Frequency

Frequency is used as a ranking word. People apply it to themselves, to rooms, to music, to a friend they find irritating, and the scale is always the same: high is good, low is bad. A person with a high frequency is calm, attractive, aligned. A person with a low one is draining, heavy, stuck. The word does the work of sorting without doing any measuring. Nobody is asked to count anything. They feel whether someone is high or low and that is taken as enough.

It appears in the same breath as energy, aura, vibration, and the claim that follows is rarely stated outright but is always available: that the low ones are a problem to be lifted, and the high ones are a standard to be approached. A video at 2am will say you can raise your frequency, a shop window will sell you crystals for it. A friend will say, honestly, that you have been low lately, and mean it as a diagnosis.

The word is fair as a description of sound. A bell rings at a certain rate and so does a string. But as applied to people and places it stops describing and starts ranking, and the ranking is the whole point. Higher is better, lower is worse, and the sorting happens before anything is examined.

Frequency, as I use it, is a rate of return. Not a rate of vibration in the air or in a room, though people may mean that too, but the rate at which a thing keeps coming back to you. The question that is worth asking is not how loud the thing is or how often it appears in the world. It is how often it reappears in your own life without being summoned, and what you notice when it does.

You can count the returns. The song you keep hearing, the question that arrives at roughly the same hour. The room you find yourself in without deciding to go there. Each one can be noted, dated, set down as a fact about your own day. What cannot be noted is why it came back, what in you the thing is touching, what changed between one return and the next that made this one different or the same.

That gap, between the countable and the unaccountable, is where the word does its real work for me. A thing that returns often and for reasons you can state is just a habit, and habits are ordinary, and that is fine. A thing that returns often and for reasons you cannot state has a frequency worth noticing. The reasons stay where they are, unexplained, possibly unexplainable. The count is what is available to you, and it is enough for what it is.

Sleep is where frequency is easiest to notice without anyone having measured it. You go to bed at roughly the same hour, the room has been the same temperature for days, and a thought arrives anyway, familiar, not new, not urgent, at about the time it did the night before. The same thought, returning. It comes with a regularity that feels like a pulse, and for a while you can almost count the intervals between arrivals, and then you notice the clock was never started and the returns do not keep a schedule anyone could read. You stop trying to count. The thought stays, and you lie there with it, and the ordinary evening continues around you in whatever way it continues.

This may only be true of me, but the sleep case is the one I reach for most, because it is the case where the returning is most obvious and the reason for it least available. The thought comes back and I cannot say why it comes back, only that it does, and that it does so more often than the other thoughts that might have arrived.

Focus gives a sharper version of the same thing. You sit down to work and the mind keeps folding back onto one unfinished problem, past the emails, past the meeting notes, past the thing you were actually supposed to be doing. The circling has a rhythm. It returns faster than the other demands on attention, and the return itself is what you can notice. Sometimes you can say what the problem is, in which case the frequency is just a matter of how often you keep failing to leave it alone. Sometimes you can only say that it keeps arriving, and that it arrives more often than anything else in the room, and that the arriving is the thing you are watching.

In both cases the word names the rate of the returning. That is the part that shows up.

Frequency rests on vibration because a return is a motion that repeats, and repetition is what vibration amounts to when it is noticed over time rather than in a single instant. A thing that happens once is a thing that happened. A thing that happens, then happens again, with an interval you can feel between the two, has begun to have a rate. Without that repeated motion there is nothing to measure, and so the rate of returning is inseparable from the fact of the motion itself.

It also rests on cycles, because recurrence needs some kind of rhythm to be measured against. A thought that comes back at irregular, unguessable intervals has no period and so no frequency in any strict sense. The word implies a regularity, or at least a regularity that can be approximated, and it is that approximation that lets the returns be seen as a rate rather than as a scatter of separate events. Where there is no cycle to approximate, there is only a list of happenings.

What it stands against is noise. Noise is what does not come back. A sound that enters a room and passes through it, a word overheard on a tram, an image that registers for a moment and then is gone, these leave no return behind. They are present once and that is the whole of their claim on attention. Frequency requires that something return, and noise is defined by its failure to do so. The two are not opposites in degree. One is the shape of repetition and the other is the shape of passing through, and a person can notice the difference without measuring anything.

Frequency counts returns. It can tell you that a thing arrives again, roughly at the same interval, more often than most. But there is a case where the counting fails before it has started, and that case is when the return has no object.

People notice a pull. They are drawn somewhere, back to something, with a regularity that feels like a rate, and when they try to say what the pull is pointing at they find it is not pointing. There is no thought to name, no place, no song, no question sitting there to be returned to. The returning is real enough; the mind keeps coming back the same way it always does. But the thing that would be the object of the return is absent, and frequency has no word for a rate of coming back to nothing.

This is different from the case where the reason for a return is unclear. In that case there is still a thought or a place or a person, and the count works; only the why stays uncountable. Here there is not even a what. The regularity is present and the object is not, and the word can register the rhythm without having anything to attach it to. It can say the mind returns and stop, because there is no second term for it to say returns to.

I have noticed this with my own attention. There are hours when I am circling, and the circling has a rate, and if I ask what I am circling around I cannot always answer. The returning is the whole of what is available. Frequency holds the rate and leaves the rest, and here the rest turns out to be everything.