The Diceman

[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 pla

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?'