The Dice Man
July 16, 2022
Ethan Maurice
By: Luke Rhinehart Intro:
The Dice Man shakes things up. Playing with the overlooked role of chance in the universe and our lives, the novel chronicles the wild exploits of Dr. Luke Rhinehart, a bored psychologist who decides to make all decisions with the roll of a dice.
With counter-culture subversiveness, Dr. Rhinehart lays siege to planning and reason. While surely overdoing it at times, he ultimately hits his mark in offering deeply intoxicating perspectives of possibility and chance.
Dependent on their values, people tend to love or hate this book. It was loaned to me by eighty-seven year old, fun-loving, deeply engrossed-in-life Ed Buryn, author of Vagabonding in Europe and Vagabonding in America . A great rascal of a human I am unsurprised totally loved the book.
After reading, I threw a convinced half a dozen friends to participate in a nine day “dice life” experiment with me. A couple of them still carry a die around today. I still dream of hosting a “dice party” some fateful night.
Update: I threw a “dice party” at WONDER WANDER 2022 . Infused with the philosophy and results of chance, it was very rad. A year later, someone literally tattooed a pair of dice on their arm to mark the experience and remember to “dance on the feet of Chance.”
My aim is to bring out a psychic state in which my patient begins to experiment with his own nature -- a state of fluidity, change and growth, in which there is no longer anything eternally fixed and hopelessly petrified.
Carl Jung
What else might the dice dictate? Well, that I stop writing silly analytic articles; that I sell all my stock, or buy all I could afford; that I make love to arlene in our double bed while my wife slept on the other side; that I take a trip to San Francisco, Hawaii, Peking... I might become a college professor... a stock broker... a real estate salesman... zen master... used car salesman... My choice of profession suddenly seemed infinite. That I didn't want to be a used car salesman, didn't respect the profession, seemed almost a limitation on my part, an idiosyncrasy. My mind expanded with possibilities. The boredom I had been feeling for so long seemed unnecessary. I pictured myself saying after each random decision, "the die is cast."
Becoming the dice man was difficult because it involved a continual risking of failure in the eyes if the adult world. As a dice man I 'failed' (in the second sense) again and again. I was rejected by Lil, by the children, by my esteemed colleagues, by my patients, by strangers, by the image of society's values branded into me by thirty years of living. In the second sense of failure I was continually failing and suffering, but in the first sense I never failed...
From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.
Fail! Lose! Be bad! Play, risk, dare.
How we laugh and take joy in the irrational, the purposeless and the absurd. Our longing for these bursts out of us against all the restraints of morality and reason. Riots, revolutions, catastrophes: how they exhilarate us. How depressing it is to read the same news day after day. Oh God, if only something would happen: meaning if patterns would only break down.
To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movies heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed.
It's the job of dice therapy, like the job of revolution in the world as a whole, to enlarge free territory.
At first they often cast the dice and think: "Now I must have the willpower to do it." That's bad. The illusion that an ego controls or has "willpower" must be abandoned. The student's got to see his relation to the dice first as that of a baby in a rubber raft on a flooded river: each motion of the river is pleasant; he doesn't need to know where he's going or when, if ever, he'll arrive. Motion is all. And then he's got to reach the point where he and the Die are each playing with one another. It's not that the person has gained equality with the Die, it's that the human vessel is now so infused with the Spirit of the Die that it's become in effect a Sacred Vehicle, a Second Cube. The student has become the Die.
Most of us go through our lives from one thing to the next mechanically, without thought. We study, write, eat, flirt, fornicate, fuck as the result of habitual patterns. "Pop" comes a dice veto: it wakes us up.
But what is this nature of man you're so gung-ho to defend? Look at yourself. Whatever happened to the real inventor in you? to the lover? or the adventurer? or the saint? or the women? You killed them. Look at yourself and ask: "Is this image the Image of God in which man was created?" Dr. Rhinehart looked from Peerman to Cobblestone to Weinburger to Moon to Mann. "Blasphemy. God creates, experiments, rides the wind. He doesn't wallow in the accumulated feces of His past."
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 in 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 of the feet of Chance.
'Terry, the reason you must have faith in the Die is simple.'
'Yes.'
'The Die is God.'
In the beginning was Chance, and Chance was with God and Chance was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Chance and without him not anything made that was made. In Chance was life and life was the light of men.
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