Glory, Honor and Woodpecker

"Here we have a piece of chain that is a quarter of an inch thick. It is made of crude iron, stronger than steel. With the simple expansion of my pectoral muscles, or chest, that is, I'll break the hook."

Zampanò, in Fellini's "La Strada"

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Dear Kate,

I am writing in my backyard now but what I really want is to take a nap.  It's after lunch, it's the spring breeze, it's the blue sky with one big pillow of a cloud right around the back of my head.  This is good for writing, this is bad for writing, this is writing itself with no need of my help.  I see bugs surfing my lawn and they will sure surf me if I am to stop living.  The owl is watching.

Last night I dreamed about shooting penguins--no, just one, actually, brown, looks like a duck--with an arrow.  Sure it was a duck, the one in a vaudeville skit played by a holy fool in Fellini's "La Strada," a movie I've watched in my life three times but really for the first yesterday and at the end I said to myself, If I have to write about this movie one piece a day to ride out the pandemic it would have been all over before I could touch the surface of it.  Greatness defies any scale or merit system and certainly the "tomato-meter": hand me a check-list of what makes a movie great and "La Strada" is not on it.

Greatness I believe is the call of being human.  Off-the-scale greatness.

I contradicted myself just now, didn't I?  Surely to say something is great there must be some other not-so-great things for me to compare it with?

That is if we are to go with our unquestioned assumption that greatness means being number one, the best, and almost always at the expense of someone else who's not as good.

Now hear this: "...what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?  You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor."  So here is a sight of you and me in the loving gaze of our creative Father.  We are made and meant to be great, off-the-chartedly.  Do you know of a scale to weigh glories against each other?  Would one sort of honor cancel out a different sort and engage each other in a zero-sum game?

Then the question of course is: Why are we not great?  Why do we most of the time not even feel adequate?  Or as Fellini's movie seems to ask, Why do we live like animals?

The penguin is the duck is the woodpecker that's been working hard on my house's wood siding and I want to shoot it bad.

Yours, Alex