Glitch
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Not much invites magical thinking more directly than those periods of life in which everything starts glitching at the same time, erupting in small inconveniences and disjunctions: Is it ever not in the same 24-hour period that your shinbone starts to hurt, there’s an epic windstorm repelling your advance across the bridge bike path, your gym class malfunctions again, the salad you intended for lunch must be rescheduled for dinner, and you fling your pills on the ground that is foraged at all times by your evidently suicidal cats? I have dropped so many things over the last few days that on Tuesday, after dropping something else, I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered if something was … really wrong.
In my favorite essay, the chronically brilliant Kathryn Schulz describes a season of losing objects—keys, more keys, shirt, wallet, bike lock, cellphone, truck—that preceded the death of her father, and explains that the relationship of these two kinds of loss is more than linguistic happenstance:
The verb “to lose” has its taproot sunk in sorrow; it is related to the “lorn” in forlorn. It comes from an Old English word meaning to perish, which comes from a still more ancient word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, “to lose” acquired the meaning of failing to win. In the sixteenth century, we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and one another and has been steadily expanding ever since.
The etymology of “glitch” is less clear. Maybe it comes from the Yiddish for “slippery place,” Merriam-Webster says:
but that's not certain. Print use of glitch referring to a brief unexpected surge of electrical current dates to the mid-20th century. Astronaut John Glenn, in his 1962 book Into Orbit, felt the need to explain the term to his readers: “Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit which takes place when the circuit suddenly has a new load put on it.”
Glitching as we use it now (“a usually minor malfunction”) shares a quality with its subset the losing of things: The more it happens, the less it feels like a coincidence. Depending on your belief system, persistent glitching may have to do with the orbital progress of the planet Mercury; it may reflect divine disfavor or be the artifact of a curse. Glitch gave us, in 1999, “glitch in the Matrix,” a visible malfunction of physics that betrays the unreality of our perception. One time I made a list of glitches in the matrix that had recently come to my notice—experiences which defied ordinary explanation. They included a guy in the Union Square subway station whose image seemed to stagger and blur as he stared at my unusual coat; drones; and my then-boyfriend.
Some of us are perhaps noticing more of these kinds of glitches nowadays, in which old forms of order have rapidly dissolved and uncanny simulations collide with the constant foreshadowing of apocalypse.
But I’ll end with a brief defense of the glitch: It reminds us that our notions about what is foreordained are unreliable. (More on this in an interview with Marilynne Robinson—rowdy Calvinist—that I could listen to on loop.) It supplies novelty. It keeps us ready to adapt, however minorly. It encourages us to pay the closest of attention.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.