Becalmed

Luthor isn't wrong about everything.

When Supes appoints Mon-el, guardian, alongside a second official Guardian (subtle much?), while he flies off undercover to New Krypton, Jimmy, elegantly, eloquently, on humanity's behalf, postulates Luthor's premise: "maybe it's time I manned up."

Mon-el further fosters Jimmy's co-dependence furnishing a signal watch attuned to a new frequency.

On the other hand, Luthor would cheer -- letters of protest to the editor long abandoned -- now that the citizenry are manning up, arming in a frenzy, fearing a 'perfect storm,' of 1) economic collapse; 2) civil unrest (racism); 3) gun law restrictions --

--investing a landscape lit by ignoble fear custom made by/for them.

Defenders, once hailed, are now Prosecutors (fortunately Sam Waterson is no E.G Marshall and will never be).

Per Wordsworth:

Ah me, that all
the terrors, all the early miseries,
regrets, vexations, lassitudes, that all
the thought and feelings which have been
infused
Into my mind, should ever have made up
the calm existence that is mine when I
am worthy of myself.

Ah, yes, a worthy calm existence (perfect stanza's) as formulated in:

a library;
a book;
a page;
a panel--

--are sorely missing in the new County library resembling a chain bookstore.

The absence of aisles, repetitive tall stacks, square gardens, obliterates the solitudinous shadow required to examine life.

Bolano asks, then, 'is calm the opposite of madness,' and answers, absolutely not.

Yet when Bolano loses the thread of even a flimsy McGuffin, i.e., the search for an obscure writer, he is abandoned, just as he dismisses ethics, duty, honesty, curiosity, love, bravery and art, all in the same breath.

I. Murdoch contends, "a deep motive for making art of any sort is the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what might otherwise seem a mass of senseless rubble."

Embracing spiritual warfare, for example, constructs forms of heroic drama, yet its cheerless, aggressive, nature, menances far too arrogantly to achieve the synthesis of a Trinitarian Justice League that will inevitably be subsumed by an ordered Anglo-American landscape.

Something like the Psalms, meant to be sung ascending the measured steps of Solomon's Temple, balances an untamed grace panelled in manageable red-letter captions.