9. Tuan (2)

TimbuktuIn Yi-Fu Tuan’s ‘Intimate Experiences of Place’ chapter, he explores the notion of skewed reality.

Tuan states that “evaluations and judgments tend to be clichés. The data of the senses are pushed under in favor of what one is taught to see and admire.” In addition, “thinking creates distance” Tuan is thus, pointing out the rarity of having a ‘real’ experience with a place.

Reading this reminded me of Walter Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion. Lippmann provides examples of impediments to the “actual environment”, including our scanty attention levels, the poverty of language, distractions, unconscious constellations of feeling, monotony, and the obscurity and complexity of facts themselves. He also states that “even the eyewitness does not bring back a naïve picture of the scene..” because our senses are arbitrary and visual perceptions are complicated by tricks of memory and imagination.

Although Lippmann is focused on a more general idea of ‘truth’, both he and Tuan successfully note possible obstructions to truth whether that is in reference to a place or situation.

Luckily, Tuan says that we can still have a true experience, “In a new setting ,[where] we are forced to see and think without the whole world of known sights, sounds, and smells.[…]

Good luck!

New York, New York on the Vegas Strip: It doesn't even LOOK real (photo by JpL)

Well I suppose this blog post is a fitting forum to discuss some quotations and ideas that I had prepared for my Colloquium – Fortunately or unfortunately, I did not need my notes as often as I had anticipated. If I had been asked exactly where I wanted to start, I was planning to offer the following quotation from the epilogue of Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience:

Feelings and intimate experiences are inchoate and unmanageable to most people, but writers and artists have found ways of giving them form. Literature, for example, is full of precise descriptions of how people live. The academic disciplines themselves yield abundant experiential data that deserve our closer attention (202).

Tuan has a habit of bringing to our attention that which would have been obvious if we has only stopped to think about it. In the case of the above quotation, I found my Rationale, Colloquium, and I suppose my Concentration and general course of study validated when reading Tuan’s words. During my Colloquium, we discussed many aspects of portrayal and redefinition of both New York City and Paris, drawing on both literature and film. I believe that the creation of these two cities as mythic concepts derives first and foremost in experiential knowledge of these two vibrant cities. Both Paris and New York have innumerable layers of history (granted, Paris has been around a lot longer…) that make these constantly moving metropolises what they are today. But when I say history, I mean everything you find in a standard textbook along with all aspects of culture as well as individual perception and a side of topography. But when considering these cities as singular entities, if that is even feasible, New York and Paris are certainly greater than the sums of their parts. This synergy comes from their auras. As wholes, they can be more or less deconstructed, but there is that certain je ne sais quoi that can only truly be exposed through art. I have noticed countless times that those who best capture the essence of either city are talented (is that word too cliché?) artists—writers, filmmakers, what have you.

As per our class discussion yesterday at the Christopher Street Pier, New York is perhaps a city of individuals who share common thoughts and experiences. We laughed at the time, it even became a running joke for the rest of the afternoon for those of us who stayed in the sun a while after class was over. But I think there is a great deal of truth in this collective identity that seems to harshly oppose what we consider our idiosyncratic individualities. In just about any book, film or even song that comes readily to mind about New York, I am struck by common themes that come up to some degree almost every time. For example, I find in so many portrayals of New York City a similar touching and beautiful loneliness. If we are all lonely, and it shines through so frequently, how does that fit in with defining New York as its own humanized place in the world?

And on a totally tangential note, here’s a question that came out of my Colloquium: What is it about Paris and New York that make them worthy of being the only two currently major cities to be represented in Las Vegas? How are there senses of place duplicated and/or lost in their reproduction?

"All eyes on me in the center of the ring just like a circus": The classy taste-maker, Britney Spears, even wrote a song on the subjectToday, I was walking along Fifth Avenue near Central Park. While I was taking in the budding green trees and the lush grasses I failed to immediately notice a similar energy in the people. It wasn’t the warmest of our spring transition, but it was a Sunday, and Sundays (the warm ones) call for relaxation outside. So, I started looking at the people. As my friend and I came to the corner of 57th and 5th, a corner of plaza ubiquity, I noticed that the three squares were dotted with people. There were some larger dots, smaller dots, medium dots, but on the whole the plazas were well dotted. (As opposed to the dot-less Winter season).
And all of the sudden Tuan popped into my head. He sure is doing a good job with that increasing “the burden of awareness” (203) thing. In Chapter 12 Tuan says that objects, more specifically sculptures, “have the power to create a sense of place by their own physical presence….[that] A single inanimate object can be the focus of a world”(162). That, like people, they seem to make their own spaces. In the three surrounding plazas I could discern three dominating central objects. The Apple Store Plaza has its Apple Store atrium jutting through the pavement. The Grand Army Plaza has its grand armed statue and its less glorified sister plaza has its less glorified fountain.
People seemed to be congregating around places to sit and places close to the central objects, similar to what the video in class revealed to us: that people sit where there are places to sit. It also said, however, that people tend to avoid open, central spaces. Which seemed as well true. The fringes of the plazas, lined with benches and ledges were popular places to sit and stand. Also, the objects, close to the actual centers of the spaces, were crowded with people. It seems that people indeed liked being near the center. This doesn’t prove that the video was false, if anything it shows how right it was. The video spoke about how people didn’t like to be in central, OPEN spaces. What the statue, the fountain, and the atrium do is diffuse the central space. By placing something there they have made it more comfortable to be there.
Tuan also says that ordered spaces are indicative of cultural rhythm. In this way, it seems that people don’t like to feel they are the focus of all random street attention. They don’t want to feel that everyone’s looking at them, scrutinizing their appearance and actions. Yet people ARE in the center, reclining at the base of statues and the steps of fountains, mingling with the focal object. An explanation could be that these three inanimate objects function in the same way as a street performer does (who, incidentally, usually stands at the center of a space). By drawing attention to himself he lures a crowd. They feel comfortable standing around him, populating a central open space and so they stay. But once he’s finished and moved to the next block, the crowd disperses. The mass of people no longer feels at ease in this center of focus, so it backs away, back onto the benches and fringe hideouts.
It seems that people, though usually only feeling comfortable at the edges and not wanting to dominate public attention, congregate around these objects because it allows them to a) sit where there is place to sit and more importantly b) because it lessens their burden of self awareness. Like with the situation of the street performer, the person gets to advantage of central view without all the responsibilities of being the center of attention. So, it seems that statues perform a vital function, making people feel comfortable in the most area of an open plaza, while also making it that much more beautiful.

Tuan, Jim, and HuckIn his essay entitled “Attachment to Homeland,” Yi-Fu Tuan discusses the human drive to attach emotion to place saying that, “attachment to homeland is a common human emotion... The more ties there are the stronger the emotional bond.” He goes on to say, “A people may become strongly attached to a natural feature because more than one tie yoke them to it.”
As a literature concentration, I can’t help but apply this to a very specific book in American Literature. For my colloquium, I used the Tuan text in relation to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to discuss this human relationship to a natural feature. Undoubtedly, the Mississippi River becomes a home for both Huck and Jim during their travels, and appropriately so.
Both Jim and Huck are ultimately displaced individuals, and ultimately, can only create a home outside of society’s bounds. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates discusses the symbiotic relationship between a place (or a home) and it’s people (or an individual.) He calls it duty. So often when we think of the concept of “home” we automatically imply a sense of ownership, “This is my home, or hometown, or favorite spot, and I can do whatever I want and be whoever I want while I’m here.” But we forget that home must be a symbiotic relationship because, inevitably, there will always be some sort of political or social institutions in place. If we don’t abide by the rules of home we can be forced out. This is how Huck and Jim become displaced individuals, and are forced to create a new home for themselves.
Huck, be it his personality or extenuating circumstances, can’t follow the rules set up for him by the Widow Douglas at the beginning of the book, nor can he stay under his “Pap’s” control. The river—the natural feature that Tuan talks about—becomes the ideal place for Huck to make a home, and it is no coincidence that by not being able to “abide by the rules of home” he can’t stay there (even if he’s not forcibly thrown out.)
The very same is true of Jim. As a slave, Jim is under countless restrictions and rules based on the rules of his role/class in society, and the “rules” of race relations in a slave state prior to the Civil War. But on the river Jim is no longer a slave.
Once Huck and Jim are aboard the raft, they can create entirely new rules. Getting back to the natural world (with only the rules of nature to adhere to) means that a young white child and a slave can become friends, can share personal experiences, and become equals where they never could within the bounds of their “civilized society.”

Stage 5: Desolation. Click through to see the rest of The Course of Empire.The Course of Empire, a five-part painting series by the 19th century Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole, illustrates the duration of a civilization from one vantage point. The five paintings, respectively entitled The Savage State, The Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, The Destruction of Empire, and Desolation, show different chronological stages of a piece of land. It starts as stormy a shore with little sign of human life. There is a group of presumably native hunters, but nature dominates the landscape. The next painting shows a more established human settlement. There are signs of architecture, recreation, and farming. The Consummation illustrates a civilization at its height. There are fountains, ornate decorations, and other signs of wealth and prosperity. The next painting illustrates the destruction of the city in the time of war. The sky and sea are stormy, and people are fleeing and panicking on shore. The beautiful structures from the previous painting are shown in ruins. Finally, the Desolation painting gives a glimpse of the ruined and abandoned city as nature starts to take over the land once again.
Cole's paintings illustrate some of Yi Fu Tuan's ideas about Time and Place. The Course of Empire, beginning and ending with stages lacking much human involvement, suggests a cyclical or circular view of time, where a place can be dominated by nature, then man, then nature, and so on. As the audience of the paintings, we have the rare and valuable experience of viewing one place over a long term period of time. In a sense, we "get to know" this place through Cole's 5 snapshots of moments that are decades or centuries apart. Photographs and paintings have undoubtedly taught us to experience places through imagery, but without any historic context or nostalgic attachment. The Course of Empire, like 5 lone frames from very long set of time-lapse photographs, gives us the depth of time, allowing for extra understanding of a place beyond what is visually apparent.

In Tuan’s chapter “Time and Place”, he describes three ways to look at how time and place interact. He introduces them as “time as motion or flow and place as a pause in the temporal current”, “attachment to place as a function of time” and “place as time made visible, place as memorial to times past”. (179) As I was reading I was trying to think of how these approaches to time and place meet in my daily life. Referring to the first interaction between place and time, the example I thought of immediately was a walk in the park. I have always thought of Washington Square Park as a place as a whole, which it is, but I never considered the little sections of the park places as well. As I am walking from one class to another, there are definite spots along my path that are significant markers of how I understand the park itself. Washington Square Arch is probably the most pronounced and well-known place within the park marking the end of Fifth Avenue, along with the center fountain (although now blocked off). There are the two dog parks, the children’s playgrounds, the chess tables at the southwest corner of the park and the area along Washington Square Park East where the man warns me about watching traffic and how much time I have till my next class. These are all important places that are, as Tuan says, “connected by an intricate path, pauses in movement, markers in routine and circular time”. (182)
As I was looking through pictures of Washington Square Park, I came across a website created to defend the preservation of the park. http://home.earthlink.net/~preservewsp/ The website documents the politics, dangers, and current construction of the park’s renovation through articles, pictures, videos, and a blog. In “Time and Place” Tuan talks about how people, depending on their perspectives, think about the past. He says, “Some people try hard to recapture the past. Others, on the contrary, try to efface it, thinking it a burden like material possessions. Attachment to things and veneration for the past often go together. A person who likes leather-bound books and oak beams in the ceiling is ipso facto an acolyte of history. In contrast, one who disdains possessions and the past is probably a rationalist or a mystic. Rationalism is unsympathetic to clutter. It encourages the belief that the good life is simple enough for the mind to design independently of tradition and custom, and that indeed tradition and custom can cloud the prism of rational thought”. (188) I thought this quote highlights the differences of how people supporting the preservation of the park view history and place and how the City of New York and its parks department understand place. While those who defended the preservation of the original park cited the history and culture that will be destroyed through its reconstruction, city employees refer to the benefits of the new park. George Vellonakis, the park’s landscape designer, says to the New York Times that his new plan will “increase the green space in the park by a fifth and include the new one-acre lawn and strips of horticultural plantings — ferns, evergreens, flowering dogwoods — around all four sides of the park”. As the park renovations proceed and are completed how will the new Washington Square Park change the way you and I view place and time?

Tuan, in his chapter on "Architectural Space and Awareness, describes the clarifying and defining qualities of architecture, properties that can also be applied to other forms of human creation. "First man creates the circle, whether this be the plan of the tepee or the ring of the war dance, and then he can discern circles and cyclical processes everywhere in nature, in the shape of the bird's nest, the whirl of the wind, and the movement of the stars." (112) Where at first the design defines, later it teaches. Borrowing from Piaget's theories of learning and development, human designs can be seen as informing schemes into which we attempt to fit and define the world around us. In the West, and especially the United States, it is not difficult to see the way we have divided up space into neat Euclidean places. Manhattan is an especially clear example, divided into neat rectangles upon which structures explicitly or roughly resembling right cuboids are erected, containing collections of cuboid spaces in which people live and work. Even when a building is only roughly arranged in this way, we still see it as being generally rectangular in all its dimensions. We imagine that the ground is planar and flat, when it is in fact anything but. Even the streets, which we commonly imagine to be very regular and flat, are in fact sloped: they are highest at the center, and slope downward to the gutters, to prevent pooling of water. Still, when one draws a picture of Manhattan, one draws straight lines in parallel or perpendicular to each other, imagining classical Euclidean shapes aligned to a grid. Cylinders, arcs, spheres, and other easily mathematically abstracted forms are also major components of our architectural vocabulary. Some architects, perhaps most famously Frank Gehry, have challenged this paradigm, with varying degrees of success.

Functions and forms that do not fit in with the scheme that mathematicians find useful are commonly referred to as "pathological". One of these was the "pathological curve", today known as the fractal. A fractal is a geometric pattern that is self-similar under a change in scale. Fractals defy traditional geometry in that they can describe a shape of infinite length contained in a finite space. Fractals are often modeled with extremely simple geometric shapes which are then recursively modified according to iterations of a similarly simple rule. Such models are extremely useful in describing "natural" forms (trees, mountains, etc.) Tuan, in his writings on the way a house both reflects and structures the social interactions inside it, mentions that "on a larger scale the settlement itself may be a potent symbol. (112) What if the social, spiritual, and physical structures pertaining to the individual were similar in form to the corresponding structures of the household, and also of the community at large? Couldn't architecture in such cases reflect and enable such self-similarity at different scales with a fractal architecture? Mathematician Ron Eglash says that this is exactly what happens in numerous villages throughout Africa long before anyone in the Western world had any understanding of such forms (see the video below). One of the most striking fractal Eglash describes is in the Ba-ila settlement in Zambia:

Ba-ila settlement

"Ring-shaped livestock pens, one for each extended family, can be seen in . . . a Ba-ila settlement in southern Zambia. Towards the back of each family ring we find the family living quarters, and towards the front is the gated entrance for letting livestock in and out. For this reason the front entrance is associated with low status (unclean, animals), and the back end with high status (clean, people). This scaling of social status is reflected by the scaling in the architecture of each family ring: the front of the ring is only fencing, as we go towards the back smaller buildings (for storage) appear, and towards the very back end are the larger houses. The two geometric elements of this structure -- a ring shape overall, and a status gradient increasing with size from front to back -- echo throughout every scale of the Ba-ila settlement."

Ba-ila fractal pattern

Inside the large ring, near the back, is another, smaller ring, housing the chief's family. Inside that ring, near the back, is another ring, for the chief himself. Inside that ring, again near the back, is enshrined a miniature of the village, where the spirits of their ancestors dwell...and they too, have a shrine. And so on. This is the nature of the fractal: a recursive pattern that is self-similar at arbitrary scales. The whole contains the parts, yes, but the parts also contain the whole. Tuan identifies a very similar notion in mythical thought, in which, he writes, "the part can symbolize the whole and have its full potency." (100) The Chinese roof tile "encapsulates the essential order and meaning of the Chinese cosmos", and the Pueblo Indians' boundaries are both the distant mountains and the walls of the dwelling, but in the Ba-ila settlement, the common intellectual construct of a cosmos with many centers is actually physically realized.

In his essay ‘Architectural Space and Awareness’, Tuan discusses the ritual quality and context of place. He also discusses how a place (a designed/man-ipulated space) serves an educational purpose. From plan and layout to materials and details, Tuan suggests that each place tells information of the person or group of persons that inhabits or makes use of the structure. Some places have instructional details inherently in them. For instance, the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages make use of symbols and pictures to illustrate Christian teachings. Stained-glass windows are substitutes to scripture texts to proclaim the Word to the illiterate. Similarly, the cross is used to suggest ‘suffering, atonement, and salvation’ (114). As Tuan notes, “The symbol to the medieval mind is more than a code for feelings and ideas that can readily be put into words. The symbol is direct and does not require linguistic mediation. An object becomes a symbol when its own nature is so clear and so profoundly exposed that while being fully itself it gives knowledge of something greater beyond. (114)” By meditating in a place with such magnificence, the worshiper can effortlessly understand the existence of a greater being. Chartres 1134, Rebuilt 1194

Tuan goes on to discuss how buildings today are no longer designed with such ‘illustrated language’ because the modern society is increasingly literate. This can be seen in Modernity’s influence on churches. Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp moves away from the basilica plan and Gothic details. The walls and roof are made of concrete, which point upward at one corner like the prow of a ship, a reference to the ark or St. Peter’s fishing boat. The elaborately designed windows of previous cathedrals are replaced by simplistic, stained-glass windows recessed into the walls. All symbols are removed, except for an abstracted cross at the altar.

Tuan discusses how the growth of literacy has affected all aspects of design. There is no longer a need for ‘physical environment to embody the value and meaning of culture: verbal symbols have progressively displaced material symbols, and books rather than buildings instruct (117).’ To Tuan, symbols are now indistinguishable from signs.

Tuan points out the many differences between the Middle Ages and contemporary life especially in terms of building construction and design. However many theorists argue that there are distinct parallels between the Middle Ages and modern culture. Umberto Eco discusses these parallels in his essay “The Return of the Middle Ages.” Eco discusses how the elite of the Middle Ages translated the ideologies into images, just as modern media tries to translate learned and popular culture into visual communication. He states, “The Middle Ages are the civilization of vision where the cathedral is the great book in stone, and is indeed the advertisement, the TV screen, the mystic comic strip that must narrate and explain everything, the nations of the earth, the arts and crafts…the mysteries of faith, the episodes of sacred and profane history, and the lives of the saints (82).”

Notre-Dame-du-Haut, 1950-55 Eco also discusses the erosion of the city of the Middle Ages due to decline in population, famine, abandonment, difficulty of communication, erosion of roads, etc. Eco argues today’s wreckage of the city is due to ‘an excess of population that interacts with excess of communication and transportation, making the cities unhabitable not through destruction and abandonment but through a paroxysm of activity’ (77). He goes on to compare the erosion of buildings from ivy in the Middle Ages to the present day erosion caused by air pollution and garbage.

Eco suggests that a ‘Middle Ages’ is brought on by the collapse of the Great Pax (military, civil, social and cultural), which causes a period of economic crisis and power vacuum (75). His theory seems strikingly familiar with the collapsing of the modern economy.

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Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Harcourt. New York. 1986.

Fogelsville, PA: friend of mine took this. not quite sure how it might apply to this post, but it sure is pretty.There are a handful of statements (theories?) offered in Tuan’s “Time and Place” chapter that sparked some immediate reflections on a few memories and past observations. Early in the chapter, he presents a metaphor in which he is wishes to become “vice-president in a motorcar company,” but to get there he will have to settle at “foreman” and “manager” first (180). He describes a sense of uncertainty at being held up on the way to his goal, and that is something I can directly connect with. When working toward an objective, I’m usually not comfortable resting along the way, especially if that rest is unplanned. That particular metaphor resonates with me as well: I hate the idea that, someday, I may have to resolve myself to working at some “way station” job before I hit the big time! I realize that makes me sound like some asshole American entitled white male, but in my head, it’s pretty reasonable. A little later on, Tuan writes specifically of family vacations, and how, while on vacation, “the sense of place extends beyond individual localities to a region defined by these localities” (183). This brought to mind family vacations to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, a mere three hour car-ride from our home in PA. We went there regularly for over ten years (including the year we moved and had no money and stayed in a structure comparable to a vaguely luxurious trailer home). We don’t regularly go there as a family anymore, and I haven’t visited in over two years, but I would still know my way around the town that we stayed with no problem. The good arcade with the ferris wheel and cooler games is about five blocks down the street from the really shitty arcade with better, less pirate-themed mini-golf courses, which is next to Uncle Will’s Pancake House, where you can sit next to one of two statuettes of well-dressed pigs (which can get kind of fucked up if you’re eating bacon, but I suppose maybe you deserve it if you’re eating bacon in the first place, and yes, the view is spectacular from atop my pedestal), which about a five-minute walk from the house we stayed at the last five or six times we went, where my parents still go, which is across the street from the park where hundreds of old people unsafely drive their vans on to the sandy grass to watch other old people play big band music every Wednesday. It’s really an excellent place, but it took a few years in a row of not going to make me realize how much I enjoy it there. Finally, after Tuan starts talking about “attachment of a place as a function of home,” he mentions simply seeing a place for just a moment, like “the first glimpse of the desert through a mountain pass” (184), can bring forth some intense instinctual sense of recognition. I feel this way when I see wide-open plains or fields. I took a train to Montreal last summer, and most of upstate New York along the route was just fields and big lakes, yet somehow I didn’t fall asleep for any of the twelve-hour train ride. That appearance of endlessness, of infinity, always captures my attention. I don’t know what that really means. I guess what I’m getting at here is that a lot of what Tuan has written in ‘Space and Place’ leaves me thinking of the past. I’m not so sure that there’s anything new in there to find, but it’s refreshing to go back to from some new angles.

The quantum coherence of liquid crystalline organisms

In Yi-Fu Tuan's essay Time and Place, he describes the relationship of time and place as an intricate problem that invites different approaches. The three that Tuan explores are: time as motion or flow and place as a pause in the temporal current; attachment to a place as a function of time; and place as time made visible, or place as memorial to times past. According to the laws of Newton, if you know the initial conditions of any object in space, it is possible to predict the future of that object as well as retrodict the past. Time plays no part, it is reversible. This universe of absolute space-time views things as separate solid object with definite locations.

Thermodynamics, which is roughly the way in which systems exchange energy and matter with their environment, introduced times arrow into physics and hence the idea of irreversible processes. If the world is a big machine, then entropy implies it is slowing down, energy is leaking out, it could not last for ever, and time therefore, took on a new meaning. However, if we observe the world around us it is clear that some processes such as evolutionary biology are speeding up. Ilya Prigogine revolutionized thermodynamics by showing that the classical results were only valid for closed systems, where the overall quantities of energy are always conserved. If one allows an intense flow of energy in or out of the system (pushing it far from equilibrium), the number and type of historical outcomes greatly increases. Instead of a unique and simple form of stability, we now have multiple coexisting forms of varying complexity. Moreover, when a system switches from one stable state to another (at a critical point called a bifurcation) minor fluctuations may play a crucial role in deciding the outcome. At this point systems will either dissolve into chaos or radically self-organize and jump to a higher level of complexity. This new state is termed a dissipative structure and demonstrates how entropy can actually produce order.

Deterministic physics views the world as a static machine. Objects exist in space and time, where as organisms in essence are of space-time, meaning that they create space-time by their actions that are not always predictable. Physics deals with deterministic systems, but biology is an evolutionary process. Thermodynamics proves that the 'universal laws are not so universal after all. In fact, they only apply to local regions of reality (such as the motion of a pendulum, or planetary movement). Most phenomena of interest us are open systems in which time plays a much more crucial role. Einstein's theory of relativity also helped to break up Newton's perfect world and asserts a multitude of space-time frames, each tied to a particular observer, who therefore not only has a different clock, but also a different map.

The living organism maintain a complex level of quantum coherence. This means that every molecule in an organism, though it is moving, maintains a relationship to that of its neighbors maximizing local freedom while also providing global coherence. Organisms are partially determined by genetics, but also communicate and send message with the environment. At any time one of these message can modulate the system causing it to mutate but still maintain the relationship of its components in relation to each other and to the whole. Similar to a giant orchestra in which every individual musician is capable of improvisation while still staying in time with the rest of the group. All of these molecules in our bodies are moving together but they give the appearance of being static. This is made possible because the molecules exist in a dynamic crystalline state that is highly sensitive to intensive effects (such as heat and pressure) and connected by a matrix that allows it to synchronize itself. Because light vibrates much faster than the coherent rhythms of molecules, organisms appear static under polarizing microscopes. This is proof of their quantum coherence.

Time is very much a factor in all processes of life. Molecules are constantly moving, combining, dissolving and recycling into other formations. Inert objects are simply the extensive (metric quantities) crystallization of processes. These historical processes account for all structures that we see around us and that constitute our reality.