Sporadic news dispatches from California over the past couple of years have kept us posted on the ups and downs, in the sedate Carmel Valley, of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Non-Violence. We read, for instance, of the failure of a zoning challenge brought by a neighbor who regarded the Institute’s afternoon sessions as “detrimental to the peace, morals, or general welfare of Monterey County.” The sessions, so the items informed us, involved twenty-five students at a time in a six-week curriculum of picnic lunches, silent meditation, and discussions of points raised in the writings of such thinkers as Henry Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, and Jiddu Krishnamurti. The Institute is supported and regularly attended by Miss Baez, and it is directed by a man from St. Louis named Ira Sandperl, whom Miss Baez discovered when she was sixteen, ten years ago, at a Quaker meeting near Stanford University, where her father was on the physics faculty. Roving along the West Coast on a recent rainy Saturday, and finding ourself in the vicinity of Carmel with an hour on our hands, we arranged to drive up the Valley and have a talk with Miss Baez at the Institute.
The Institute’s grounds occupy a grassy, oak-strewn expanse between road and river. Its plant is a former one-room public schoolhouse that has been stuccoed over, reroofed with red Spanish tile, cleared of school desks, and outfitted with lounging mats and a native chalk-rock fireplace; a small residential wing for Mr. Sandperl has been added. It was Mr. Sandperl, as it turned out, who was lounging in the schoolhouse doorway and greeting his arriving student body when we approached. The students, who included several couples trailing small children, looked and chatted with one another like young suburbanites getting together anywhere on a Saturday noon. Mr. Sandperl could have been their tennis pro. He is a sinewy man in his early forties, crew-cut, clean-shaven, very deeply tanned, alert of eye, and generally smiling, and he was wearing an open sports shirt, gray slacks, and clean green sneakers. He acknowledged the unusual weather wryly and added, “Joan’s supposed to be giving a benefit concert outdoors at the Monterey County Fair Grounds this evening, but this rain puts the matter in doubt.” He led us around a clump of chatting students toward the fireplace and a smaller group that included Miss Baez, who was wearing black pants and pullover sweater, and who struck us as startlingly more beautiful than any of her photographs suggest—features more delicately sculptured, expressions more luminously candid and humorous, hair only shoulder-length—and who, besides all that, was not behaving like a star whose concert was in imminent peril of being rained out.
“The dog is friendly, sweetheart—you can pat her,” Miss Baez was explaining to an ambulatory infant who stood eye to eye with a cloud-gray shaggy dog at Miss Baez’s feet.
Miss Baez invited us to follow her to Mr. Sandperl’s quarters for our talk. The shaggy dog, whose name proved to be Anathea, came along, too. We took a chair while Miss Baez arranged herself on a couch in such a way that Anathea could doze comfortably on her knee. Then Miss Baez told us, “I used to avoid interviews, because I hadn’t found out what I thought, or if I had anything to say, but not now. I’m interested in ending war. I’m not interested in gazing through a blue marble at Miss Baez. What I’m all about is that I’m a non-violent soldier. That’s to be distinguished a little from being a pacifist. It’s not just withdrawing and growing your own vegetables and not paying taxes. It means doing more than being nice to birds and small animals. I dislike the word ‘goal,’ but I suppose that’s what we have here—we want to let out the news that the time has come when killing in the outside world is no more proper than killing within the national boundaries. Not that absolutely everybody agrees yet that even killing within the nation is no longer acceptable. There’s still that cultural inertia left over from nearly three hundred years when it was the thing for us to carry guns, since there was always the chance we might have to shoot a neighbor. Today, there’s certainly enough proof around that violence can’t be appropriate anymore anywhere, but people want to hang on to that old feeling. You know—‘It’s a sunny day. Let’s go kill something.’ When the world was proved round, that news was evidently just as hard to accept. In spite of the disadvantages of a flat world—monsters at the edge, sailboats falling off—people hated giving it up. Right now, people hate to give up weapons. We’ve changed the War Department’s name to the Defense Department, but weapons are still made for killing, and boys are still trained to run bayonets through people, and the word ‘murder’ still doesn’t seem to ring a bell. I don’t mean to say that there may not always be barroom brawls and things like that—though among the Hopi and Zuñi, if you slug someone, it’s regarded as poor form and you’re out of it—but brawling is on a different plane from organized mass killing. And non-violence is—well, totally misunderstood. It’s not avoiding violence. It’s the opposite of running. It means confronting violence and having to come up with something more intelligent in response. Perhaps the only response that can possibly be effective today is refusing to coöperate, and going to jail. But we don’t go into tactics and techniques here. Dr. Martin Luther King’s movement has problems because its emphasis is all on tactics. At the University of California, the kids’ trouble was that they only had a technique: if the cops came in, they knew they were supposed to drop to the floor. However, if you’re rooted in the understanding that the Ku Klux Klansman and the Negro garbageman are both your brothers, then there’s a chance you’ll know the right thing to do.”
The door flew open, and Mr. Sandperl popped in saying, “Please excuse me for breaking into my room, but can I ask just one question? What’s my unlisted telephone number?”
“I’ll write it down for you,” Miss Baez said, producing a pencil and a slip of paper and writing. She handed over the paper and said, “You can give me mine later.”
Mr. Sandperl left, and Miss Baez told us, “Unlisted numbers have a way of getting out, so we keep getting new ones. Anyway, about non-violence. There are certain pitfalls. There’s a Fort Ord boy who comes here with the schizo idea that he’s non-violent because he takes a supercilious view of the Army and can ridicule his job as a soldier. And I’ve been corresponding with a boy in Vietnam who thinks he’s eased his conscience because he managed to exchange his gun for a camera, and now he writes about the bizarre beauty of war. It’s so easy to kid yourself. Like believing that an Army ambulance driver’s first duty isn’t to get banged-up soldiers back to their guns as soon as possible. Not that one mustn’t care for the hurt and dying—but for all the hurt and dying, on all sides. We don’t always like to notice what we’re doing. What people mainly do is to avoid boredom. We’d rather feel anything than boredom, and boredom is oneself. The meditation we try here means only that you stop doing the things you do all day long to avoid yourself—listening to the radio, making conversation, woolgathering—and after that it’s hard to define. It’s not concentrating on an idea. Krishnamurti gave a clue when he said, ‘If the interest is there, that’s a beginning.’ The interest turns into paying attention—trying to listen as though you’d never heard before. We all grew up learning to try and then to expect a result from trying, but here it’s not a result that’s the point but simply the trying. Krishnamurti also said that, as far as he could see— No, he didn’t say that; he’s never that modest. He said, ‘Creativity is when the mind is still.’ As to effort—well, there’s a kind of effort. For instance, I try to write, and if I sit at the typewriter and make the effort to start writing just a lot of ‘x’s, after a while something begins to happen. You know that song ‘Be Not Too Hard’?”
We said we did. It leads off Miss Baez’s 1967 Vanguard album (“Be not too hard, for life is short, and nothing is given to man. . . ./Be not too hard if he’s sold or bought, for he must manage as best he can./Be not too hard when he blindly dies, fighting for things he does not own. . . .”), and it reminded us to ask whether the neighbors were as hard on the Institute as the wire services had led us to think.
Miss Baez said, “No, the community is fine to us. At first, a few people imagined we were doing awful things—smoking pot, or making love—but we asked them to walk in and see. The worst trouble came from a lady across the street. She looked in and saw we were doing nothing—literally nothing, since it was meditation time—and that really got to her. She went into her house for a gun and fired it into the hillside. As you see, the kids here are mostly regular-looking college-age people. Flower children, thank God, aren’t interested. They’ve divorced themselves completely from reality. They’re so lost. I talked to one the other day who told me, ‘Man, that non-violence thing, that’s for me.’ So I asked, ‘Then how come you’re still pushing acid?’ The cyclists, too. I met a couple of the heads of Berkeley’s Hell’s Angels. They said they just loved my music. I looked down at their Iron Crosses. They simply don’t know what’s going on. Maybe Allen Ginsberg was helpful to them—getting them off skull-cracking and onto pot.”
Miss Baez smiled radiantly, and we asked if she was always so composed on the afternoon of a concert in hazard.
“Oh, no,” she said. “This just happens to be one of my good days.”
Early that evening, as our plane lifted off Monterey Airport bound for San Francisco and our connection to New York, we were gratified to see the rain clouds blowing away eastward, in plenty of time to insure that the concert would go on. ♦
