The Eternal Recurrence of a Spotless Mind

Everyone is always told that you have to love your significant other warts and all. But what if he or she or it could journey to a parallel universe where none of their positive attributes would be marred by human foibles. Both Nietzsche and the mathematician Poincare believed in the notion of Eternal Recurrence which states that over the infinite expanse of time literally everything and all its mutations would appear as a succession of possibilities. It’s another iteration of the idea that if you put a monkey in front of a typewriter, over infinite time it will spew forth Hamlet. The idea of parallel universes presents a science fiction version of this idea in which chinks in time make it possible to travel to other dimensions where we can be melded into more perfected forms of ourselves. What a savings of time and money. If they could be accessed, parallel universes would prove to be a lot more reliable than therapy. Therapy rarely offers a cure. All that’s being offered the patient is an ability to accept and understand dysfunctional and maladaptive parts of the self—with the dreary hope that under optimal conditions serial murderers, for example, might recognize that they are acting out. If only scientists could find a way of identifying wormholes and other means of accessing the multiverse then we would be able to select from a number of possibilities. Let’s say there had been knowledge of parallel universes back in the day of Adam and Eve. Eve might have been able to find another form of herself which didn’t give in to the temptation to take the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. There would have been no fall or original sin and earth would have been paradise.

Parallel Universe II

34 is the Parallel Universe that exists on Patchen Place in the 1940s. Djuna Barnes is the doyenne and the lingua franca is women who love women. However, it should be pointed out that in 34 it is perfectly acceptable to be a heterosexual male who has the sensibility of a woman who loves women. Beyond that, life goes on as normal, with the legendary Maxwell Perkins holding court uptown, and the downtown world of La Bohème remaining curiously immune to both the highs and lows, both the temptations and excitements of trade publishing. By the way, there goes John Dos Passos, who has become a total fascist, despite his wondrous U.S.A. Trilogy.

   

The parallel universe is really the land of opportunity.  There is one to fit every personality and sexual orientation, and naturally one to accommodate even the most eccentric schedules. For instance, there is a parallel universe fitted to the second after your birth and the tenth, hundredth and thousandth of a second before that. There is a parallel universe where you make a fortune shorting currency, like George Soros, and another one where you lose your shirt. Most importantly, there is the parallel universe where you drive down Maple Street and are blindsided by another driver, and another where you get into a fight with your wife, making you late for the potential accident. In that universe you go on to live a long and happy life.  Finite matter and infinite time—these are the two variables to think about when it comes to the question of parallel universes.

Parallel Universe

The notion of the parallel universe appears as a philosophical concept in Nietzsche’s Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence. Though the concept had a long and venerable history in many religions and philosophies, the notion of the parallel universe may be one of the only philosophical concepts that went on to have an afterlife in both science (Poincare’s Recurrence Theorem) and science fiction (in the work of masters like Phillip K. Dick). Doesn’t Dick’s The Man in the High Castle suggest that the Allied victory is coeval with that of the Axis, which lives on as an alternate world? Hard science itself is forced to deal with the notion of parallel universes when it confronts the uncertainties of string theory and quanta. Yes there are successions of worlds only a millionth of a second apart, repeating themselves with minute divagations and forever bookending in conformity or complete dissolution. Isn’t Minority Report a description of a form of parallel universe in which what is meant to be is essentially coexisting with what is?

   

It’s very comforting that life is going on in some  multiverse, and that even after death we will still be living in a slightly altered form in another dimension. If only we knew how to jump from one dimension to another, we could switch horses when we were diagnosed with a fatal disease. The lights never go out. Life continues on despite the fact that it has eliminated us. We live on in successive universes as if nothing had happened at all.  For every loss, death, breakup, failed job search, failed romance, there is the parallel universe where the reverse has taken on a life of its own, and the life we know continues without missing a beat.

   

Over the expanse of infinite time, we exhaust enough possibilities so that we come back to where we started, both a second too early and three seconds too late.