Читать книгу The Book of the Die - Luke Rhinehart - Страница 9

It’s not clear exactly when Whim began referring to himself as ‘we’ and ‘us’, but soon enough it led to his being forced to visit a psychiatrist.

‘Why do you call yourself “we”,’ the psychiatrist asked.

‘Because we are,’ said Whim.

‘I only see one of you,’ said the psychiatrist.

‘We only operate one at a time and use the same body.’

‘Show me another of you.’

‘Here I am.’

‘Who are you now?’

‘Whim, we of many chances.’

‘But which Whim?’ insisted the psychiatrist.

‘Here today, gone tomorrow.’

The psychiatrist had been scribbling frantically but he now stopped.

‘So you feel you have many personalities,’ he commented cautiously.

‘Yes, we do,’ said Whim cheerfully.

‘And do the voices of these other personalities sometimes speak to you?’

‘We talk to each other sometimes.’

‘And do some of your other selves frighten you?’ asked the psychiatrist, sensing a breakthrough.

‘Of course not,’ said Whim. ‘We’re friends.’

‘Which of your selves do you like the best?’

‘Me.’

‘Who’s “me”?’

‘Meherenow,’ said Whim.

‘What’s meherenow like?’

‘He’s like himtherethen a few seconds ago. Now the one I like best is the new meherenow.’

‘I see,’ said the psychiatrist, his face twitching slightly. ‘Don’t you feel any continuity between your consecutive selves?’

‘Oh, sure,’ said Whim. ‘There are family resemblances.’

‘But what do you want to do with your life?’

‘Whose life?’

‘The lives of yourselves,’ answered the psychiatrist, not believing he was having this conversation.

‘Oh, we all have different plans,’ said Whim.

‘Well, what determines which one of you acts at any given moment?’ the psychiatrist asked. Whim smiled.

‘Ignorance and chance,’ he replied.

How many people have you been today?

To go from the cage of a single self to the amusement park of multiple living, we need to exercise: to play games which break down our self-imposed limitations and uncover new selves, experiences and talents.

Of course, the killing of the self is for most of us as difficult as physical suicide, although rather more rewarding. The challenge to turn over decision-making to chance rather than one’s ‘self’ is a challenge that most people can’t meet. Such a surrender of will is irrational! It’s absurd! But most of the consistencies we find ourselves locked into are equally irrational and absurd – we just don’t notice. But others notice. We see others, even our friends, as filled with the most absurd opinions, habits, interests, behaviour patterns, but as part of our unconscious social agreement we pretend we don’t see them that way. Everyone tacitly agrees to overlook their neighbour’s insanities. Unless he begins choosing his insanities by dice rather than ‘free will’. Then we’ll talk about him.

One dicer reported that when she first began making her decisions with dice she kept her use of chance secret. She noticed that although people thought she was behaving rather erratically they went out of their way to find rational reasons why she suddenly decided to get her hair dyed, have her nipples pierced, fly to Houston for a weekend, pick up a guy at a bar – all things inconsistent with the person her friends had previously thought her to be.

Then the dice told her to tell them that she had begun making decisions with chance. Suddenly actions that were actually consistent with her earlier self seemed to her friends to be bizarre, insane. Now if she went to a movie at random, even a movie she would have previously wanted to see, they were annoyed with her. Now if she dropped a boyfriend and announced it was a dice decision, some friends berated her, even though they had previously been urging her to drop the same guy. The moral is: we are allowed to make stupid decisions on our own but as soon as we make them by letting dice choose a few things, we are insane.