None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Luke Rhinehart, the pen name of George Cockcroft, published "The Dice Man" in 1971 as a mock autobiography, a form chosen with full satirical intent. The book claims to be the confessions of a great man who will be misunderstood, and it proceeds to make that prediction come spectacularly true.
Rhinehart the character tells us in the preface that his style will be random, that distortions will be embraced, and that a well-told lie is a gift of the gods, then asks us to take everything that follows seriously. A text about the dissolution of the self that keeps dissolving its own reliability.
A bored psychiatrist, sitting at a poker table after midnight in 1968 New York, decides to let a die govern his actions. The first command is rape. Rhinehart goes downstairs, announces his intention to his neighbour Arlene Ecstein with flat sincerity, and she, after some negotiation, cooperates.
Here the book lays its most provocative card on the table, face up and grinning. The treatment of sexual assault as a zany domestic caper is a genuine moral failure, one that the novel wears with nonchalance as a philosophical position. It is not. It is a period artefact, soaked in the same testosterone-drenched utopianism that made the 1970s simultaneously revolutionary and revolting.
The book believes, with the cheerful totalitarianism of Nietzsche, that sex is the primary site of human liberation. This belief is as dated as motel bathroom wallpaper.
The novel's satirical targets are numerous but the central one is psychiatry itself. Rhinehart practices nondirective therapy, a method he describes with accurate and affectionate contempt as making the analyst resemble a redundant moron.
His colleague Ecstein publishes clear and brilliant books demonstrating that the key to therapeutic success is accident. Dr. Mann, the authoritative father figure, dispenses wisdom from an armchair while crumbling potato chips onto the table and charging by the hour.
The profession Rhinehart is abandoning was already built on chance pretending to be method, and the dice merely strip away the costume. When Rhinehart begins insulting his patients, assigning them exercises in humiliation and transgression, he is doing what his training already did, only faster and cheaper. The satire is accurate. The comedy is cruel. The two are indistinguishable.
The self is already a performance, already a set of habitual choices cpnstructing an identity. Rhinehart cites Jung, Nietzsche, Chuang-Tzu and van den Berg in his epigraphs, and his dice therapy is a comic operationalisation of ideas already circulating in the counterculture of 1968.
This period document sketches the ridiculousness of every liberation philosophy available to it, from Zen to radical therapy to free love, to drugs and alcoholism, to gambling and investing, with the affection of an author who has tried them all and found them wanting, and the mischief of a man who has tried them all and found them amusing.
The dice do not free Rhinehart into happiness or wisdom. They free him into chaos, legal jeopardy, the destruction of his marriage, and a grandiosity so total it becomes indistinguishable from psychosis.
The liberation the die promises is genuine. The liberated man is a fugitive composing his memoir in hiding. The book does not look away from this consequence, and this is where its profundity ambushes the reader who came only for the laughs.
The supporting characters are drawn with a comic brush. Ecstein, short and rotund and brilliant, researches the rape of his own wife as a case study and publishes the results. Lillian Rhinehart, described as a female Don Quixote after being tossed in a blanket, responds to her husband's abandonment by rolling a die, taking a lover, and enrolling in Columbia Law School, and she is the sanest person in the book. Arturo Toscanini Jones, committed to a psychiatric ward for throwing hand grenades at Young Conservatives, has a better grip on the terms of his situation than any of his doctors. Eric Cannon, the messianic teenager with long hair and rimless glasses, escapes through a Broadway theater.
These characters are grotesques, but grotesques with mortgages and families and genuine grievances, and that separates Cockcroft from the merely absurdist tradition he is raiding.
Despite the considerable handicap of its sexual politics, Rhinehart creates a theology, a sacred text called "The Book of the Die," a congregation of dicepeople, and a missionary impulse that spreads from Manhattan to Missouri. When a correspondent writes to ask how to raise her daughter in the faith. The dice become God in an arbitrary, indifferent, and surprisingly difficult to disobey form.
This religion works as well as the others. It provides community, meaning, and the consolation of surrendering personal responsibility to a higher power that cannot be blamed, reasoned with, or sued. That the higher power is a cube of painted plastic is a reductio ad absurdum of all religion, an honest account of how faith has always operated.
Plenty to think about and plenty to cringe over.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Luke Rhinehart, the pen name of George Cockcroft, published "The Dice Man" in 1971 as a mock autobiography, a form chosen with full satirical intent. The book claims to be the confessions of a great man who will be misunderstood, and it proceeds to make that prediction come spectacularly true.
Rhinehart the character tells us in the preface that his style will be random, that distortions will be embraced, and that a well-told lie is a gift of the gods, then asks us to take everything that follows seriously. A text about the dissolution of the self that keeps dissolving its own reliability.
A bored psychiatrist, sitting at a poker table after midnight in 1968 New York, decides to let a die govern his actions. The first command is rape. Rhinehart goes downstairs, announces his intention to his neighbour Arlene Ecstein with flat sincerity, and she, after some negotiation, cooperates.
Here the book lays its most provocative card on the table, face up and grinning. The treatment of sexual assault as a zany domestic caper is a genuine moral failure, one that the novel wears with nonchalance as a philosophical position. It is not. It is a period artefact, soaked in the same testosterone-drenched utopianism that made the 1970s simultaneously revolutionary and revolting.
The book believes, with the cheerful totalitarianism of Nietzsche, that sex is the primary site of human liberation. This belief is as dated as motel bathroom wallpaper.
The novel's satirical targets are numerous but the central one is psychiatry itself. Rhinehart practices nondirective therapy, a method he describes with accurate and affectionate contempt as making the analyst resemble a redundant moron.
His colleague Ecstein publishes clear and brilliant books demonstrating that the key to therapeutic success is accident. Dr. Mann, the authoritative father figure, dispenses wisdom from an armchair while crumbling potato chips onto the table and charging by the hour.
The profession Rhinehart is abandoning was already built on chance pretending to be method, and the dice merely strip away the costume. When Rhinehart begins insulting his patients, assigning them exercises in humiliation and transgression, he is doing what his training already did, only faster and cheaper. The satire is accurate. The comedy is cruel. The two are indistinguishable.
The self is already a performance, already a set of habitual choices cpnstructing an identity. Rhinehart cites Jung, Nietzsche, Chuang-Tzu and van den Berg in his epigraphs, and his dice therapy is a comic operationalisation of ideas already circulating in the counterculture of 1968.
This period document sketches the ridiculousness of every liberation philosophy available to it, from Zen to radical therapy to free love, to drugs and alcoholism, to gambling and investing, with the affection of an author who has tried them all and found them wanting, and the mischief of a man who has tried them all and found them amusing.
The dice do not free Rhinehart into happiness or wisdom. They free him into chaos, legal jeopardy, the destruction of his marriage, and a grandiosity so total it becomes indistinguishable from psychosis.
The liberation the die promises is genuine. The liberated man is a fugitive composing his memoir in hiding. The book does not look away from this consequence, and this is where its profundity ambushes the reader who came only for the laughs.
The supporting characters are drawn with a comic brush. Ecstein, short and rotund and brilliant, researches the rape of his own wife as a case study and publishes the results. Lillian Rhinehart, described as a female Don Quixote after being tossed in a blanket, responds to her husband's abandonment by rolling a die, taking a lover, and enrolling in Columbia Law School, and she is the sanest person in the book. Arturo Toscanini Jones, committed to a psychiatric ward for throwing hand grenades at Young Conservatives, has a better grip on the terms of his situation than any of his doctors. Eric Cannon, the messianic teenager with long hair and rimless glasses, escapes through a Broadway theater.
These characters are grotesques, but grotesques with mortgages and families and genuine grievances, and that separates Cockcroft from the merely absurdist tradition he is raiding.
Despite the considerable handicap of its sexual politics, Rhinehart creates a theology, a sacred text called "The Book of the Die," a congregation of dicepeople, and a missionary impulse that spreads from Manhattan to Missouri. When a correspondent writes to ask how to raise her daughter in the faith. The dice become God in an arbitrary, indifferent, and surprisingly difficult to disobey form.
This religion works as well as the others. It provides community, meaning, and the consolation of surrendering personal responsibility to a higher power that cannot be blamed, reasoned with, or sued. That the higher power is a cube of painted plastic is a reductio ad absurdum of all religion, an honest account of how faith has always operated.
Plenty to think about and plenty to cringe over.
❤️ 🇮🇱