FAUST’S SHADOW: A Twice-Told Tale

by John Fast

  “We forget that a free market, like a free government, requires checks and balances. When the market is totally free, we are totally enslaved. A totally free market, inevitably dominated by a collection of corporate autocracies, determines our public policies, our foreign relations, our everyday lives. And if we continue to surrender our constitutional democracy to the tyranny of the free market, then the possibilities of real freedom, real opportunity, real justice will fade into the distance, not to mention the possibilities of a habitable planet. We’re emptying the seas, leveling the forests, scourging the land, burning the air. And where will it end? With a world-wide desert, a new Mars.”

  Alexa paused for a moment, lost in thought.

  “And what really angers me,” she continued, “is that my fellow economists never name names. They never name the presidents, the senators, the representatives, the cabinet secretaries, the federal bank managers, the university economists, the rating agents, the financiers, the bankers who helped to dismantle the economic safety regulations. They never name the executives of the consulting firm who helped to transform normal business practices into extortionist deceptions. They never name the political and corporate leaders who turned every global trade agreement into yet another opportunity for worker exploitation and environmental degradation.

  “And why don’t my fellow economists name names? Because, as a pseudo-science, economics is restricted to the mathematic analysis of structural systems. Economists refuse to talk about individual people. Again, why? Because individual people are unscientific! We can’t quantify the behavior of individual actors! And so capitalist economics has become the modern science of obfuscation. Just read the business section of any newstream where the economic reporters love to parrot the professional economists. They love to explain the excess profits of particular oil companies, for example, as the result of greater, ‘competitive efficiency.’ And what does greater, ‘competitive efficiency,’ actually mean? It means the managers of these companies successfully manipulated their oil supplies and prices just like the managers of the cigarette companies successfully manipulated their nicotine levels and prices.”

  Alexa sighed with exasperation, then she plunged ahead.

  “Everything is distorted in the circus mirror of capitalism, including the fact that everything is distorted in the circus mirror of capitalism. And even the distortions themselves are re-commodified, re-packaged and re-sold under the slick labels of the free market.

  “And where are the critical thinkers, the social philosophers, the engaged intellectuals, the enraged artists who could help us re-imagine the world? Struggling to eke out a living, fighting for tenure, preening on television, and fiddling while the planet burns.”

  She shook her head and apologized.

  “Sorry, sorry, John,” she said. “I just wanted to have a quiet dinner with you and forget all about the conference.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I asked you about it.”

  She refilled my wineglass and opened the bottle she had bought. A few minutes later, when we finished eating, I helped her clear the table.

  “I think about the local and global economy all the time,” Alexa said as she rinsed the dishes. “I try to channel my anger and despair into my work, but I need other ways to deal with it. So I’ve been meditating. I joined a Buddhist temple in London. And while I don’t care for their passive view of history, I love their wisdom traditions. Anyway, would you like to meditate with me?”

  “Sure,” I replied.

  *************

  We went into the living room where Alexa took a large candle and a small plate from the bookshelf. She set the candle and plate on the floor, in the center of the room. Then she walked back into the kitchen. She returned with a box of matches and lit the candle.

  “I forgot to mention,” she said casually, “that I don’t wear any clothes when I meditate.”

  I felt a sudden, deep, throbbing in my body. I tried to stand perfectly still as a flood of images from a long ago spring evening swept through my mind. Alexa turned off the lights and took off her clothes. After a couple of deep breaths I did the same, trying to copy her slow, calm example.

  I did my best not to stare at her. She sat in the lotus position on one side of the candle while I sat cross-legged on the other side. I used a pillow from the couch to cover my erection, which, I hoped, would settle down after awhile.

  “First,” Alexa began, “I close my eyes, slow my breathing, relax my muscles. Then I let my mind and body rest in a kind of unknowingness. I try to release my self-centeredness to a non-centeredness, my self-consciousness to a non-consciousness. I guess it’s a kind of disconnecting that hopefully leads to a deeper reconnecting that I don’t exactly seek out, but that I make time and space for. That’s the best explanation I have, anyway. And when my meditation succeeds, I go to some other place where I leave my rage and sorrow behind.”

  She closed her eyes and let the silence speak for her.

  “I’m not sure what to do,” I whispered.

  “There’s no goal, John,” Alexa murmured. “Just go with the rhythm of your breathing.”

  I quickly forgot about my breathing as I watched the candlelight flickering up and down her body. I studied the rise and fall of her breasts, the curve of her hips, the inward sweep of her thighs. Alexa was the focus of my meditation and everything else disappeared. We stayed like that for awhile and I began to feel that quieting and settling she had talked about, even in the midst of my intense desire for her.

  After twenty minutes or so, Alexa opened her eyes again. I wanted to reach across the candle and caress her face, but I didn’t want to disturb the relative tranquility of the moment. And she knew just how far my unpracticed meditation had gone.

  “Of course it’s sexual, sitting here like this,” Alexa said. “That’s part of the discipline, not to transcend the body, but to integrate it with the mind and spirit. And given the fact that I’m sitting directly in front of you, in the lotus position, with a candle illuminating everything there is to see, there really is no need for your pillow, John. No reason to cover the beauty of your arousal. Look closely and you’ll see how you’ve made me glisten.“

  I followed her gesture to the inward curve of her inner thighs and saw exactly what she meant. I was transfixed and became instantly hard again. I put the pillow aside. Alexa smiled as she took in the view.

  “Sometimes I like to finish with a release,” she said. “Would you like that?”

  “Yes!” I enthused, giving voice to all my pent up love and desire for her. I leaned forward to kiss her and she leaned back.

  “Not that way. We can do it as part of the meditation.”

  I leaned back and wondered what she meant. She slid the candle and plate to the side and slid herself forward until her knees almost, but not quite, touched mine. She stayed in her lotus position and I stayed cross-legged.

  “Now, close your eyes and imagine my hand gently encircling your hardness. Imagine my fingers gently stroking the length of your shaft.”

  I didn’t need to imagine her caresses because the heat of her words made them seem very real.

  “Now, imagine your hand gently cupping my opening. Imagine your fingers gently stroking the length of my lips.”

  And again her words pierced my mind and body.

  “Now, keep your eyes closed and your body still. Imagine I am gently stroking you, and you are gently stroking me.”

  “I feel … you …,” I said in a tight whisper.

  “Good. Now stay there with me, stay there and feel the warmth of my hand, feel the warmth of your arousal and mine ....”

  Alexa kept stroking me with her magic words until she brought me to a height of erotic tension that felt unsustainable and was unsustainable and she and I either had an orgasm or imagined we had an orgasm and the difference didn’t seem to matter anymore because it had become the same thing in the shared intimacy of our meditation. She gave me knowledge surpassing knowledge and,
when I finally opened my eyes again, I drank her in as I’d drunk in the wine and all I wanted to do was to lie with her and enter her. She knew that too and felt it too and yet she smiled at me and shook her head. Then she stood up and let my eyes caress her body for another moment before she started to dress.

  “You see why I like to meditate,” she said.

  “Uhh … yeah,” I said feeling dazed. “What did you do to me?”

  “I put a Tantric spell on you.”

  “You did that a long time ago,” I said.

  I stood up and reluctantly began to put on my clothes.

  “Alexa,” I began. “You know I love you. You know …”

  “Of course,” she replied. “And you know I don’t want to be possessed ever again, by anyone or anything.”

  “So …?”

  “So, let’s just be as we are John, sharing these intimate moments when we can.”

  “Can’t there be more?”

  “That’s the nature of desire, John. We always want more, always imagine there is more, so the trick is to play the more against the less and find some way to live intensely in the meanwhile.”

  “Is that your economic philosophy or your sexual philosophy?”

  “Is there a difference?”

  I shook my head and said, “You’re a mystery Alexandra Elena Pavlova. An exquisite, beautiful, delightful mystery.”

  She smiled at my compliments and said, “I hope that isn’t a polite way of saying I’m a tease.”

  “Yes, it is, and yet you’re also the exact opposite of that: an erotic dream come true. You give more with your withholding than most people give with their gifts. And I haven’t given up the desire, or hope, of becoming more intimate with you.”

  “Is that possible?” She asked.

  I wondered the same thing during the entire train ride back to Princeton.

  CHAPTER 34.

  Ancient Paradoxes

  Michael caught up with me at the Q-Lab on a cold Friday afternoon in mid-December. We were headed to Lincoln Center later that evening where he was scheduled to perform his most recent piano compositions. Aster and the rest of the family were going to meet us there. However, my brother was so keyed up, in every sense of the phrase, that he had come much too early. He sat at my workstation and compulsively ran his fingers through his thick, shoulder length, black hair and stroked his two-day shadow of a beard. He looked like a younger version of André. I had to distract him for awhile and that’s how I found myself trying to explain the problem of quantum computing to a musician.

  “Way back in the early 1980s,” I began, “Benioff, Feynman, Deutsch and others wondered if the speed and power of a quantum dynamic could be harnessed in a computer. In the early 1990’s, Ekert, Lloyd and others followed up this idea by suggesting that quantum superpositions could be turned into quantum switches and then, they theorized, these quantum switches could be turned into quantum logic gates.”

  “Wait! Slow down!” Michael pleaded. “What’s a quantum superposition?”

  “Musician, heal thyself,” I said, shaking my head. “Have you really forgotten everything you learned in school? No? Yes? Okay, I’ll give you the shortest version. A single atomic or subatomic particle can display some very quirky behavior. Imagine a single guy, Jack, who has two girlfriends, Jill and Jane. Imagine that Jack makes love in the same bed, at the same time, exclusively with Jill and exclusively with Jane.”

  “Exclusively? At the same time? With both? Impossible! Can’t be done! Not even if he wears silk pajamas and sleeps with twins!”

  “That’s why the physicists call it the superposition,” I quipped, trying to hold Michael’s attention. “The atom, or particle, can have, simultaneously, both a clockwise and a counter-clockwise spin. And it gets weirder. If two particles share the same origin, their superpositions can be entangled. We’ve been experimenting with pairs of photons emitted from the two-step decay of the electrons of calcium, and of mercury 200/202. We’ve also been studying the photons which split in two after being shot through a crystal lattice of lithium iodate, or barium borate.”

  “So how are these twins entangled?” Michael asked.

  “If you measure the spin of one of the paired photons over here and it turns out to be clockwise, then no matter how far away the other one has traveled–a mile or a hundred billion miles–its spin will always read counterclockwise. In other words, superposition entanglement is a kind of cosmic Kama Sutra.”

  “Hmm …, “ Michael intoned. “Are we talking Quantum Mechanics or Fast Mechanics? A single guy? Two girlfriends? Superpositions? Entanglement? Kama Sutra?”

  I knew very well we were talking about both at the same time. We were talking about my entangled feelings for Takla and Alexa, and we were talking about entangled photons. As my old rhetoric professor would have said, Michael had recognized the implicit autobiographical metaphor tucked inside my explicit quantum metaphor. He had recognized that we were talking about the quantum nature of desire. And yet I didn’t want to talk about it, so I ignored his question and plunged ahead.

  “The average, unentangled atom, or particle, spins in opposite directions at the same time and only when it comes into contact with a sufficient number of other atoms, or particles, does it eventually settle down and get married to a particular orientation, a specific reality. In effect, the other atoms/particles enforce a kind of communal moral code by reading and measuring the spin of their neighbor and bringing him into alignment with their belief systems. And if enough of these atoms and particles cohere, along with the right mix of dark matter and dark energy, then you get the macro-universe that we perceive.”

  “Entanglement, marriage, reality: the sad fate of many atoms,” Michael declared somberly.

  “And here’s the thing,” I continued, not really wanting to pursue the joke. “Think of the individual atom’s superposition as an off/on switch that reads both off and on: 0 and 1. Now, put two atoms side-by-side and their combined superpositions will offer four, simultaneous, patterns: 00/01/10/11.”

  “Four? Simultaneously?” Michael enthused, a salacious grin on his face.

  “Yes,” I said, rushing ahead. “And of course each additional atom dramatically increases the number of possible combinations. And these multiple sets of super off/on switches could be used to build all the basic logic gates: ‘AND,’ ‘OR,’ ‘NOT,’ ‘COPY,’ etc. A quantum computer that aligned, sustained and encoded the superpositions of 100 atoms could perform quintillions upon quintillions of simultaneous calculations. In other words, it would be a quantum orgy.”

  I beat Michael to the already exhausted punch line, hoping he would let it go.

  “So how do you actually do it?” He asked, his salacious grin turning into a salacious smirk.

  “Do what?” I inquired reluctantly.

  I’d pushed the sophomoric sexual metaphor so hard that, instead of shifting my brother’s attention away from my personal life, I’d only succeeded in focusing his attention on it.

  “How do you line up all the spinning atoms in a quantum computer?” He asked.

  “Oh!” I exclaimed with surprise.

  Michael was letting me off the rhetorical hook, and I jumped back into the water as quick as I could.

  “Cirac and Zoller realized that some physicists had already isolated a single ion, an electrically charged atom, in an ion trap: an electromagnetic bottle. So they argued that was a good place to start.”

  “Then you can use an ion trap to capture and line up your spinning atoms, and you’ve got your quantum computer,” Michael concluded.

  “Yes and no,” I replied. “Wineland and Monroe set up an ion trap calculator. They captured a single atom and used its quantum superposition to run a basic operation. They also tried to capture and manipulate two, three and four atoms, but the quantum superpositions were very hard to sustain. Then there’s the programming system. All very tricky.”

  “Can’t it be done some other way?” Michael asked, looking pu
zzled. “I mean, as I understand it, these quantum phenomena are buzzing all around us. Can’t you make a better bottle to catch them?”

  “We’re trying to build on these early experiments, as well as on the work of Kimble, Mooij, Cory and others. We’re exploring the possibilities of cavity quantum electrodynamics, a technique which bounces photons back and forth between two mirrors. Then there’s nuclear magnetic resonance, which suspends molecules in their quantum superpositions. And something else called quantum dots, which are individual electrons surrounded by atoms on a computer chip. And again there’s the superconducting loop, which is a tiny wire with an electric current that runs both clockwise and counterclockwise. We’re working on all these strategies in our various labs. We’ve been able to align ten atoms at once, for example, but there’s a huge distance between that fleeting achievement and a stable quantum computer.”

  “But how does an atom decide which event he’s going to marry in the quantum universe of possibilities?” Michael asked, reuniting my explicit and implicit metaphors with his merciless biblical pun.