The Diceman

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 i

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 perso

[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 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 so

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.