Fremder

4

Some children inherit money and property. What I’ve got is an oscillator in my brain: it’s about the size of a pellet of birdshot. If you want to be a flickerhead you’ve got to have one of those.

Most civilians don’t get to see the Corporation Yearbook. Here’s the beginning of ‘A Note on Flicker Drive’ from the 2053 edition:

Victor Lossiter’s investigations into biological scaling began after he read Richard Voss’s early 1970s papers on 1/f noise and Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory of fractals published in 1977. He credited film director Gösta Kraken, however, with the idea that started him on the research that resulted in his formulation of the Intermittency Principle in ‘Being: Not Steady State but Flicker’, Scientific American, April 2017. Thirty years earlier Kraken had written:

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop; but below the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.

Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived:

an Unfinished Memoir (Jonathan Cape, 1987)

Years before Kraken’s thoughts on ‘the occulting state of being’ Elias Gorn had begun his investigation of what he termed ‘zoetic oscillation’. As early as 1969 he had written to Boris Pavlovich Belousov:

After reading of your quite remarkable demonstration of chemical oscillation I have produced this reaction in my own laboratory using a malonic acid reagent. Since then I have been seeing the characteristic spirals and rings in everything from coins of Knossos and Troy Town mazes to the movement of smoke in wind-tunnel experiments. It seems to me that what you have shown us might well be the universal communication pattern of which your chemical reaction is one of an infinite number of manifestations. Communication of what? Perhaps the primal impulse that drives all systems both microcosmic and macrocosmic? A very unscientific leap of the imagination indeed!

I’ve been considering the possibility of zoetic oscillation and I believe that this can be demonstrated by the simplest of experiments but I haven’t had the technology available that would enable me to build the necessary equipment.

Elias Gorn never did acquire the technology; he and his wife committed suicide in 2009 when he was dying of cancer, leaving the notes that his daughter Helen would study and make use of. Victor Lossiter had the technology, and in his elegant 2019 experiment that made Lossiter’s rat as famous as Schrödinger’s cat he isolated not only the zoetic current of a rat but the substantive emissions of its cage. He wired both rat and cage to a camera with a nanosecond quartz flash, the circuit that activated the camera being completed only in the intervals in zoetic and inanimate currents; Lossiter’s film showed frame after frame of empty laboratory table, thereby demonstrating that life and matter are not continuous but intermittent, a nonlinear alternation of being and non-being at varying frequencies in the ultraband. Lossiter died in 2021 at thirty-seven with his work unfinished but his discoveries and the researches of Elias and Sarah Gorn started Helen Gorn and her brother Isodor on the ontological investigation that resulted in flicker drive.

Flicker drive was not Helen Gorn’s first objective: she had been in correspondence with Lossiter since 2018 and she believed that the phonomenon of intermittency could be applied to psychotherapy. Herself given to frequent depressions, she was hoping to find a mode of controlled access to states of non-being as a means of relieving stress. In May 2021 she and her brother Isodor, financed by a Corporation grant, began a series of experiments with the limbic system and within a year they demonstrated conclusively that the ‘carrier wave’ in the human brain is generated in the amygdala…

Fremder here. At Corporation Library you can see 318 transcripts of Helen Gorn’s recordings of the experiments from 2 May 2021 until 16 February 2022. There are no transcripts between that date and Isodor’s death on 13 April 2022. Helen was twenty-three when they began the experiments, a Fellow of Corporation Neurobiology and Corporation Elite. Eighteen-year-old Isodor was a mathematician and an FCE as well. Reading their notebooks now I find the two of them more like one composite being than two distinct individuals.

The family name used to be Gorenstein. Elias Gorenstein’s parents ended up in Auschwitz and when he came to England he thought Gorn might be a better name to have if somebody came knocking on the door in the middle of the night. ‘Gorn today; here tomorrow,’ he’s quoted as saying.

The beginning of my life was not quite the usual thing. My mother killed herself when she was seven months pregnant with me. She knew from the scan that she was carrying a boy and she left a note for the sanatorium staff saying that she wanted me to be circumcised and named Fremder Elijah Gorn. There was also a note for me; when it was put into my hands four years later I looked at those marks made by my mother’s hand and her words came to me in silence from the voiceless paper:

Dear Fremder Elijah,

I’m sorry that I’m not going to be around to be your mother but each of us can only go so far: I’ve gone my distance and now you’ll have to go yours. Learn the speech of ravens and they will feed you.

Good luck,

your mother,

Helen Gorn

There was a chair for Elijah at the circumcision. Perhaps he attended, perhaps not. As quickly as possible I learned the speech of ravens and they fed me.