You and I in the Multiverse

On reckoning with our present and alternate realities

What is the multiverse? Simply put, it can be said to comprise everything in existence, including our own universe and all hypothetical universes besides. All of space, time, energy and matter whether we consider these as separate or connected entities.

I went to a book launch recently for the new novel Bridge by South African author Lauren Beukes, which is about a girl called Bridge who pursues her deceased mother across parallel universes. The conversation went around the fact that even within this one universe that we know, we are living parallel realities where my reality might be very different to yours, and each of our experiences may differ from moment to moment. 

We live in a time when this has never been more apparent, in an age of political and religious extremism, of Brexiteers and anti-vaxxers, of climate change denialists and the like. We have to coexist in the same physical space yet there are vast chasms between us in terms of our beliefs and how we see the world. 

We feel this more acutely now with the genocide happening in Gaza; we can see the overwhelming evidence that the beliefs of those who wield political and economic power have the ability to wipe out an entire race of people before the eyes of the world, with almost absolute impunity. I say almost absolute impunity because we have seen the resistance to this oppression in the form of ordinary people taking to the streets in protest, and we have even seen action at the level of national governments (although this to a lesser extent and more slowly than we would have hoped).

And even for those of us who would claim to be on the right side of history, can we really say that we have not benefited from systems of oppression, even if only in seemingly small material ways? The mass-produced items and gadgets we fill our houses with, that will eventually fill landmines that clog up the earth… were those not manufactured through the labour of people who will never share in even a fraction of the wealth we possess?

Yet with every decision we have the opportunity to redirect the course we are on, to steer our lives towards a trajectory that today may feel inconsequential, but years from now will prove to have made a very big difference indeed.

There may be so many different realities, but at the same time we can only truly grasp the one that is in front of us right now. It is a mark of privilege and perhaps an active imagination to be confronted with a multitude of possibilities and struggle to choose one. Everything we say yes to automatically means saying no to something else, whether we realise it at the time or not. 

None of this information is new but the way that we reckon with it is. In a world where so much is available to us, where so much has been made possible by science and technology, we can still be held back by our collective fear, guilt and shame. We have access to so much knowledge but the answers to the biggest questions remain obscure as ever: how do we live well? How do we protect the planet from our own destructive impulses? How do we mobilise our collective efforts to free the oppressed? How do we continue to do what we do with love and generosity when we harbour very real anxieties regarding the future of our race? 

The Creation of The World and The Expulsion From Paradise, 1445, Giovanni Di Paolo

Photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/ Scala, Florence

One might say that the most important questions, those concerning the soul of man, are precisely the questions that have no concrete answer. These are the very questions that guide us to the precipice of this universe and beyond, from which could be fashioned some kind of bridge between my reality and yours. In truth, we do not need to unearth the answers but to hold within us the value of the questions themselves. 

Of this the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said: 

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”