It could only seem like a vestigial appendage we would no longer have the circuitry for, the ability, like Muhammad, to go up on the mountain and hear the voice of the angel.  We've become modern people, in charge of many powers and many things, but no longer able to receive divine thoughts, no longer believing, skeptics.  Anyone laying any sort of claim of such we would of course, perhaps rightly, be immediately suspicious of.  But like that of myth-making, it seems that somewhere along the line we've lost our powers for that mode of activity.  It seems we might go hike up the mountain, but what would we possibly receive, as we peeked from time to time at our phones, as if the prophecy or divine guidance should come through them.

The world of Islam choses not to aggrandize images of the prophet, a point made clear in the PBS documentary "Life of the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Unto Him."  It is the divine message, not the mortal messenger, to acknowledge and celebrate.  Our world seems instead to go for personal fame, even though a person is balanced when allowing the divine to flow through him, superseding the personality.

Muhammad, by the excellent account, was dissatisfied.  He was unhappy with society.   He had deep questions about the nature of creation.  He felt troubled, and he sought peace in meditation and retreats to the mountains above Mecca.  He need to get away from its tribal society, having experienced all levels of it, displeased with its treatment of the poor and marginalized.

"Read," the voice of the angel said to him as he awoke from a dream with a feeling of being stifled.  Twice he replies that he is not a reader, that he does not know how to read.  Finally, at the third urging from on high, from the angel who has caught him, the prophet asks, "what shall I read."  And it is the words themselves which, when transcribed, carry the prophecy, simply by their own nature, coming from God, such that a sensitive but not necessarily learned type might be perfectly able to take their dictation from the recitation of God.  So it is the word itself which has inherent importance.

"Read: and your Lord is the Most generous,
Who taught of the pen,
and taught man that which he did not know."  Qur'an (96:3-5)

Muhammad, after this first revelation, was of course frightened and agonized, needing the sheltering comfort of his wife and family, wishing to tell no one.  He would admit that he 'abhorred' poets and madmen in particular, and would never want to be one, just as he had told the angel Gabriel that he was not a learned worded type.  And the angel had wrestled him the first time and the second time appeared to him as if straddling the horizon as Muhammad had returned to the mountain, telling him that he was 'the messenger of Allah.'

Bring this to modern times.  What is it that man does not know?  What are the things that are worthy of such a pen?  What would the relevance of such words be to such a world, one we often think of as so advanced beyond the tribalism of the prophet's time (who so eloquently, in his last speech, given in Mecca at Hajj, reiterated the thoughts of how God, Allah, had created many different peoples so they could get to know each other, without infringing, without terrorizing, but to peacefully get along) or at least considering ourselves as civilized, but others less so.

Bringing the divine out of the personified myths of tribal paganism, the deeper human psyche's working its way out through storied tales, may have seemed to require some shift, anyway.  God, now one force, had to directly speak over all such tales, to say finally, more directly, what was good and bad, as far as behavior and ways of thinking, applicable to all facets of life.

How would a writer, with the same basic reluctance and suspicion, see his role, see the point of writing in the world, perhaps particularly there is so much writing in it already, and when anything he might say about the need for peace in the world would come of as juvenile editorializing, and who is he anyway but some punk kid, when compared to an expert like, say, Henry Kissinger.  Overwhelmed by all the feuds of the world, bombings, etc., what could we do but leave it up to the television itself, hoping that wise leadership or the better angels of our human nature might win out as if at the end of a grand morality play broadcast live, capable of fixing the vast complexities of the economic world too.

Can the world be solved by 'the transcribed' words of the divine?

Have we lost, then, a belief in the ultimate importance of the word, its power, its ability to convey the guidance of the divine?

One can only know his own dissatisfaction, his own disappointment in himself for fitting too eagerly into the modern world of personal fame, the cult of pleasure and luxury, the don't ask/don't tell of professional lives of monetary existences.  It was never his own personality that mattered, but the yogi presence within, and if he emphasized the former he was in for bad health and angst, and if he emphasized the latter he felt calm and in good health and did good things.

Fortunately the small profile of this "writer" as "barman" included his habit of wishing to listen to people in particular, to their trials and travails, shared over the vino's veritas, and how that was the most priceless for him.  He did not come to work in a bar to pour the latest cocktail, nor even to make money beyond the bit given to him, prizing the time and the labor for its own sake, perhaps for keeping him around other beings thus somewhat sane.  In his confusion, in his long harried night, unclear of his role in life, he too fell into the vanity and the desire for wine and fun and dancing company;  he too drank too much, so as to suffer the next day;  he too fell for tasty food and things beyond the simple, the good, the nutritious (though it could have been far worse.)  Perhaps it led to a greater understanding of the human condition, even as he knew not what to do with his own life.  But even the thought that he was 'a writer' too had much vanity to it, though I suppose a writer is always saved by allowing things, perhaps the subconscious, speak through him, impersonally.  (Writers who are forced into the awkward spot of having to be publicly a writer ego are in danger of falling into a falsehood, if they do not hang onto their journalism of the self behind the ego, which would entail disowning most popular images of the writer who is worldwide explorer and interesting personality.  Kerouac, he fell victim to the fame, to the portrayal of his personality, and to his credit his sensitivity and realness hung in there a long time;  it's obvious the poor guy wanted to escape, though of course it would be very awkward, publicly for the writer to escape his role, as society has done away with the old comfortable roles of myth tellers, prophets, bards, troubadours, 'poets,' scholars, philosophers, that gave writers acceptable roles and duties.  Kerouac, who was deeply religious, presents a very real and interesting problem, and it seemed that he had indeed come to a kind of safety with his Buddhist works, finding a real role for himself, which was not easily come by;  it must have been chemistry, past a tipping point, a lack of sufficient help protecting him against his drinking, on top of years of abuse when out in the wilds, that got him.)

That which he had done reluctantly, as if forced, knowing not what else to do, turning to words themselves, like Milton's Adam when expelled from the Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost, turning to that blind and amorphous project of "writing," as if to lay out the only few things that were observable, became a kind of habit.  And whereas none of it would ever go anywhere, at least it would inform him about how the words in gospels and sutras and other revelations might have come about.

Fortunately, today, obviously, we have a large body of religious texts to rely on, we have law and order, some of us anyway, we have educational systems, we try our best to bring equality.  Perhaps, the prophets are no longer necessary, as if we have figured everything out.  The only thing we might complain about is our own selfishness, our own egotism, our own pursuit of materialism beyond what we need, all the things that get in the way of our own reflections, our own desire to go meditate somewhere and make gentle the ways of the world, things we all might have access to in due time, our own ability to inhabit the high words of the visionary and make them truer.