The theme: Into the Multiverse

We walk through doors every day, sometimes with eager anticipation, sometimes with trepidation, and still other times with curiosity. Doors invite us in, creating an evocative pull to move through the space they outline. Leonard Cohen’s achingly beautiful lyric “hungry as an archway, through which the troops have passed” captures both that visceral connection, the longing which moves us through space, even as it also gestures toward the ways in which passage through that space may be fraught with danger, longing, and loss.

Doors and doorways are haunted by the spectres of banishment or loss from intimate spaces of safety. Dionne Brand’s powerful book, Map to the Door of No Return, details the ways in which the embodied intergenerational trauma caused by slavery can be understood through the figure of the Door of No Return, illustrating how the transformations effected by travelling through portals may be unchosen and unwelcome, but also indelible.

Sara Ahmed reminds us that doors and denial are also intimately connected, and that the doors fashioned by institutions like Western may not necessarily allow all of us to move through them equally. While some of us may travel freely through the doors it fashions for us, others of us not only struggle to find the door but may be met by a brick wall instead.

Doors are complicated, it seems, and embodied possibilities shape how, when, and even if we move through them.

Doors and the literature of fantasy and science fiction are intimately connected – be it the magical door at the back of the cupboard that leads into Narnia, Bilbo Baggin’s captivating round door in The Hobbit, or the many and varied portals (disappearing train platforms, blackholes, wormholes, stargates, and even rabbit holes, to name just a few) which open out into a different universe that populate fantasy and science fiction. I am not alone, I think, in feeling a bit of disappointment in the domestication of the word portal to signal access to online sites and services. To me the word “portal” still holds out the potential for something magical, a way to transport us, a potential which cruelly betrayed when I find myself delivered to a government website rather than an out of this world adventure, but I digress.

The plurality of possibility encompassed in the idea of the multiverse, however it is accessed, offers up a reparative possibility that both ameliorates the pain of denial or banishment (a way back, or a way to imagine a different future) and helps us imagine a future which is multiple and transformative. Moreover, as literature shows us, we are most often to experience these transformative experiences in other universes or spaces when we least expect them, serendipitously, and that our paths and transformations are unique.

Into the Multiverse offers you multiple doors through which you can walk on October 13 to hear from speakers who will help open you up to possibilities you didn’t know existed. We can’t wait for you to start exploring these different universes and finding your future, or at least one of them.