THIS ECSTATIC NATION

What Terror would enthrall the Street Could Countenance disclose The Subterranean Freight The Cellars of the Soul (poem #1225) Dust is the only secret Death, the only One You cannot find out all about In his "native town" (#153) One Anguish-in a Crowd A Minor thing-it sounds And yet, unto the single Doe Attempted of the Hounds 'Tis Terror as consummate As Legions of Alarm Did leap... (#565) Terror as perspectival experience. Howe writes: '"My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun-' explores the ambiguous terrain of dream, between power and execution, sensuality and sadism-here the poet would tread and draw blood. Mary Rowlandson's bestselling seventeenth-century captivity narrative, Hannah Dustm's 1697 captivity and violent self-organized escape, the legend of Daniel Boone: for Faludi-as for Howe- j these become crucial sites for exploring the ambiguities of American (self-)mythologizing. [...]Faludi analyzes the dynamics of "Saving Jessica Lynch." [...]Karlheinz Stockhausen's infamous (and, when read in full, complex) meditation on the destruction of that day as infernal art, aesthetic cataclysm: 'Tis so appalling-it exhilarates So over Horror, it half Captivates (#281) Or Susan Sontag's dissenting remarks published in The New Yorker, Sept. 24, 2001 The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the selfrighteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing.