein at the same time.
`What’s all this about dice, young man?’ Dr. Cobblestone asked. His cane lay on the table in front of him as if it were a piece of evidence relevant to the proceedings.
�� new therapy I’m developing, sir,’ Dr. Rhinehart replied promptly.
�� understand that,’ he said. `What we mean is that you should explain.’
`Well, sir, in dice therapy we encourage our patients to reach decisions by casting dice. The purpose is to destroy the personality We wish to create in its place a multiple personality: an individual inconsistent, unreliable and progressively schizoid’ Dr. Rhinehart spoke in a clear, firm and reasonable voice, but for some reason his answer was greeted by a silence, broken only by Dr. Moon’s harsh, uneven breathing. Dr. Cobblestone’s stern lower jaw became sterner.
`Go on,’ said Dr. Weinburger.
`My theory is that we all have minority impulses which are stifled by the normal personality and rarely break free into action. The desire to hit one’s wife is forbidden by the concept of dignity, femininity and covetousness of unbroken crockery. The desire to be religious is stopped by the knowledge that orgy “is” an atheist. Your desire, sir, to shout “stop this nonsense!” is stopped by yo
ur sense of yourself as a fair and rational man.
The minority impulses are the Negroes of the personality. They have not enjoyed freedom since the personality was founded; they have become the invisible men. We refuse to recognize that a minority impulse is a potential full man, and that until he is granted the same opportunity for development as the major conventional selves, the personality in which he fines will be divided, subject to tensions which lead to periodic explosions and riots.’
`Negroes must be kept in their place,’ said Dr. Moon suddenly, his round, wrinkled face suddenly coming alive with the appearance of two fierce red eyes in its ravaged landscape. He was leaning forward intensely, his mouth, after he had finished his short sentence, dangling open.
`Go on,’ said Dr. Weinburger.
Dr Rhinehart nodded gravely to Dr. Moon and resumed.
‘Every personality is the sum total of accumulated suppressions of minorities. Were a man to develop a consistent pattern of impulse control he would have no definable personality: ha would be unpredictable and anarchic, one might even say, free.’
‘He would be insane,’ came Dr. Peerman’s highpitched voice from his end of the table. His thin, pale face was expressionless.
`Let us hear the man out,’ said Dr. Cobblestone.
`Go on,’ said Dr. Weinburger.
��n stable, unified, consistent societies the narrow personality had value; men could fulfill themselves with only one self. Not today. In a multivalent society, the multiple personality is the only one which can fulfill. Each of us has a hundred suppressed potential selves which never let us forget that no matter how mightily we step along the narrow single path of our personality, our deepest desire it to be multiple: to play many roles.
��f you will permit me, gentlemen, I would like to quote to you what a dice-patient of mine said in a recent therapy session which I taped.’
Dr. Rhinehart reached into his briefcase beside his chair and drew out some sheets of paper. After leafing through them, he looked up and continued: `What Professor O. B. says here seems to me to dramatize the crux of the problem for all men. I quote “�� feel I ought to write a great novel, write numerous letters, be friendly with more of the interesting people in my community, give more parties, dedicate more time to my intellectual pursuits, play with my children, make love to my wife, go hiking more often, go to the Congo, be a radical trying to revolutionize society, write fairy tales, buy a bigger boat, do more sailing, sunning and swimming, write a book on the American picaresque novel, educate my children at home, be a better teacher at the University, be a faithful friend, be more generous with my money, economize more, live a fuller life in the world outside me, live like Thoreau and not be taken in by material values, play more tennis, practice yoga, meditate, do those damn RCAF exercises every day, help my wife with the housework, make money in real estate, and … and so on.
“And do all these things seriously, playfully, dramatically, stoically, joyfully, serenely, morally, indifferently do them like D. H. Lawrence, Paul Newman, Socrates, Charlie Brown, Superman, and Pogo.
“But it’s ridiculous. When I do any one of these things, play any one of these roles, the other selves are not satisfied.
You’ve got to help me satisfy one self in such a way that the others will feel that they are somehow being considered too.
Make them shut up. You’ve got to help me pull myself together and stop spilling all over the goddamn universe without actually doing anything.”
‘Dr. Rhinehart looked up and smiled. ��ur Western psychologies try to solve O. B.‘s problem by urging him to form some single integrated personality, to suppress his natural multiplicity and build a single dominant self to control the others.
This totalitarian solution means that a large standing army of energy must be maintained to crush the efforts of the minority selves to take power. The normal personality exists in a state of continual insurrection.’
`Some of this makes sense,’ added Dr. Ecstein helpfully.
��n dice theory we attempt to overthrow the totalitarian personality and -‘
`The masses need a strong leader,’ interrupted Dr. Moon.
The silence which followed was broken only by his uneven breathing. `Go on,’ said Dr. Weinburger.
��ll I’ve got to say for now,’ replied Dr. Moon, closing the shutters on the red furnaces of his eyes and beginning to swing in a slow arc toward the shoulder of Dr. Mann.
`Go on, Dr. Rhinehart,’ said Dr. Weinburger, his face expressionless but his hands crumpling up the papers in front of him like octopi demolishing squid.
Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his wristwatch and went on.
Thank you. In our metaphor - which has that same admirable degree of scientific precision and rigor as Freud’s famous parable of the superego, the ego, and the id - in our metaphor, the anarchic chance - led person is governed in fact by a benevolent despot: the Die. In the early stages of therapy only a few selves are able to offer themselves as options to the Die. But as the student progresses, more and more selves, desires, value and roles are raised into the possibility of existence; the human being grows, expands, becomes more flexible, more various. The ability of major selves to overthrow the Die declines, disappears. The personality is destroyed. The man is free. He-‘
�� see no need to let Dr. Rhinehart go on,’ said Dr. Weinburger, suddenly standing up. ��lthough, as Dr. Ecstein has so helpfully observed, some of it makes sense, the idea that the destruction of the personality is the way to mental health may be rejected on a priori grounds. I need only remind you gentlemen of the first sentence of Dr. Mann’s brilliant textbook on abnormal psychology: “If a person has a strong sense of his identity, of the permanency of things and of an integral selfhood, he will be secure.”
He smiled over at Dr. Mann. �� therefore move-‘
`Precisely,’ said Dr. Rhinehart. ��r rather, precisely, sir. It is always rejected on a priori grounds and not on empirical grounds. We have never experimented with the possibility of a strong man being able to demolish his personality and become more various, happy and creative than he was before. The first sentence of our textbook will read: “If a person can attain a strong confidence in his inconsistency and unreliability, a strong yea-saying sense of the impermanence of things and of an un-integrated, non-patterned chaos of selves, he will be fully at home in a multivalent society - he will be joyous …
`We have plenty of empirical evidence regarding the destruction of the personality,’ said Dr. Cobblestone quietly. ��ur mental hospitals are overflowing with people who have a sense of an un-integrated, non-patterned chaos of selves.’
`Yes, we do,’ replied Dr. Rhinehart calmly. `But why are they there?’
There was no answer to this question, and Dr. Rhinehart, after waiting while Dr. Weinburger sat down again, continued, `Your therapies tried to give them a sense of an integral self and failed. Isn’t it just possible that the desire not to be unified, not to be single, not to have one personality may be the natural and basic human desire in our multivalent societies?’
Again there was a silence, except for Dr. Moon’s expiring breaths and an irritable throat-clearing by Dr. Weinburger.
`Whenever I look at the Western psychotherapies of the last hundred years,’ Dr. Rhinehart went on, ��t seems to me incredible that no one acknowledges the almost total failure of these therapies to cure human unhappiness. As Dr.
Raymond Felt has observed: “The ratio of spontaneous remission of symptoms and the rate of supposed `cures’ by the psychotherapies of the various schools has remained essentially the same throughout the twentieth century.”
`Why have our efforts to cure neurosis been so uniformly unsuccessful? Why does civilization expand unhappiness faster than we can develop new theories about how it occurs and what we ought to do about it? Our mistake is booming obvious. We have carried over from the simple, unified, stable societies of the past an image of the ideal norm for man which is t
otally wrong for our complex, chaotic, unstable and mufti- ‘ valued urban civilizations of today.
We assume that “honesty” and “frankness” are of primary importance in healthy human relations, and the lie and the act are, in the anachronistic ethics of our time, considered evil.’
‘Ah, but Dr: Rhinehart, you can’t-‘ said Dr. Cobblestone.
‘No, sir. I regret to say I’m serious. Every society is based upon lies. Our society of today is based on conflicting lies. The man who lived in a simple, stable, single-lie society absorbed the single-lie system into a unified self and spouted it for the rest of his life, un-contradicted by his friends and neighbors, and unaware that ninety-eight percent of his beliefs were illusions, his values artificial and arbitrary and most of his desires comically ill-aimed.
`The man in our multi-lie society absorbs a chaos of conflicting lies and is reminded daily by his friends and neighbors that his beliefs arc not universally held, that his values are personal and arbitrary and his desires often ill-aimed. We must realize that to ask this man to be honest and true to himself, when his contradictory selves have multiple contradictory answers to most questions, is a safe and economical method of driving -him insane.
��n the other hand, to free him from his unending conflict we must urge him to let go, to act, to pretend, to lie. We must give him the means to develop these abilities. He must become a diceperson.’
`See! See!’ Dr. Peerman interrupted. `He just confessed to advocating a therapy which encourages lying. Did you hear him?’
�� believe we have been listening to Dr. Rhinehart, thank you, Dr. Peerman,’ said Dr. Weinburger, again mangling the papers in front of him. `Dr. Rhinehart, you may go on.’
Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his watch and continued.
`When all men lie by their very being in a multi-lie society, only the sick try to be honest, and only the very sick ask for honesty in others. Psychologists, of course, urge the patient to be authentic and honest. Such methods ‘