In this second QUARANTINE session we range over where we are and where we’re not, looking back to glimpse the way ahead and what the unknown feels like, through ruminations on THE CAVE IN THE SNOW, the memoir of a 12-year spiritual retreat by Tenzin Palmo (English born Diane Perry), Dag Hammarskjold’s MARKINGS, the web and the Zoom, hand wringing over hand washing, Sparrow’s dictum that “staying home is the new activism, and Jack Spicer’s poem “It is Forbidden to Look”—-where our discussion in and on the Great Pause took a pause. Following the form of the Spicer poem, which in part occurs within the myth of Orpheus and his descent to the underworld—-in Spicer case, following the screenplay of Cocteau’s “Orfe,” via a wall mirror-—to Eurydice back to life, after a few days we reflect on what we had said as well as keep going, touching on Ginsberg’s first reading of HOWL in 1955 and its 1980, 25th-anniversary performance, Greg Masters’ collaborative poem with Steve Levine “Well Hello” (for Arthur Rimbaud), the play “He Who Gets Slapped” by Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev, the nature of masks and marks, and a homage to women, who it turns out outstrip men as our current essential workforce.
