Glitches In Action
Nonlinear architecture of reality
"Hi, I'm Francesca. Would you like to meet for coffee later?" With a smile, everything plunges into paradox.
Here's the glitch in action: weeks of calculated approaches, forced conversations, attempts to impress her, all failed. Then, the moment I stop trying, when I'm no longer seeking to control the outcome, she materializes with an invitation. It's the paradox of non-linearity - the desired event occurring precisely when you've abandoned the idea that it will happen. Not a logical progression, but an unexpected quantum leap.
I'm not trying to simplify anything here. It would be pretentious, even contradictory, to talk about not categorizing and then attempt to categorize the uncategorizable. I merely observe.
Do you know glitch music? That moment when digital sound stumbles, fractures, breaks. A CD skipping. A corrupted mp3 file. A sample obsessively repeating off-beat. Disturbances that become instruments. Errors transformed into art.
Ttzzk-ttzzk-krrrr-klik-kzzz
In ambient music, the glitch isn't a defect but a gateway to new sonic dimensions. An interruption that reveals what hides beneath the polished surface of the composition.
Reality glitches work the same way. That work email that resurfaces after months of silence is a ttzzk in the orderly flow of time. That abandoned project that suddenly finds completion is a krrr in the linear progression of events.
Reality doesn't move up or down. It develops through depth, like an ambient track that layers seemingly disconnected sounds to create a three-dimensional soundscape.
Being in things and things in us. Like when you listen to a piece by Oval or Fennesz, and you no longer know if you're listening to the music or the music is listening to you.
The more I push toward something (+1, +2...), the more it seems to move away (-10, -20...). Then, when attention shifts elsewhere, the unexpected happens. The klik that breaks the sequence.
Ttzzk-ttzzk-ttzzk-kzzz
Introjecting experiences. Like the musician who incorporates the machine's error into his composition. Not resisting the glitch but becoming the glitch.
Yesterday, my life seemed like a perfectly mixed track. Today, it's full of interruptions, skips, and unexpected repetitions. I don't try to correct them. I pass through, like the listener who immerses himself in the fractures of sound.
Non-linearity is not to be feared. Not to be solved. It's to be explored. Like a Basinski composition that deteriorates as you listen to it, revealing beauty in the decomposition itself.
"It moves, it moves not; it is far, it is near; it is within all this, and it is also outside of all this."
(Isha Upanishad, Verse 4) - Translation by Max Müller
Forget reality as pre-packaged chicken breast in plastic wrap. This is Isha glitch. A corrupted .zip file. Unzip it: empty and full. Silence and white noise. Here and everywhere. Logic skips, like a busted mp3. Tzzz-krrrr... Brahman? Maybe a broken beat. An infinite loop of "yes" and "no." Reality isn't a linear track. It's shuffle mode. A glitch on the timeline. And we’re in the buffer overflow of the present. Listen to the skip. Don't fix the error. Dance with the freeze frame. There, in the data loss, is epiphany. Not explanation. Just vibration.
Glitches aren't lessons. They aren't messages. They're ripples in a fabric I don't fully understand. Moments when reality reveals its deep, layered nature, irreducible to simple trajectories. Perhaps everything is a "staggered joint masonry" made of glitches. Like in those ancient walls where each brick overlaps the joint of those beneath, creating a structure where no line of weakness crosses the entire wall.
Here's the message I send today and the reply that arrives three months later. Here's the missed appointment and the chance encounter that changes everything. Here's Francesca, appearing just when I stopped looking for her. I do things in what I call the present, but reality responds in its contrary architecture, in which past, present and future are just an opinion. A brick here, the effect of pressure visible elsewhere, at a disconnected point in the structure.
Misalignment… Bzzt-crk… Fracture…Tzz-snap… Epiphany.
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