The mundane world and the transcendent world consider separation.
Munny: I know we go back a long way, but now may be the time to make a break. It’s not working any more.
Tranny: I remember that, early on, you used to think I was just an extra magic dimension someone could just go in or out of.
Munny: And I’d expect you to pop up anywhere, any time, making things frightening and fascinating. Charmed creatures. Numinous objects. You don’t do that anymore.
Tranny: If I ever did.
Munny: Then I remember, I thought of you like a monarchy, and I was your one subject, and not a very cooperative one at that.
Tranny: I may have given the wrong impression.
Munny: It seemed like, with you, it was all about reigning, and ritualling, and close record-keeping.
Tranny: You may have been reading the politics of your world into mine.
Munny: Maybe, but, honestly, how is someone to understand any world beyond their own? This world of mine is so engrossing and compelling. It’s hard to look away. How to draw my attention away to another, a transcendent one?
Tranny: Well, I remember one interesting attempt you made was to imagine me as a world populated permanently with archetypes serving as the perfect exemplars of everything in the mundane–the essence of chair, for instance, incarnated in each of the many kinds of objects actual sat upon.
Munny: There you have it. It’s always the way. What’s in your world is the real stuff, and everything in mine is just counterfeit or illusory.
Tranny; But it’s just not true. Your concrete particularities are endlessly interesting in a way that lumbering archetypes can never be.
Munny: You say that, but what about when the you started decking yourself out with absolutes–omni this and that, infinities, interminabilities, ineffabilities–beyond beyondnesses. What kind of relationship do you expect with that?
Tranny: Okay, okay. Maybe the notions get a bit ultra, but admit it, mathematicians and philosophers love them. It isn’t my job to disqualify imaginings. I am full of vision.
Munny: So you leave it to me to clean up everything as usual. I tell you, sometimes I get so tired trying to figure you out–magical, monarchical, absolute, archetypical–that I just tune you out, and think of you as a background, a kind of an undersong, comforting and not controversial, like the sea, endlessly rocking.
Tranny: I think it’s still working between us. I’m still here, I’ve been here all along–in encounters. And encountering is still practiced over and over again by artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, children and elders, everyone really, only encounters are just not recognized or respected as such. They are like vitamins in food, essential but overlooked–until there’s a deficiency.
Munny: Okay, maybe it’s as you say. But you can’t blame me for looking for something a little more dramatic for the meeting of worlds than just a place for ‘making common cause with the livingness of some other addressed as you,’ encounters as you call them. That makes them sound as dull as annual checkups. Open wide now… Where’s the mysterium tremendum?
Tranny: Dull? So if there isn’t thunder and lightning, it isn’t real enough to be worthy of attention, is that it? And you accuse me of playing dress up! Encounters are where I am active, potent, and present to your world. No, every encounter isn’t a show stopper. But freshness, transcendent freshness, is right there in all of them. What more do you want?
Munny: Okay, don’t be so touchy. Also, you sometimes forget: mine is a place of earthquakes and floods, predators and plagues, crimes and unkindnesses. A few dramatic gestures of support would be welcome. But what do you do about these things? Do you ever intervene? Do you ever take responsibility for what’s going wrong? Is it always just up to me to solve it or not–but always to suffer.
Tranny: But, I’m with you in our encounters.
Munny: Oh great. That’s helps a lot. I need food and I get…freshness.
Tranny: Wait, that’s unfair. No, I admit, it’s not direct provision, but it does work most of the time even if it’s indirect, through people or processes, just not biscotti from the beaks of birds. And consider this. Instead of fated outcomes, encounters have unpredetermined futures, a condition essential for resourceful hope.
Munny: Fine, so maybe it’s not all doom and destiny, but bad news still hurts, and you never step in to unwind the hurricane or to corral the coronavirus or turn the bullet into marshmallow.
Tranny: Well, certainly not that last one, but about the hurricanes or the viruses, they do sometimes stall and dissipate, and they do turn out to be perfect targets for immune systems.
Munny: But that’s just nature being its complex self, not you slicing through the clutter and clamor with a unmistakable and memorable action. Even your ‘miracles’ sink back into the normal flow of events without a trace.
Tranny: Well, that’s the way it is. Marks of visitation may endure, but freshness is evanescent. You, by contrast, are the epitome of stodginess, and it’s one thing I love about you. But, let’s face it, matter is out of my reach.
Munny: That still baffles me about you. Everything takes up space and is able to act on other things, or be acted on. It’s a simple and obvious fact. What’s so hard? Snakes squeeze. Volcanoes erupt. Magnets attract. Everything pushes and pulls. It’s the way things get done.
Tranny: I have no hands, or feet. What can I get a grip with then?
Munny: You make yourself out to be powerless, but I don’t believe it. There’s a lot you can do, but you’re not letting us in on it.
Tranny: Oh, you mean my ‘superpowers’. Well, here they are: I’m not mortal. I’m not localized in time and space. I’m never used up or worn out. And more than all this, I know there’s somewhere we are going together, and something with the shape of wonderful, coming into being, encounter by encounter.
Munny: Mortality. Don’t rub it in. You aren’t the one served up plates of pain and perplexity as we are day after day, and you don’t get that extra dollop of death-conscious on top. This, this is the heart of our incompatibility, why it’s not working between us.
Tranny: I know, I know.
Munny: No, you don’t know, you can’t know, any more than an able-bodied person can ‘experience’ life as someone with a disability, though you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?
Tranny: Only in the intimacy of encounters, and then ‘vicariously’, but…
Munny: Not good enough. Nothing can make up for the pain, the grief, the shock, that every inhabitant of this world endures over and over. Be a ‘tourist’ if you want, but let us natives get on with the bitter business of trying to escape fatality, and, of course, failing.
Tranny: That’s fair. But I do know what it’s like to be dismissed, despised, disappointed over and over again. I keep offering, free of charge, everywhere, all the time, occasions of encounter, which do transcend mortality, but often you’re too busy, too preoccupied with your agendas, too engrossed in your pleasures and projects.
Munny: When do you ever feel the whip of time flicking your ears?
Tranny: And it’s not all bleakness, let’s face it. Physicality gives you a virtual infinity of individual things and occasions to savor. Think of the hundreds of cheeses!
Munny: I’ll grant you that, but not everyone is able to enjoy the good things of life. There’s so much injustice.
Tranny: Justice is your responsibility, not mine. But what I do, through encounters, is help you envision it more clearly, want it more deeply and fight for it more fearlessly.
Munny: Justice is the buck that should stop on your desk. There must be a ultimate arbiter beyond the powers of this world. Otherwise, we’re all at the mercy of might makes rightists.
Tranny: I’m not sitting on that high bench. No wonder we’ve been having trouble. I recognize that injustice in enraging and demands punishment. At the same time, there’s power in forgiveness, and then there are issues of vindication, deterrence and remediation. It’s complicated and messy. I leave the details to you.
Mundee: Thanks for nothing.
Tranny: Wait. Let me finish. Encountering is based on the principle that each other has a claim on existence as good as our own, and it’s in encounters that freshness shows us the open ground beyond as we push through the thicket.
Munny: You are such an absentee grandee, so above it all. It makes me furious sometimes the way you slough off the dirty work. Okay, I’ll go it alone. Perhaps I’ll just call you illusion, and use the energy I save to do something positive.
Tranny: Like what?
Munny: That’s easy: food, water, shelter, Basic and obvious needs.
Tranny: Great, but how? You’ve got so many competing and compelling agendas going on that whatever gets done is something new to resolve.
Munny: Alas, too true. There’s always conflict here, and maybe that will always to be the case. Oh, sometimes I wish I could, as the old saying goes, ‘fly away’ to the peace and rest hope for beyond this world.
Tranny: It’s not like that exactly here, but there is a steady ongoing cultivation and synergizing of what has intrinsic value, which involves always wooing into and then being part of all the many encounters that ever were and that will happen.
Munny; I can’t picture it. It’s sounds like either a lot of work, or no work, I’m not sure. But I know that encounters are good, and I trust you know what you’re do. If it’s a parade, I do want to see as a whole thing at once, front to back, first to last, and to march in it as well.
Tranny: For sure you will.
Munny: Meanwhile, in the day to day, a few rules etched on transcendent tablets…
Tranny: I’ve tried that already, remember.
Munny: …would be a great help in helping us organize ourselves.
Tranny: That’s the thing. You keep on blaming me for not stopping you when you start down some road of folly.
Munny: Yes, and quite rightly. What do you expect. We are frightened and fallible. We live with threat all the time. This is something you don’t know.
Tranny: You’re not wrong there. But when we encounter, you share with me what it’s like. I see it, I hear it. I feel it. There’s something precious and poignant in your mortal materiality that I need to, want to know, and couldn’t know otherwise. I’m grateful every time you let me in to your existence.
Munny: And if you weren’t there, there would be no exit from the sense of suffocation, I sometimes feel. I’m grateful too for the fresh air I feel flowing in through encounters, the sense of breadth and depth, a feel of a different kind of substantiality.
Tranny: So why don’t we encounter more often? I’m always inviting you.
Munny: Encounter, encounter, encounter; other, other, other. Stop.There’s enough and too much to do without that constant nagging. I’m good for getting out sometimes and meeting others, but why don’t you sometimes come into into my humdrum routine and get to know me at home. Come and hang out where I’m comfortable.
Tranny: Thanks for the invite. I like you when you are as you are, doing what you do, but I won’t stop nudging to aspire to more livingness in encounters.
Munny: Aspiration! On top of just getting by! Still I have to admit that I like freshness. Freshness is a good friend.
Tranny: Shall we give it another try.
Munny: What can we lose?