Jobu Tupaki
Time travel doesn't cut it anymore. Reliving nostalgic moments or time-heisting the past is not a good enough metaphor today. The queen of the ball is multiverse.
In a multiverse, any event has all outcomes at the same time, in branching timelines. Any what-if scenario exists somewhere. Dr. Carroll (the current one) believes that the multiversal construction is a method to discuss and a consequence of the deep truths of quantum mechanics. Marvel Cinematic Universe believes that the multiverse is an infinite content-generating device. Super Smash Brothers believes that dividing the world into storylines of different protagonists is arbitrary and unfair. In the most recent entry of the Ratchet and Clank video game saga, multiversal travel is aided by, and helps market the latest in solid-state drive technology.
In a multiverse, you cannot privilege one opinion over another, for they are all true. The lack of an obvious authoritative source of truth enables some actors to claim that everything is true at the same time, and also nothing is true either. Multiverse accelerates the post-truth. What happened in the town of Bucha near Kyiv, in late March 2022? According to the russians, at least four mutually exclusive things. You can send your best experts, you can collect evidence, reconstruct timelines, and write fat thousand-page reports. The bad actors always can drown out the grain of truth with the deluge of way too many "truths". This level of confusion can extend to a whole nation. But when confused people do bad things, we still need to call them bad things.
Splintering reality is not only a tool to inflict trauma upon others or to conceal the trauma; it can be a mechanism of healing. If this plane of existence doesn't work out for you, you can try another one, often without involving magical substances. Many of my friends emigrated from Belarus: some, by crossing land borders; others, by emigrating deep inside themselves.
A prominent guide for inner emigration, and a deep connoisseur of multiversal affairs is the rock band N.R.M. (standing for Niezaležnaja Respublika Mroja or Independent Republic of Dreams). Started as Mroja in the 1980s, the band was reborn under the new name in early post-Soviet Belarus to keep up with the times. As Belarus gained its first populist, temporarily democratic president, N.R.M. felt the growing disconnect of the official discourse and the culture that was just awakening from the Soviet slumber and slaughter. In 1998, N.R.M. as a self-respecting republic issues its own passport, in the form of an album declarative of their values and commitments. In 2003, a tribute to N.R.M. consisting of covers on their songs performed by other contemporary acts, is issued under the name Viza N.R.M. These what-if versions of songs enter the Independent Republic of Dreams not as feared outsiders, but as treasured guests.
N.R.M. get closest and most explicit about the multiversal divide on their 2007 album titled 06, in the song titled Miensk i Minsk, highlighting the duality of the capital city. You can fly into Minsk, take a subway there, and pay your electricity bill. But around the city, if you search closely enough, you can slip through the cracks into Miensk, a place of myth, freedom, and culture. Miensk is usually open for inner emigration and doesn't ask for visas in the usual sense, only maybe in the Viza N.R.M. sense. You need to know the right people who can show you the ropes, of whom Miensk is made up.
While N.R.M. and other multiversal approaches debate the best way to hop across universe boundaries, the NSK State cuts laterally. NSK, standing for Neue Slowenische Kunst ("New Slovenian Art"), is a political art collective founded in socialist Slovenia in the 1980s, functioning as a virtual state. NSK gives out symbolic passports, but at the level of an artistic statement, an NSK passport represents a change of basis in our idea of citizenship - instead of being tied to one government on one parcel of land, it rejects spatial boundaries and state borders - and is indeed useless for crossing borders in the meatspace.
The musical wing of NSK, the band Laibach, likes to lean into totalitarian imagery but also to change and subvert the canonical symbols. It is a false flag operation in a place where there can be no other flags. Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak calls this "mimetic critique of ideology": using the state's visual symbols to critique it. As with similar satire cases, using the symbols of the opposite side leads to a natural question of whether ethical boundaries have been crossed. The mismatch between the message and the form confuses the self-nonself discriminators: it bypasses the government censors but causes the public to question the true allegiance of the artists. Which side of the universe are you, are you one of "us" or one of "them"?
Multiversal demarcations gain strong symbolism. As you cross the border, the symbols around you change. Pizza turns from a flat pie to a tight ball. Everything bagels flip to negative colors and become googly eyes. The sunset over a swamp turns into a bandage with a strip of blood. Without these markers, you cannot recognize which side you are on - sometimes it is okay to be ambiguous, other times it is deadly.
When I was a teenager, I was just learning about the divisions. My school was in Minsk, my earbuds led to Miensk. One language was used in family and school, another one was balancing between mediocre and clandestine. The big wide world was just outside, behind a wall of passport controls and price tags. Some of my classmates moved to university somewhere east, others somewhere west, while I just stayed there for a bit waiting for history to restart its run.
During a military exercise in 2017, the western part of Belarus was named "Viejšnoryja" to denote a fictional country within the training military conflict. The seven days of the exercise, run by russians, have come and gone - but somehow Viejšnoryja remained as a virtual state, a spiritual cousin to NSK. Viejšnoryans issued passports to each other, adopted a flag, wrote an anthem, and embraced the sheer absurdity of existing as a meme-laden virtual state between the teeth of hungry land-based empires. The official history lists Viejšnoryans as descendants of both Vishnu and Atlantis. The multiverse would be proud of them.
Living in a multiverse is pretty terrifying. A recent independent, non-franchise multiversal movie aptly titled Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, hits that note. The protagonist Evelyn explores all the paths her life has not taken to borrow skills from her alter egos. The choice junctions for herself, her family, and the Internal Revenue Service officers form an endless kaleidoscope of alternatives and recombinations, with no boundaries or structure. Endless switching of behavioral codes, languages, countries risks descent into an all consuming chaos that is impossible to navigate and perhaps most easy to just ignore. Multiverse leads to nihilism, the belief that nothing is worth trusting or holding onto. In the movie Evelyn finds her way, but can we?
In Belarus 2022, the multiversal duality of Miensk and Minsk has all but collapsed as they got firmly projected onto national borders; that is, people who would have loved to live in either virtual Miensk or Viejšnoryja can only live freely after physically moving beyond the border. There is a world in which the Viejšnoryan history book is the truth. There is a world in which I can go home without fear of prison or worse. There is a world in which I have not caught Covid yet. There is a world in which I know exactly how much salt to add when I cook. There are way too many linguistic worlds with an endless dance between them. There is a world in which I am a researcher, a consummate professional, writer, coder, graphic designer. Before the multiverse collapses my mind, how many of these skills and perks can I borrow?