Description

Fourier showed that any irregular signal, however jagged or complex, could be decomposed into a sum of simple oscillations. This discovery was not just about sines and cosines but about the universality of repetition as a hidden language of change. From radio to medical imaging to data compression, the world runs on this principle: that beneath the surface of complexity lies a harmonic structure, a spectrum of frequencies that can be isolated, manipulated, and reassembled. It is one of the clearest demonstrations we have that systems which appear opaque can be made transparent through the right basis of analysis.

And yet, the very clarity of this approach reveals its distance. To see life as signals and decompositions is to abstract ourselves from it, to translate presence into components that can be managed and repurposed. What is lost in this translation is not accuracy but intimacy. The world becomes something done to us, a set of oscillations processed on our behalf, rather than something we are in the midst of. We begin to depend on the machinery of description as though it were reality itself, forgetting that what keeps both signals and societies alive is not the neatness of their harmonics but the instability, the noise, the uncertainty that sustains their tension. It is here, in the space where order leans on uncertainty, that the experience of being is found—not in the decomposition, but in the unresolved resonance that makes decomposition possible.