Introduction
The story is set in London, Constanta, Bucharest and Timisoara. You will be introduced to Hamlet played by the narrator. His wife's mother, Christina, whose untimely dispatch by a once charming brother turned Faust at this demise, sets the plot in motion. This brother's departure in death, concludes a network of spiritual transference to niece Faustina and her family, perpetuating the Devil's work.
Goethe's Faustina, has a coterie fronted by her brother Mephistophelese. The resultant 'cabaret inferne' a la Gounod sees young people lose their former integrities. The 'Walpurgisnacht' will be a mixture of Tchaikovsky's White and Black Swans; their offspring, and a struggle with the judicial systems to be self-sufficient in law and rise above the indifference and customs of the laws delays in the pursuit of justice.
Despite all attempts by evil forces to corrupt Christina's daughter Marguerite, she remains a phantasm unblemished, since there can be no sexual commerce between her and Faustina. Faustina couples with a phantasm of Marguerita, a complete illusion created, not by Mephistopheles, for the benefit of Faust, but by the virtuous integrity that runs to her core surrounded by an aura of protectiveness given her at birth. Her Progeny is a symbol of this natural nobility.
As in Marlow's 'Doctor Faustus' all pleasure and power experienced by Faust is given in that momentary illusion at the expense only of the renunciation of his soul grasping at the worthless pursuit of all the insubstantial temporal values. The story will also take you into areas of law, psychology, philosophy, drama, music and comedy plunging the depths of love and hatred. Struggling to reconcile problems of identity, knowledge and belief, truth and falsity, free will and determinism. Marguerita's family emerges chastened and purified, losing all inclinations to the material side of nature, and clinging to spiritual values alone that give hope of immortality through progeny. They have learned that to know another person is to know who and what that person is, rather than and separate from what that person has. This forces upon one the proper balance in making true friendships arising from the former rather than the latter.
A short philosophical comment.
Within a Laplacian,1 framework of determinism, or similarly embodied in the pre-destination of Omar Khayyam2 there is a state where the configuration of the events have reached saturation point. At such moments it is possible to observe dramatic change.
Rising water levels burst the banks of rivers, filling a glass forces an overflow. These events, like any body function when surfeited, fall into abatement3. Thoughts and images will eventually disgorge themselves, like Freudian slips4 into accidental or even intentional utterances and dissertations.
In these intense moments, where it is almost impossible to act contra predictively (such as preventing a waterfall from its fall) one is aware how powerful is the force of destiny. Outside this, where the flow of events is comparatively untroubled, most individuals will share the universal view that we all have free wills and are perfectly capable of behaving in a manner that appears to defy predictability. Combine Heisenberg's 'uncertainty principle'5 with Laplace's formulation and one really has a struggle to predict precisely an event, in a manner that is certain enough within a sufficient time frame to behave contra-predictively.
1 Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace.
2 Omar Khayyam
3 Twelfth-Night; or, What You Will.
4 The Freudian Slip
5 Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
6 Questor 4th stanza
7 King Lear. Act i. Sc. 1.
8 Hamlet. Act i. Sc. 5
Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, in the 18th century framed the classical formulation of this thesis. For him, the present state of the universe is the effect of its previous state and the cause of the state that follows it. If a mind, at any given moment, could know all of the forces operating in nature and the respective positions of all its components, it would thereby know with certainty the future and the past of every entity, large or small.
The Persian poet Omar Khayyam expressed a similar deterministic view of the world in the concluding half of one of his quatrains: "And the first Morning of Creation wrote / What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read."
Twelfth-Night; or, What You Will, Act I. Scene I.
Duke. If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
4 The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O! it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets,
8 Stealing and giving odour. Enough! no more: 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity
12 Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe'er, But falls into abatement and low price.
The Freudian Slip. Freud's term ... parapraxis.Freud's term for these was "faulty action" (Fehleistung), for which his editor/translator adopted the pseudo-Greek scientism parapraxis. The colloquial label is "Freudian slip". Freud's in any 1901 book on the subject 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life' distinguishes errors of speech (Versprechen), memory (Vergessen), and action (Vergreifen). In every case there is presumed to be an unconscious determinant of the faulty action, which can sometimes be inferred directly from the context. (Usually these actions reveal the true contents and thoughts of their author's mind.)
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (in one of its forms): if the position of a particle is specified precisely, then its momentum must be unknown (i.e., described by a state such that the probabilities of the particle having a certain momentum are spread out over a wide range of possible values), and vice-versa (more simply - the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.)