“Some people get queasy,” I’d been warned.  Hah, not me!  I put on the headset, hopped on the stationary bike, and was delighted to find myself back on a racetrack (even if only on two wheels instead of four):  a good road track, winding up and down and around sharp corners, with high desert mountains to either side.  The harder I pedaled, the faster I went.  And to steer, all I had to do was lean this way or that, much like in a kayak.

I went fast — whoopin’ and hollerin’, freed of all responsibility by the knowledge that none of this was real.  And yet I couldn’t help acting as though it was.  So much so that when I realized I was about to crash into a mountainside, I braked as hard as I could, and tried to dismount.

I guess I stepped off a bit too soon, because as soon as my foot touched the ground, I suddenly, deliriously, had zero sense of balance.   I was halfway to the ground when I found out that there’s much to be said for being caught in real arms when your brain’s been deceived into unreality.

It was my friend Susie Lee’s fault (that’s her here on the bike, about to get queasy).  A leading art-and-tech maven, she’d whisked me off to SIFFx, the new VR offshoot of the Seattle International Film Festival.  We’d wandered in to Vulcan Technology’s ad hoc lab, where they were working on test displays in situ — a playful defiance of perfectibility that I hadn’t expected, and found quite admirable.

“This is creepy,” I said as I generously offered myself up as a test subject for their “hover-chair” (move your body around in it, and you find yourself moving around a dilapidated old house).  “Looks like it could use a couple of chainsaws on the wall.”

“Great idea,” said the guy at the keyboard, and started working on importing a chainsaw or two.  (And of course, at right, I’m telling him exactly where to put them.)

Alas, the informal Vulcan lab was one of the few places where I could do more than simply look.  Too much else was dismayingly passive, and the “content” too often made me feel like I was being lowest-common-denominatored, Hollywood-style.  I mean, why in the name of all that’s environmentally holy would anyone in Seattle want to create an animated cartoon rain forest when magnificent real rain forests are just a couple of hours’ drive away?

But back to that passivity.  Just how passive?  At another location, I watched others don headsets and earphones to view short movies I’d watched earlier, including that “rain-forest” one.  These were movies whose rewards, meager as they were, came from moving your head — looking high up and around and way behind you.  But nearly everyone stood stock still, like they were frozen.

“Plato’s cave,” I thought.  “The VR origin story.”

Remember, in The Republic, when prisoners chained to the wall of a cave see shadows cast by a fire and mistake the shadows for reality?  Like those prisoners, most of my fellow head-setters seemed unable to move, passively accepting shadow life.  Faced with blatantly fake virtual environments, they swallowed them whole.

Could it be, I wonder, that two and a half thousand years after Plato, technology is merely trying to emulate him?  And with zero sense of irony?

I can see lots of great medical and educational uses for VR.  I can see lots of not-so-great uses too, including  military ones.  But above all, I can see huge profits for the Entertainment Industry.  Forget being a couch potato — make that a cave potato.

But still, there’s that Wow factor.  And in that, mea culpa.  I’d love to go paragliding, for instance, and ski-jumping:  two things I know I’ll never have the guts to do IRL, and would eagerly do in unreal life.  And then…

If you’re philosophically minded, you might remember the famous paper “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” by Thomas Nagel, a leading philosopher of consciousness.  Impossible to know, he said.  We may know a lot about bats — how they fly, their wing structure, and so on — but we’ll never know what it’s like to actually be one.   Or could VR change that?  Not with pretty 3D pictures of bats, but by getting as close as a human can get to what it feels like to fly like one (or more accurately, what it feels like to be a human thinking she’s flying like a bat).

That intrigues me, far more than crashing bikes into mountains or hanging chainsaws on walls.  Could we use VR to actually enter someone else’ experience?  Or something else’s?  To feel what they feel?  Could we use it to expand our minds?  To do something more than watch shadows?

Or will we just settle for wowing out?

I’ve been to New York City many times since September 11, 2001.  And each time, avoided going anywhere near Ground Zero, now formally known as the National September 11 Memorial.  I didn’t want to make a pilgrimage to disaster.  Didn’t want to take part in what felt like an act of national piety.  And yet I felt oddly guilty about not going.

Last Friday, I was in New York again.  It was horrible weather:  the whole city in complaint about the bitter cold, the biting wind, the snow flurries.  “And in April!” people kept saying, as though the season only added to the insult.

I had an early afternoon appointment way downtown.  And when I checked the map, realized it was just two blocks from Ground Zero.  It had taken me fifteen years, but the time had clearly come.

I’d seen photographs of the memorial, of course — and much admired the concept of it.  Not the conventional obelisk or spire lifting the eyes skyward, nor even the black marble wall built into the landscape of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War memorial in DC.  No.  This one, by comparison, was unutterably spare.  It didn’t lift off the ground or nest into it.  Instead, it went deep down into it.  Where the two towers had been, two giant squares had been dug, and filled partway with water.  Each almost an acre in size, they covered the footprints of the twin towers.  And at the center of each pool was a far deeper one, a sharp descent into what seemed to be a bottomless black square — a void within a void.

So why did I need to see this “in the flesh,” as it were?  I kept asking myself that question as I followed the thin stream of tourists who’d braved the weather, wool caps pulled low, scarves multiply wound, collars and shoulders hunched against the wind.  Were their eyes streaming in the wind like mine?  They had to be.  There is something about the iciness of a wintry Manhattan wind as it funnels through the high-rise canyons that seems to suck tears out of your eyes.

As we entered the plaza — past three guys handing out pamphlets for the memorial museum, each of them incongruously sporting green plastic Statue of Liberty headgear — I was wondering if there wasn’t something kind of ghoulish about this.  All these people going to see where all these other people had died?  The site of nearly three thousand horrific deaths becoming an item to be ticked off the tourist checklist?  What was I doing here?

Yet I resisted the urge to turn back.  As everyone else headed straight for the shelter of the museum building, I went the other way to the North Pool, the one where the North Tower had been.  I leaned over the waist-high parapet, its bronze surface etched with names of those who’d died, and the moment I did so, all my questions faded into very small, graceless quibbles.

What I saw was grey on grey on grey.  Concrete on concrete.  A square within a square, so sparse as to be brutalistic.  And this brutalism moved me — deeply and unexpectedly — because surely, it was what was needed.

I made my way to the south edge so as to get my back to the wind, but still it seemed to knife right through me — through the leather motorcycle jacket, through the fleece ski leggings, through the wool beret.  My eyes streamed more than ever — was it only the wind? — and as the tears threatened to freeze on my cheeks, I realized how utterly different this was from the photos I’d seen.

They’d showed placid water calmly spilling over from the upper square into the lower one — less my idea of a waterfall than of a large-scale ornamental water feature.  But the water this afternoon was anything but placid.  It was angry, roiled up by the wind dipping into it and howling over it, raising whitecaps and sending giant silvery curtains of wind-drift over the surface.  The water didn’t merely fall into the deep center square:  it fell over itself, boiling in icy tumult, tumbling and cascading into the void.

I stood.  Still.  Shivering.  For I don’t know how long.  In sadness, in awe, in admiration at how the designer, Michael Arad, had created what felt like sacred space out of  public place.  Not the kind of sacred space that elevates you, but the kind that fills you with dread, and with the biting awareness of how fragile life can be.

“You should have taken a photograph,” a friend said that evening.  But I had no need to.  That time I spent leaning over the parapet is unforgettable, and what I saw is etched in my mind as indelibly as the terrible images from fifteen years ago.  “There’ll be lots of photos online,” I said.  And indeed there are.  But all seem to be with the water calm.  It seems nobody pauses to takes photographs when an icy wind is blowing.  And many of the photographers had clearly waited for dusk, when the walls are lit up for dramatic effect, though all the lighting did, to my eye, was prettify what should never be prettified.  After a half-hour of online scrolling, I found not one photo that came anywhere near expressing the forlorn quality of the place last Friday afternoon — the terrible, abandoned greyness of it.

And maybe that’s as it should be.  How, after all, do you photograph absence?  How do you photograph a void?

–

Allow me to rave. I’ve read several good novels over the past few months, but none has bowled me over like this one.

Sudden Death is bawdy and metaphysical, cheeky and deadly serious, vividly funny and yet written from a place of very deep pain. In other words, it’s totally uncategorizable. And if I try to describe it, I know I’ll only turn most readers off.

It’s set in the sixteenth century, for a start. It revolves around a tennis match. It takes place in Mexico and Italy and Spain. The dialogue is without quotation marks, so you need to hear the speakers rather than read them. And on the very first page, there’s a sentence in Latin, untranslated.

Are you sufficiently turned off?

So let me tell you that the tennis ball in play is made of Ann Boleyn’s red hair, cut off her head just before her head was cut off from her body. And that there was nothing Wimbledon-like about tennis in the Renaissance, when it was a vicious game beloved by gamblers and low-lifes.

Then let me tell you that one of the players is a certain artist by the name of Caravaggio. And that one of the judges is a mathematician who turns out to be, on nearly the very last page… (but no, that would be a spoiler). And that major appearances are made by the conquistador Hernán Cortés, by Aztec emperors, by a Mayan princess, and by an assortment of venal popes. And – the clincher for me – grappa is downed by the jugful.

Or perhaps you’ll be as entranced as I am by tapestries woven entirely of feathers (scroll to the end for a piece made of hummingbird and parrot feathers). Or by the extraordinary mastery of the way Enrigue spans time and distance, finally setting my head spinning as though I was on mushrooms.

This Spanish and Mexican award-winner is the first of Enrigue’s novels to be translated into English, and I want to read all of them, right now. In the meantime, after marveling for a day once I’d finished this one, I began reading it again – and realized that of all the blurbs on the back cover, only the late lamented Carlos Fuentes manages to describe Sudden Death the way I would if I could.

This is a novel, he wrote, that “belongs to Max Planck’s quantum universe rather than the relativistic universe of Albert Einstein: a world of coexisting fields in constant interaction and whose particles are created or destroyed in the same act.”

Precisely (as it were): a quantum novel. No wonder I can’t describe it. No wonder many people will be frustrated by it. No wonder I love it.

————-

In case you take the leap, here’s a rough version of the Latin on the first page (with a bit of help from Google Translate). It’s a quote from the fifteenth-century Bishop of Exeter describing tennis as “profane oaths and gatherings, illicit and full of perjuries, often with fighting.”

And here — miserably flat and two-dimensional — is a Mexican Indian feather-art portrait of Jesus, made with hummingbird and parrot feathers:

I love this photo. My friend the art critic and Pulitzer finalist Jen Graves (yes, I’m boasting) took it last month at a preview of an exhibit at Seattle’s Frye Museum of Art.  That’s me up there on the wall — my words, that is — and she’s reading them aloud to him.

What she’s reading is this:

Write what you know, they say.

But I write what I don’t know,

led by stubborn desire

to explore,

to see what there is,

or what might be,

or could be.

I play with ideas,

with paradox,

conundrum,

and wrestle with words

— pin them down –

— lose hold of them –

— delete them —

until the right ones appear.

I recognize them

and then, startled,

come to a dead halt

lest they shift again.

They may not seem so right

tomorrow, yet here they are,

in the world,

suddenly solid.

The fire extinguisher seems a tad de trop.  As might be the show’s title, ‘Genius 21’, which surely runs the risk of begging the question.  It’s on through January.

Here’s a great two-page record of my infinity talk at the Goodship Academy of Higher Education the other night, and the discussion that followed.  It was made by artist Jed Dunkerley, whose extraordinary talents range from animation design to musical theater.

(The talk, based on the next-to-last chapter of Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, ended up on the front page of the Seattle Times.  It began with the pianist playing Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon,’ and yes, that’s me inviting people to come sit on the floor.  The book’s due out in April, and I’d show you the cover except… well, infinity means it’s not yet finalized).

I slow down for falcons.

Falcons, eagles, hawks, cranes, herons, kestrels, all manner of large birds.

If I’m on the road, I pull over, stop the car, get out, and allow myself to be entranced.  If I’m at home and spot one from my office window, I abandon the keyboard, step out onto the deck, and stand transfixed, silently urging it closer even as it spirals farther away.

This is one reason I’ve been stretching the muscles of my mind trying to commit Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem The Windhover to memory — the first eight lines, that is, since the last six go all over-the-top Christ-our-Lordy and do nothing for me.

A mere eight lines should be easy enough, no?  It should be what my Irish mother used to call a doddle.  And yet while I think I have an excellent memory, this poem defies me, and has done so for well over a year.

Try reciting it out loud, slowly, rather than reading it fast and silently:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

    dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

You see what I mean?  Wouldn’t you love to ring upon the rein of a wimpling wing?

This is one of the two most anthologized poems written by Hopkins, the closeted gay man who became a Jesuit priest and indeed kept his heart in hiding — except in his poetry.  The other is Pied Beauty, which you might know from its first line, “Glory be to God for dappled things,” but that I love for its seventh, which expands dappledness to “All things counter, original, spare, strange.”

The idea of beauty as counter, original, spare, strange is so damn beautiful, and yet it’s ‘The Windhover’ that haunts me, so much so that it comes with me everywhere I drive.  Physically comes with me, that is, nestled on page 468 of The Rattlebag, an anthology edited by Ted Hiughes and Seamus Heaney that has taken up permanent residence on the passenger seat of my car, jostling for room with the occasional human passenger.  Every time a drawbridge goes up (this being watery Seattle), I open the book to the dog-eared page and recite the lines a few times, eyes open sometimes, closed at others.  Yet no matter how I do it, nor how many times I do it, I find myself stumbling, and have to stop and look at the printed page, always discovering yet another transcendent phrase that’s escaped me.

‘The Windhover’ defies memory, at least for me, and this makes me marvel not only at the lines themselves — at each evocatively, even provocatively precise word — but at how Hopkins wrote them.  He has to have held the whole of the poem in his mind in order to write it, has to have each word following each word firmly in place.  And yet as a mere reader/reciter, I can’t keep track.  The poem seems to spiral away from me, to soar out of sight, leaving me thrillingly aware of the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

It’s weird how a single scene from a movie can stay with you. Like this piece of American noir:

A fedora-hatted gumshoe walks into a Chinese eatery. He heads for the back booth where an over-sized guy with a bowl in one hand and chopsticks in the other is steadily shoveling food into his mouth. The gumshoe wants information, and tosses a banknote on the table. The other guy delicately picks up the banknote with his chopsticks, tucks it into his vest pocket, and keeps right on eating.

I so envied that nonchalant chopstick deftness. A mere thirty seconds of screen time, but it stayed with me even though nothing else of the movie did. I had no idea what it was called, or where I’d seen it (late-night TV?), or who was in it (Bogart?). So for years – decades – I recounted the scene over Japanese or Chinese or Thai food in the hope that someone would recognize it. And finally, a month ago, someone did. A New York friend who’d been on a noir binge in preparation for a course he was teaching sent an email titled “That movie.”

Pickup on South Street. 1953. Directed by Sam Fuller.   Starring Richard Widmark.

Yay! I found a copy, and I was right, it was a great scene. It was a wonderful damn scene. Yet while it was exactly as I remembered it, it was also not at all as I remembered it.

The chopstick magic was there – not once, but twice, as more money was tossed on the table until the overweight guy (going by the irresistible moniker of Lightning Louie) was persuaded to talk. But where the scene played in my memory with the camera full front on him, he was shown the whole time in profile, from the side. The camera was fronted on the gumshoe, seated not across from him in a booth, but cater-corner at a table.

And there was no fedora.  In fact there was no gumshoe. ‘He’ was she – Jean Peters, the female lead, playing the ballsy yet vulnerable dame trying to find a bad-on-the-surface/good-at-heart guy in trouble (that’d be Widmark, of course).

I watched the rest of Pickup on South Street as though for the first time. I had no memory of it, despite the great camera angles and a terrific cast of characters. Only that one cherished scene was familiar, told so many times to friends and drastically re-created in the process. In essence, I’d re-shot the scene, usurping Sam Fuller’s role as director.

I like to think I’m a good observer. As a psychologist, I should surely have a clear eye. I know how malleable memory is, how it has a way of adapting itself to desired narrative, to what we think should have or could have been. But here was proof positive that I’m no more immune than anyone else. I wanted the gumshoe. I wanted the fedora. And because I was entranced by Lightning Louie’s ability to pick up banknotes with chopsticks, I wanted him head on.

As a wise friend said, “we all write our own scripts.”

“Isn’t there a convention that if you don’t know the author of a quote, you can always attribute it to Churchill?” one character asks another in Zia Haider Rahman’s novel ‘In The Light of What We Know.’

“I suppose you’re right,” the other replies.  “In fact, as Churchill himself said, the false attribution of epigrams is the friend of letters and the enemy of history.”

“Churchill said that?”

“No.”

That’s just an amuse-bouche from Rahman’s novel, which I’ll write more about soon.  But it seems to me that the epigram convention could as well apply to Kafka as to Churchill.  I suspect this might be the case in the following quote invariably attributed to Prague’s ur-existentialist:

— “The meaning of life is that it stops.”

I love the mordant humor of that (and have never heard it attributed to Churchill.)   My problem with it is that I can’t figure out where it comes from.  Was it really Kafka?   Kafka fan sites (a Kafkaesque notion in itself) list hundreds of quotes, but few bother to source the quotes precisely, and even on those few, this particular one goes unsourced.   A friend says it sounds more like Oscar Wilde, and it does have that sardonic Wildean touch.

So herewith, an appeal:  if you know where Kafka said it (or Wilde, or even Churchill come to that), please do let me know, so that I can give credit where it’s indubitably due.

And talking of crediting quotes, I’m still casting my net for the source of this brilliant definition:

— “Forgiveness is abandoning all hope of a perfect past.”

At first blush, this sounds quite Wildean too, but it has a resonance — an afterlife in the mind — that speaks of deep sagacity, though the sage in question remains a mystery.   So again, if you know who said it (perhaps that should be written as whoseddit, as in whodunnit), do let me know.

In the meantime, here’s a sprinkling of well-sourced quotes that have been circling my head this past month:

— “I have decided to stick with love;  hate is too great a burden to bear.” — Martin Luther King

— “To be free of belief and unbelief is my religion.” — Omar Khayyam

— “We don’t even know for sure that our universe really had a beginning at all, as opposed to spending an eternity doing something we don’t understand.” — physicist Max Tegmark

— “I look forward to surviving.  If I don’t, remember that I wasn’t Hamas or a militant, nor was I used as a human shield.  I was at home.” — Mohammed Suliman, Gaza City

—  and again from Zia Haider Rahman:  “Listening is hard, because you run the risk of having to change the way you see the world.”

———————

August 26 update:

That quote on forgiveness?  Identified!

Many thanks to AT reader Nuzhat (see comments), who traced it to…  not Wilde, not Kafka, not even Churchill, but to a wonderful and totally unexpected source:  the wisdom of comedy in the form of Lily Tomlin!

My copy of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard bears the marks of a well-used life, much like the photo of him in today’s New York Times. The cover is torn and tattered, the linen boards worn and faded, the pages yellowing at the edges. The end pages are full of scribbled notes to myself, the text scored and marked in the margins. This is a much-read book.

I’ve placed it high on the reading list of every writing course I’ve ever taught, tracing the intertwining of its parallel journeys: on the one hand, into the hidden inner sanctum of Dolpo on the Tibetan plateau, in search of the elusive snow leopard; on the other, into the mystical and equally elusive peacefulness of Zen Buddhism.

There were far more than two hands, of course, which is why I read the book so many times and never tired of it, entranced by the intense lyricism of its descriptions of landscape, and the sharp contrast with the pared-down writing about Zen practice.

I have most of Matthiessen’s other books too, both fiction and nonfiction, but this is the one I keep coming back to (in a way I suspect would have deeply disappointed him — no writer cares to be defined by one book above all the others).

I didn’t know much ‘about’ him other than what he revealed in his writing, which was carefully calibrated. I had no idea he worked a naively youthful two years for the CIA, for example, using the Paris Review as a cover, though I did know he’d become a Zen priest, that he was fiercely involved with environmental issues, and that he was… well, not exactly good-husband material. No matter: the writer was more important to me than the man.

Yet much as I love and admire his writing, I haven’t ordered my own copy of his last book, a novel called In Paradise. Instead, it’s waiting for me at the library as I write.  And has been waiting a few days. I delay picking it up because even though it’s Matthiessen, something in me doesn’t want to read it. It’s set at a meditation retreat at the concentration camps of Birkenau and Auschwitz, and the very idea of such a retreat seems, at least to me, a horribly ironic oxymoron. Which may indeed turn out to be his point. I’ll find out soon enough.

Matthiessen died yesterday, at age 86. “I don’t want to cling too hard to life,” he’d said, and by not doing so, I suspect he arrived again at the place he described in this quote from The Tree Where Man Was Born, which serves as the ending of the extraordinarily timed piece on him in today’s NYT magazine. Here it is:

“Lying back against these ancient rocks of Africa, I am content. The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without having discovered what it was.”

What is this if not pure Zen?

I don’t remember ordering J.M.Ledgard’s novel Submergence from the library.  I do remember getting the email that it had arrived, and wondering what it was. Then picking it up a couple of days later, looking at the cover — “huh?” — and asking myself if I even wanted to read it.

I still know nothing about Ledgard aside from the capsule bio on  the back cover:  Born in Scotland, lives in Africa, political and war correspondent for The Economist.  Nothing, that is, but the fact that he’s written an astonishingly ambitious, beautiful, and haunting novel.  So much so that the moment I finished it — and I mean the precise moment, with no hesitation — I turned back to the first page and began reading it again, with even greater admiration.

The ‘plot’ is simple enough:  a man and a woman meet in a French hotel, have a brief affair, and continue thinking of each other as they go on with their separate lives.  He is an intelligence agent gathering information on militant extremists in Somalia.  She is a deep-ocean scientist obsessed with the strange life forms in the deep-water fissures of the earth’s mantle.  He is captured by jihadist fighters, badly beaten, held hostage.  She dives in a submersible 3,000 meters under the north Atlantic.  Separate lives indeed, yet somehow, and with extraordinary grace, Ledgard pulls them together into a magnificent evocation of the complexity of life on earth, human and otherwise.  And of its intense fragility.

Life in the deep turns out to be extraordinarily stable.  Life on the surface, terrifyingly unstable.  The hardship of Somalia comes as alive here as the shimmering life forms (I had to look up ‘salp’ on Wikipedia) in the hadopelagic — ‘hado’ from Hades, the deepest depths.  The jihadist captors are drawn with rare understanding even as there’s no stinting on their cruelty (including an all-too-vivid scene in which a young teenage girl who has been raped is stoned to death for adultery).

Here’s an extract from toward the end:

We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose… What is likely is that sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate.

You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead.  You will be drowned in obliviion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory.  It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in.  It will be a submergence.  You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms because they are the foundation of all forms.  In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead.  Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you.  You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it.  Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.  It is stable.  Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

And as an eerie footnote to this, here’s Ledgard in an interview last year on the blog of The New Yorker.  The novel “juxtaposes land with ocean and enlightenment with fanaticism,” he acknowledged. “I felt impelled to write it in this way, but it is odd, I can see that. But sometimes life is even odder. It was the strangest moment for me when Osama bin Laden was killed and buried at sea. Everything came together in the abyss. I have often thought about it since, not just bin Laden’s weighted corpse sinking down to the sea floor, but also the processes done on his body, the creatures, the crushing dark, and that’s what I am talking about — there is another world in our world.”

The come-on, in a brief item in the New York Times arts section:  “A Picasso for $135?  There’s a Chance.”

Yeah, sure.  I would have ignored the headline except that it ran under a photo of a run-down street somewhere in the Middle East.  Tyre, as it turns out.

The $135 is for a raffle ticket, and the raffle is a fund-raising project run by the International Association to Save Tyre.  How exactly the intended arts center and research institute could save this war-battered town on the coast of south Lebanon is not at all clear, but the organizers sure know how to get attention.  Apparently reckoning that international big spenders wouldn’t know Tyre from Timbuktu, they came up with a splashy prize:  a gouache said to be worth a million dollars.

The most I’ve ever spent on a lottery ticket before is $2.  Yet it wasn’t Picasso that made me go here and drop 67.5 times as much.  Nor the absurd idea of a million dollars hanging on the wall of my houseboat.  In fact much as I admire Picasso (there’s a bronze head of his in the Tate Modern right now that I could stroke all day if they wouldn’t throw me out at first touch), this piece, Man With Opera Hat, doesn’t really do much for me.  Perhaps because I’m just not that into men in opera hats (men in fedoras would be something else…).

No, what inspired my extravagance was Tyre itself.  Or rather, Tyre’s most infamous princess, Jezebel, who was born when it was at its most splendid, three thousand years ago.  The same magnificent Phoenician princess who married the king of a small mountain kingdom called Israel, challenged the fierce prophet Elijah and sent him packing, died one of the most gruesome deaths in a book not known for eschewing grue, and and was branded a harlot for her trouble by the men who wrote the two biblical books of Kings.  I wrote a biography of her some years back, and I’m still half in love with her.

Even her sworn enemies, the Hebrew prophets, were half in love with her.  Maybe more than half.  Here’s Ezekiel delighting in the splendor of her home city even as he savored its eventual fall:

You were an exemplar of perfection.  Full of wisdom, perfect in beauty.  You were in Eden, in the garden of God, and a thousand gems formed your mantle.  Sard, topaz, diamond, chrysolite, onyx, jasper, sapphire, ruby, emerald, the gold of your flutes and tambourines – all were prepared on the day of your creation.

So you might think the New York Times would ask the organizers what happened to Tyre, and how come the most sophisticated civilization of its time was reduced to battle-scarred poverty, its run-down buildings overlooking the archeological remains of what once was.  Instead, they asked this:  “What would Picasso have made of the raffle?”

Pfah!  They could at least have asked what Jezebel would have made of it.

“A tiny little gouache?” I can hear her saying.  “That’s it?  With all the wars fought and blood shed since I was alive here, wouldn’t Guernica have been more fitting?”

There was something unsatisfactory about the New York Times’ front-page obit for Nobel literature laureate Doris Lessing, at least for me.  So I went back to the archives to look for the magazine piece I wrote on her in 1982, and there I found the complex, ornery, fiercely intelligent writer I’d spent a whole day talking with.  It’s long (the NYT Magazine really ran magazine-length pieces back then), so if you want to read the whole piece, click here.  A few out-takes:

On Euro-centrism:

“I’m glad that I was not educated in literature and history and philosophy, which means that I did not have this Euro-centered thing driven into me, which I think is the single biggest hang-up Europe has got. It’s almost impossible for anyone in the West not to see the West as the God-given gift to the world.”

On marriage:

In retrospect, she says, ”I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married. I’m probably unmarriageable now. I just can’t imagine a marriage that would make sense to me. Once you’ve passed 30, I think, it becomes harder and harder for a woman to do. It’s easy when you’re a teenager; perhaps that’s the built-in mechanism for continuation of the species.”

On religion and politics:

”There are certain types of people who are political out of a kind of religious reason,” she says, digging dirt ferociously out of the kitchen table. ”I think it’s fairly common among socialists: They are, in fact, God-seekers, looking for the kingdom of God on earth. A lot of religious reformers have been like that, too. It’s the same psychological set, trying to abolish the present in favor of some better future — always taking it for granted that there is a better future. If you don’t believe in heaven, then you believe in socialism.

On Sufism:

”I’m not a Sufi, I’m studying it,” she says. ”It takes a very long time to become one, if ever, which distinguishes us from all these cults that create instant mystics. The Sufis see the whole guru phenomenon as a degeneration, and the people who pursue gurus as unfortunates.”

On the long view:

“We’re a species under extremely heavy stress. We emerged from the last ice age 12,000 years ago, and we are shortly — say, next week or in a thousand years’ time — going back into another ice age. Compared to that threat, nuclear war is a puppy. We have lived through many ice ages, through wars and famines. Look at Barbara Tuchman’s book on the 14th century, ‘A Distant Mirror’ – nobody thought they would survive that century, but they did. We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.”

I wasn’t a “fan” of Lessing’s.  I admired her, but clearly with considerable reservations.  It wasn’t until a few weeks later, with the piece edited and ready for publication, and myself back in the United States, that admiration won out.   I got a panicked phone call from the New York Times:  “Can you call Doris Lessing and try to talk some sense into her?”

Um, come again?

Apparently they’d wanted to send a photographer, and she’d said no.  “There’s plenty of photos of me out there,” she’d said.  “You can use any of them.  No need to go taking another one.”

“But Mrs Lessing, we’re running this as the cover story,” they’d objected, with all the weighty consciousness of the magnitude of a New York Times Magazine cover.  “And we can only do that if we have our own photo of you.”

“So don’t run it as the cover story,” she’d said.  “What do I care?”  And hung up.

I loved it.  Most people would jump any number of hoops to be on the cover of the NYT Magazine.  But Doris Lessing truly didn’t care.  And even as I realized she’d done me out of a cover story as well as herself (they’d run the piece, of course, but with an old black-and-white photo and not as the lead), I started laughing out loud.  And could all but hear them down the line thinking, “Christ, she’s as crazy as Lessing.”

These two portraits are of the same woman.  Her name was Helen Brooke Taussig, and she was a famed cardiologist who did ground-breaking work in pediatric cardiac surgery.  So which one do you think has never been shown in public?

The one of the left is of someone I’d like to meet.  It’s by Jamie Wyeth, and was commissioned by Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was head of the children’s cardiology clinic, in 1963.  But it was never hung alongside all the portraits of male doctors on the hospital walls.  It was called “witchy.”  And “evil.”  Taussig was seen as “scowling.”  This was not how a doctor should be portrayed.  Especially not a female doctor.

Fast forward to 1975, when Johns Hopkins tried again, with the portrait on the right — someone I have no interest in meeting.  It’s an utterly standard institutional portrait, down to the single-strand pearl necklace, the tightly reassuring smile to go with the tightly curled hair, and of course the white coat.  This was apparently how a woman doctor “should” look.  Conventional, bland, and “reassuring.”  Taussig herself is absent, replaced by a totally uninteresting cipher.  Yet even this piece of artistic pap didn’t make it onto the Hopkins wall of fame.

It only took fifty years, but now the Wyeth portrait of her is finally to be publicly shown — not, to what should be its shame, at Johns Hopkins, but at a retrospective of Jamie Wyeth’s work next year at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

I’ve never been a particular fan of Wyeth’s, but this portrait is powerful.  It’s a portrayal of an intense, determined woman deeply committed to her work.  Slightly disheveled, because who has time for perfect grooming when there’s important work to be done?  Serious, because her work is serious.  And per the New York Times, “steely-eyed.”

But I don’t see steely eyes.  I see a directness, an openness that I admire.  I see a woman deeply committed to the seriousness of life.  I see someone unafraid to be her own intelligent, determined, vulnerable self.  And I appreciate both Wyeth’s effort to reach out and see Taussig on her own terms, and her allowing him to do that.  For both of them, that took courage — exactly the kind of courage that’s necessary to do ground-breaking work, in any field.

And so I think about how we portray women, still, today.  The constant “Smile!” demands of photographers — demands never made of men.  The emphasis on make-up and clothes.  The obsessive focus on how we “look” — not how we look at the camera or the painter, but on how we look to others, how we will be judged by the court of appearances and surfaces.  Do we look “attractive”?  Do we look “feminine”?  Do we look as we “should” look?

It’s our choice.  We can surrender to all these demands and end up as blandly uninteresting as the right-hand portrait of Dr Taussig.  Or, as she did with Wyeth, we can find the courage to be ourselves — to look into the eyes of others with integrity and self-respect and say, “This is me.  Here I am.”

It’s rare that a commencement address makes news.  This annual speech given by one notable or another to the graduating class of an American college or high school is usually in the blandly uplifting vein (you-young-people-are-a-whole-new-future, our-hopes-are-in-you, as-you-go-out-into-this-great-wide-world blah blah blah).   Students fidget and check their phones, parents nod and beam proudly, and everyone comes away satisfied that a ritual has been duly observed.  So when Roosevelt High School in Seattle asked writer David Guterson to give their commencement speech this past June, they apparently expected more of the same.

They didn’t get it.

What they got was what anyone who has read Guterson would hope for.  His best-known novel is probably his first, Snow Falling on Cedars, but my favorites are Our Lady Of The Forest and The Other.  These are all hauntingly beautiful and deeply serious works of art, books that go deep into the terms on which we exist both on this earth and in this society.

The terms of our existence?  In a commencement speech?  A call to engage honestly and fiercely with the whole question of happiness?  And with the reality of — gasp! — death?  Some parents heckled and booed, and tried to cut the speech short.  Later, they complained that it was “gloomy” and “negative.”  Too real, it seems.

Interestingly — and far more to the point — students did not heckle or boo.  They listened.  Many with gratitude.  Because here was someone actually talking directly to them, to where they were at.  Knute Berger, the editor of Crosscut, thought the same, posting a “defense of David Guterson.”  But read the speech for yourself, and see what you think:

Thank you.  And thank you to the organizers of this event for giving me the opportunity to speak.  I don’t take it lightly.  Life’s short, and we don’t often have the chance to share what we think and feel is most important.  This, for me, is exactly that chance, and I don’t want to waste it by talking to you casually.  Right now, I have 15 minutes, and after that I will leave this podium, and it might be the case that never again will I have the microphone at a ceremony like this one, where it’s perfectly acceptable for me to offer up my take on things–where it’s even expected that I’ll offer my take on things.  That take on things, most of the time, remains private, which is how it should be.  You have your own–everyone here has their own vision of life.  But right now I’ve been invited to share mine, and I’d like to do that with everyone here–not just with the graduating seniors but with their parents and siblings, their friends and relatives, their teachers, the administrators on hand tonight, to anyone in reach who cares to listen.

And what I want to talk about, as specifically and straightforwardly as possible, is happiness–happiness as something elusive on the one hand, and central to our concerns as human beings on the other.  At every moment of our waking lives, we’re either in pursuit of happiness or enjoying its presence.  When we feel unhappy, we want to change that, and when we feel happy, we want that to continue.  At this very moment you are somewhere on the spectrum of happiness and unhappiness.  If you are bored or uncomfortable, if your unhappiness takes those forms, you want things to change in the direction of less boredom and more comfort–in other words, in the direction of more happiness.  If you’re enjoying this moment and finding it entirely pleasant, you don’t need things to change.  Life, quite relentlessly, is of this nature, and all of us pass it, from moment to moment, either addressing our unhappiness or enjoying our happiness.  All of us get considerable amounts of both, no matter what we do, but some people get more of one or the other, and I submit to you that you yourself have much to say about the amount of each in your life.  In fact, no one, and nothing, has more to say about it than you.

I have an absolutely clear memory of being 18 and graduating from Roosevelt High School.  I remember that many things made me feel happy, and that I pursued those things with vigor, but I also remember that I dreaded adulthood, and even more, old age and death, and that no matter what I was doing, no matter how good were the good times, somewhere at the bottom–underneath the music and the friends, the late nights and the fun–somewhere at the bottom there was always an awareness that this wasn’t going to last forever, and that I would have to get old like everyone else, which might not be so fun, and that one day, I would die, which wouldn’t be fun, either.  Sometimes I would go for long periods without thinking about this, but then it would come to me again, the reality of my aging and death, an awareness of this while I was having so much fun, and the way I dealt with it was by telling myself that old age and death were way off in the future, that I had a lot of time, that I would deal with it later.  Or I denied it.  I told myself that, somehow, my own aging and death weren’t possible.  I remember thinking, in 1974, that the year 2016, when I would turn 60, would somehow never come, that it just couldn’t happen, something would change before that date, and yet now it’s just 3 years away.

Is all of this familiar?  Or was I just an inordinately morbid 18 year old?  I think the literature I taught when I was a high school English teacher is pretty clear on this, because distress about mortality is there, pervasively, in the poems, plays, novels, and stories human beings have produced–they tell us in no uncertain terms that death is a big problem for a lot of us, and that the reality of our own death makes it very, very hard for us to feel 100% happy 100% of the time, which is how we would like to feel, and how we wish life was.  In fact, we’re bothered by the fact that this universe we didn’t invent or choose to live in has to be like this.  Why couldn’t it be otherwise?  Why isn’t reality better than it is?  If there’s a God, how come He or She includes death in His or Her Creation–not to mention suffering and pain, and suffering and pain of such intensity and persistence that it seems impossible that there is indeed a Creator who is all powerful and all good?  Because if the Creator of the universe is all powerful and all good, why do bad things not just happen but happen to everybody?  And why is it that the ultimate bad thing, our annihilation as individuals, also happens to everybody?  What kind of a God creates such a reality?  Not one who is all powerful and all good, as far as we, in our limited, human way, construe those terms.  Which turns a lot of us into unbelievers, quite naturally.  But then what?  Now what?  We find ourselves afraid of the universe, because it is either the work of a God who seems inexplicable at best and malicious at worst or a place completely indifferent to us, when all we want, as I said before, is to be happy.  Why does that have to be so complicated, this happiness we seek?  Why does the universe seem to be a place where happiness isn’t possible?  We don’t have answers.  And so, from day to day we just stumble on through life, aware that it is, in its very nature, unsatisfactory, and experiencing, privately, a sense of dissatisfaction with it, and mostly at a loss regarding what to do about it.  In this profoundly confused way, our lives pass, and then they end.

If you are troubled by all of this, and would rather not be asked to think about it right now, well, welcome to the human race.  On the other hand, be glad, because if you’re troubled right now, than at least at this moment you’re no longer kidding yourself.  For just this moment you aren’t saying to yourself, “I’ll deal with it later; right now, things are good.”  Instead of kidding yourself that way, you’re looking directly at the central problem life presents, which can’t be addressed as long as you’re fleeing from it.  So if you’re distressed right now by all of this talk about death and God and the universe, be glad that you’re able to feel this distress, because without it, you’d have no hope for happiness.  Your distress, your dissatisfaction, is the starting place, and the earlier you acknowledge and accept it, the better.  In fact, this early start is critical, because if you wait, you will only continue on the path of deepening your strategies of avoidance, and that will make it harder.  So start now, if you are 18 or 80.  Start today.

What do I mean by strategies of avoidance?  That’s a plural–strategies of avoidance–so let me start by describing just one, a common one in our place and time.  This strategy hinges on willful distraction.  We wake up, remember who we are, remember where we are, recall that life is not entirely satisfactory, and then we turn on our various hand-held devices to see what is going on in the world and who is communicating with us, and when those plentiful sources of distraction are temporarily exhausted we listen to music, and when the music doesn’t entirely satisfy we play a game on our hand-held devices while listening to different music, or we read while we eat, or while going to the bathroom, or while riding on the bus, and again we have the sensation that something is wrong, that things are not entirely satisfactory, we lack 100% happiness, and so we text somebody, or look at pictures of people on Facebook, or remember that there is something we would like to buy that could use a little research, and then, when the bus stops, a person sexually attractive to us gets on and sits down, and we look up and distract ourselves from the basic problem of life by admiring them for a while, some of us getting carried away with all kinds of thoughts about that person that have nothing to do with who they are in actuality, and after a while that fades, too, and we go on to the next thing, which might be, before we look down again at the screen of our hand-held device, a visual sweep across the landscape of our fellow bus riders while indulging in a stream of critical thoughts about them, that the person there is ugly, or that the person there is obviously an idiot because if he wasn’t he wouldn’t wear what he is wearing or carry the kind of backpack he is carrying, at which point the bus is passed in the adjacent lane by a car and you turn your attention to that, you peer out the window into the car because there are 4 fellow students in it on their way to school and one of them is somebody you don’t like very much, a cheater and a jerk, and then it’s time to look at your hand-held device again, and now an hour has passed since you woke up and only once or twice, in small, unasked for lulls, were you undistracted enough to know what you were actually doing or thinking and to exercise some control over it.  For years and years you’ve done this until it has become, simply, the way your brain works.  The neural pathways of judgment and impatience and boredom and dissatisfaction have become deep grooves, until this manner of experiencing the world and life seems to be the only possible way.  But it is, in fact, not the only way.  It is instead something you have learned to do, something that with time has become so familiar to you that you may be as unaware of it as you are of your own breathing.

Many of you, young and old, are recreational marijuana users.  But regarding you graduates: statistics show that about half of people your age use marijuana more than 100 times per year.  In our part of the United States the rate is even higher, and in schools like Roosevelt, with a large upper middle class demographic, the rate is higher still.  I say this because I think recreational marijuana use is related to the point I’m making.  You become dissatisfied with the ordinary, common, familiar, and normal processes of your own mind and use marijuana in order to get away from them.  You smoke, and after that your mind works differently, and it is like a respite or vacation from your ordinary mind, an interlude in which you experience the world and life and your own mind in a more satisfying way.  But then, eventually, the trip is over, and you come back to your ordinary way of thinking and to the normal world, which is so boring and unsatisfactory that you feel an urge to get high again, all the while knowing that this marijuana smoking is a crutch, a little vacation or a holiday, but not really the answer to the problem of life–really, in the end, just another distraction.  Some people do this with alcohol, or by taking literal vacations to places like Hawaii or Mexico, or by combining all 3, marijuana, alcohol, and a sunny beach, or by engaging in recreational activities like skiing or kayaking–all of it with a view toward experiencing life in a way more satisfying than it normally feels, and all of it undertaken with the sinking feeling that even these activities don’t really solve the problem.  They’re also just distractions, like everything else, brief respites from dissatisfaction, and they don’t address the fact that by and large we are not at peace, not satisfied, and not happy.

I mentioned earlier that young people sometimes deal with this problem by having as much fun as they can now while telling themselves that distressing existential dilemmas can come later.  I want to warn you that this is a recipe for disaster.  The fun you are having now turns out to be not so much a temporary stay against life and death, or a delaying tactic, but a response to life and death that gradually and relentlessly tightens its grip on you, and becomes a habit, even an addiction.  I also want to warn you about something else–that the society you find yourself in isn’t going to help you.  It isn’t designed to help you.  It isn’t a society with a spiritual or philosophical basis designed to assist you in your aspiration toward happiness.  It is, in fact, designed to do the opposite.  First, it teaches you that you are the most important thing in the world, and does it so well and thoroughly that you don’t even notice.  This is there in the the so-called “Enlightenment” philosophy that is the underpinning of modern Western life and in our political principles and political documents–that the individual, with his or her personal goals, hopes, dreams, and aspirations, is primary and foremost.  From these philosophical and political roots, the primacy of the individual has grown and spread to subsume nearly everything, and that, in the end, has not brought us happiness, because the you that matters so much every second of every day is in fact mortal and even ephemeral, and you know this, and isn’t it sad, even tragic, to know that in the end all of your hopes, dreams, and aspirations don’t amount to much, that they take you nowhere, and that this constant obsession with them is really just another form of unhappiness.  To put this another way, if my life is first and foremost about me, I will never be happy.

We have another big problem when it comes to happiness in our society.  While each of us is relentlessly busy chasing after his or her personal hopes and dreams, our very sophisticated modern economy is busily exploiting the psychological and emotional vulnerabilities elicited by this state of affairs.  It is an economy that motors along on your dissatisfaction, that steams ahead only if it can convince you that something is missing in your life.  It knows that you are insecure about your appearance, for example, and in advertising it does everything it can to make you feel even worse about it, because if you feel worse about it, you will buy expensive clothing or pay a doctor to change your face.  So in our society, not only do you have to be unhappy on that existential level that is just part and parcel of being human, you also have to be unhappy in ways designed for you by others, and if you are a woman or gay or a person of color, your society will make it even harder for you by tilting the playing field so you have to walk uphill, and by confounding your inner life in ways white men don’t have to face.  Add to this your natural anxiety about the future–your distress about what it means that we are developing smart drones and melting the polar ice cap–and happiness begins to feel, for a lot of us, impossible.  So impossible that the rate of mental illness in America, of depression in particular, is higher that it has ever been.  The world might seem full of possibility, and it is that way, but it is also a place where you can very quickly find yourself among the living dead–a being without the means for happiness.

Here is something you can do about it–or something you can do to get started.  Take whatever handheld device you own out of your pocket or bag and set the alarm for 2 hours for now.  When it makes whatever noise you have selected for it to make, ask yourself how often during the last 2 hours you were actually in charge of your thoughts.  How often was your mind just rolling along like a pack of drunken monkeys, doing whatever it wants without you having anything to say about it?  How often was it busy being bored, dissatisfied, critical of others, self-absorbed, insecure, self-hating, anxious, and/or afraid?  How often were you genuinely happy?  And exactly at the moment your alarm makes its noise, where was your mind and what was it doing?  Because in the end your mind is the one thing you have going for you when it comes to happiness.  A deliberate mind, a mind that works consciously–choosing, at every turn, what you are saying, what you are doing, and what you are thinking–this is very, very hard to achieve, which is why you should start now.  Cultivate those states of mind that actually produce happiness and cast out those that don’t.  After a while you will find that you care much less about your own hopes and dreams and a lot more about other people.  You will move in the direction of self-less-ness, which is a good thing, because if there is no self, who is it that has to die some day?  There will be no one there to die.  There will be no self.  Die now, so you won’t have to do it later.  Stop thinking about yourself every second of every day, which only produces boredom, dissatisfaction, fear, dread, anxiety, and hopelessness.   Put yourself away and begin to find freedom.  And you can find this freedom, which we might also call happiness.  Your life can open toward greater happiness and greater freedom, and it is entirely up to you to make that happen.  Because in the end you have the power to do it no matter what the universe seems to be like and no matter the challenges of our place and time.  You really are in charge of your own happiness.  Which is, I think, both exhilarating and terrifying.  Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could do it for you?  It’s such a daunting and important task, really the central task of life.  But I urge you to work, on your own, or with the right mentors, or preferably, in both ways, as honestly and fiercely as you can on this matter of your own happiness.  Don’t settle for the answers all around you that are not really answers.  Don’t settle for a life of quiet desperation.  And most of all, don’t settle for unhappiness.  I want to tell you that happiness is possible, and that you don’t have to be despairing and afraid.  But it’s up to you, to each of you, to seek out the wisdom that happiness requires.  Not learning but wisdom, which is something else altogether.  I wish you a long life, the better to find and deepen that wisdom.  And I wish you happiness.

Coming soon to a screen near you:  not one but two biopics about the life of Muhammad.  One from Iran, one from Qatar.  In other words:  one Shia, one Sunni.

Oy.

And double oy.  Because how do you make a movie about someone you can’t show on the screen?  Images of Muhammad are a no-no in Islam.  Though a few medieval Persian miniatures do show his cloaked figure, his face is blanked out — a white oval in the otherwise vividly colored painting.

No surprise, then, that there hasn’t been a feature movie about Muhammad since 1976, when Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi — yes, that Qaddafi — funded “The Message,” starring Anthony Quinn (shown here at left) as Muhammad’s uncle Hamza.

Who played Muhammad?  Nobody.  The solution was not to show him at all.  Instead, the camera acted as his eyes.  When the camera panned, you were supposed to think that this was what Muhammad was seeing.  The result was… less than convincing.

What was all too convincing was the violence surrounding the movie’s planned US debut in 1977.  Twelve Nation of Islam extremists not given to fact-checking heard a rumor that Quinn had played not Hamza, but Muhammad himself.  They laid siege to three buildings in Washington DC, where they held 149 hostages and killed a journalist and a police officer until they were persuaded by the combined efforts of the Egyptian, Pakistani, and Iranian ambassadors to surrender.  (The whole miserable story is here.)

Of course the hostage-takers hadn’t seen the movie.  If they had, they might have been amazed by its stereotypical blandness.  And they’d never be aware of their ironic role in ensuring that the director, Moustapha Akkad, gave up on religious-themed movies after “The Message,” made a small fortune directing Jamie Lee Curtis in the famed “Halloween” sequels, and then in 2005 went to a wedding in Jordan and got blown up by a suicide bomber.

If it seems way past time that a better film about Muhammad be made, the question remains how it can be done without violence.  And the problem remains of how to do it without showing him.

The highly regarded Iranian director Majid Majidi (“Children of Heaven,” “Color of Paradise”) began work on his $30-million movie last October, and reportedly intends to show Muhammad’s cloaked figure, but not his face.  In short order, an outraged denunciation came from Cairo’s al-Azhar University, followed by the announcement of plans for a rival movie from Sunni-majority Qatar,  with the blessing of a top Muslim Brotherhood theologian and a budget ranging, in various reports, from $200 million to $1 billion.

So how will the two movies differ, aside from the obvious lavishness of production moola and the issue of cloaked figure or no figure?  If you’ve read After the Prophet, you’ll know that the Iranian movie will likely give a far greater role to Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, whom Shia believe Muhammad designated as his successor — his first khalifa, or caliph.  The Qatari movie will just as likely give a heftier role to Muhammad’s father-in-law abu-Bakr, who in fact became the first caliph of Sunni Islam.  In other words, the two movies are likely to act out the Sunni-Shia split.

I guess acting it out with cameras is far preferable to doing so with guns, but the risk of course is that angry denunciations such as that of al-Azhar will only encourage the latter.

Meanwhile, Hollywood seems determined not to be left out of the prophets (and, of course, the profits).  Two biopics of Moses are reportedly in the works, with names like Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Ang Lee being bandied around with Hollywood abandon and zero confirmation.  And gird your loins for a biopic of Noah due for release next year, with the ark-builder being played by the star of “The Gladiator,” Russell Crowe.

Somehow I can’t quite imagine Russell Crowe with an olive branch…