Human

For most people, the world is divided into neighboring and distant, but there is no baes for Joan, does not share

Hi, I am Joan Baez, ”she says, sitting in a chair in the middle of a huge kitchen in her old house in California, a kitchen, where a bluish-green tile is adjacent to brown boards, where in dark, smoked pots is stored in a massive fireplace behind her backs. In her hands, she has large white sheets of paper - saying, she looks at them. Then he picks up the guitar.

During Covid, quarantine and self -isolation, Joan Baes sings people on his Facebook. Small healing live concerts in one song, short outputs in the universal broadcast with words of encouragement and support from the one whose angelic voice and unprecedented resistance went down in history. When she began sixty years ago in Boston coffee houses, ten, twenty, forty people came to her performances; Now she sits in a chair in the middle of her kitchen with a guitar in her hands, and hundreds of thousands and millions see her and hear her and hear her. And in her voice the same light.

In her huge old house in California, where her mother lived and died with her, where she survived the death of her younger sister Mimi Farina, who sang with her at the famous concert for prisoners in prison, in the house where the wasps live under the roof, and the old tree grows in the courtyard-in this house Joan Baesa is found in the summer of 2020 with a bewildered, knocked down with bewildered, astray The sense, frightened, lost, does not understand what is happening to the world and, as a child, tells him clear, calm and firm words of support, comfort and love.

In the spring, when Kovid Koshmar was in full swing in Italy, she drew a picture of Viva La Italia and instantly sold a hundred and signed prints on the Internet. Money went to Speccio Dei Tempi, an organization that supports sick Italians. She sang the folk der mond ist aufgegangen for the Germans sitting at home and Chanson Pour L'Auvergnat for the French in self -isolation. She received and receives thousands of hearts and thanks from people who heard her voice in the houses of Venice, in the quarters of the Ruura, in the Arondisms of Paris, who continues to resist Hong Kong, and the question from the American Jackie O'Conell about why she helps Italians when two million people lost their jobs in America.

To whom you are helping, Miss Joan Baes, when you sing a song for Country and Folk-singer John Predid, who fell ill with coronavirus and fights for life in the hospital, on Facebook-broadcasting from your kitchen. John Pride is an American. He did not survive, he died, and half of his ashes will be dispelled in the American outback, in Kentukki, in the Green River, and the other half in Chicago.

And when she asks for helping by volunteering and money of the healthcare organization of American Indians - isn't this the help of America?

The easiest way would be to give these examples and say that this is the answer to the question of Jackie O'Conell, but in fact there is no double bottom and there is no answer.

He is given his neighbor, and he must help him. It is said to love his neighbor, not distant. His husband and wife, father and mother, children and brothers are given to man. And if he helps distant and very distant, then does he thereby run from his direct duty to his neighbor?

When Joan Baese many years ago came to a school for whites to register five black children in it, to whom did she help, neighbor or distant?

When she closed the doors to the center of the military call during the Vietnamese War with her body, for which she received 90 days of prison (settled 30), she helped and inspired thousands of young Americans who did not want to kill and be killed in Vietnam. They were not her relatives, but she felt her relationship with them.

When she was pregnant on the stage of Woodstock and sang We Shall Overcome in a hopelessly black night, stitched by the garlands of white bulbs hanging above the stage, who helped her? The generation that left the father’s house and set off? A country that in the torment of the conflict, in the stress of fault, was looking for ways to the future? Neighbor? Distant?

When in the seventies she protested against the law that limits the right of gays and lesbians to study in public schools, she helped the distant future in which minorities would not know discrimination.

When in the same seventies she stubbornly demanded to familiarize herself with her dossier in the NSA, she helped the distant ones - to the people of today in some advanced countries who have the right to know what information they are stored by special services.

When she walked along America next to Martin Luther King in huge non -violent marches, when she founded the center of study of non -violence, when she created Humanitas human rights organization, when she sat in the wilderness on the ranch, which was a refuser to support them when she paid 900 dollars a month for activists who worked for the idea of ​​non -solid Resistance to evil - to whom she helped, if not America and her good, how did she understand him?

For most people, the world is divided into neighboring and distant, but for Joan Baes, it is not divided. So it is arranged and created. For her, all her countries, and all people are nearby. She has no distant ones, simply not.

She perceives the world as a whole, as a huge arena of the struggle of good and evil, as a place where she is always and everywhere on the side of dissidents, Protestants, humiliated, robbed, insulted, oppressed.

Her song Natalia is about Natalia Gorbanevskaya, which the Soviet government forcibly put in a crazy house.

Her song China is crying for Tiananmen killed in Square. Many forgot, but not her.

In her house there is a photograph of the Pakistani girl Malala, who wanted to study and received a bullet in the head, and another girl, Greeta, she wrote a letter of sympathy and support.

In her self -determination, she included three points. Firstly, she is a man. Secondly, pacifist. Thirdly, Folk Singer. And all.

And where is nationality, belonging to a party or organization, where is the color of the skin, where are a hundred different characteristics, according to which people masterfully divide their own kinds on their own and strangers, in near and distant?

She does not accept them, does not know, spits on them all her life.

She is a response to human pain. She is all human languages. Well, if not all, then at least those that can accommodate her memory: French, Italian, German, Spanish. A little Czech-at the famous concert in Prague, she spoke Cheshik. A little Russian-she sang the song of Okudzhava in Russian.

When the Americans bombed Vietnam, she went to Hanoi with letters and gifts for American prisoners of war, spent twelve days in the basement and realized what a massive bombing was.

When the “velvet revolution” began in Czechoslovakia, in 1989 she arrived in Bratislava and sang people at a huge concert, where Vaclav Gavel came up to her with a long bohemian scarf, who had listened to her songs all her life. Two pacifists understood each other on the move. Eastern Europe needs a revolution - non -violent. “I will still come to Europe in order to make this hell,” once, years later, she said to Gavel.

Hell of dictatorships, hell of camps, hell for dissidents, hell of perennial lies, Soviet blood pressure, which at that time was bought and died.

And now he came to life again.

In 1993, she went to the Balkans and gave a concert in Sarayev, in the hope that her voice pacifist and her songs can stop the war and explain to people the nonsense of fratricide. Vain hope.

Fratricide does not disappear, it is repeated in Rwanda, in Syria, in Ukraine, in Russia. It calms down in one place and flares up in another. From the impotence of good, from the weakness of love, you can desperate, you can break. But she does not break. Look what a straight back is. Look at her dark -skinned thin hands holding the guitar. It is fragile, but does not break.

Hundreds of trips, concerts, thousands of people around, tens of thousands behind them, when she walked in the march of protest, three hundred thousand before her eyes at the famous protest concert in Washington, where strangers said to her “Sister Joan” as a sister, day after day, stubbornly and tirelessly, she sang with her angelic voice the songs of faith and resistance and resistance in resistance and resistance

And she hollowed a loser, poorly perceiving simple truths to the world: change! More love! Be kinder!

On this path, many tried to stop her. In Chile, during the time of Pinochet, her concerts were canceled, but they could not cancel it; She was still where she wanted to be, although she received threats of murder from unidentified persons. The straightforwardness of her speeches went off scale. "I will not let this killer stop me to stop me." This is not from an interview in a radical newspaper or an article in an underground leaf, but from her song Ain 'T Gonna Letody Turn Me Around.

Her son Gabriel was not with her, but in her, when she sang at Woodstock with an impenetrable rainy night (and a puddle formed behind her on stage), and when she cut her luxurious long hair with scissors, because there was no hairdresser on the ranch with refuseniks. He was alone all his childhood, without his mother, who all the time broke off and continuously left, captured by her duty to people, neighbors and distant, Americans and no, all, all, all.

Her guilt before her son - what to do with him? This feeling tormented her for many years. She went to the psychologist for advice. We must come to terms with the fault, accept her and live with her.

In 2018, she announced that she would no longer give concerts. She gave the concert, she gave the Olympia in the Paris Hall. Her two guitars - one on a light belt with the inscription Joan, the other on the dark - was carried out and served alternately. The stingy light and touching subtle sound of this concert are unforgettable. An orchestric played with her, more like a small circle of close friends, - the bassist laid the guitar and sat down at the piano, the girl who took out the guitars, sang along, and carefully drove the drums with brushes, no rumble! - A tall bald man with a good -natured face. Her son Gabriel.

Joan Baesz was the whole concert, all an hour and a half stood in a circle of light, like in his center. A fragile, thin figure with a wide belt over the shoulder, on the verge of scene and night. A wide silver bracelet was on her one hand and six thin, from threads and malachite balls - on the other. And again the hall and peace melted and disappeared in the black air. She seemed to steam over the world on a flying saucer, depending on the sixties, over the eighty, over the two thousandths. And when she sang Gracias a la Vida, her small feet crossed and even danced in a circle of light.

Andrei Sinyavsky had aesthetic disagreements with the Soviet regime. The artist cannot accept the miserable lies of those in power, their fish and slaves of the manners, their secret distributors, their lamb hats, the hypocrisy of their life, their swimming, unsuccessful brains.

Joan Baes has aesthetic disagreement with Donald Trump. There are others too, but we will limit ourselves to aesthetics here. The artist cannot accept a nouveau riche with a muddy past, all the concepts of the beauty of which are exhausted by the amount of gold, which goes to decorate the interior in his house. The artist cannot accept the cattle language of the real estate merchant, the feminist cannot accept the manner of Sulan to speak the altitude, a person with innate intelligence cannot accept uterine rudeness.

“And you will build a wall,/the largest wall,/the most beautiful wall around our borders,/but I think you better talk to a psychiatrist” (from her song Nasty Man).

A tree grew in America. Huge sequoia, 55 meters high. Healthy, powerful, living tree. There were idiots who decided to cut him. They had some kind of reason: either it simply interfered with them, or they wanted to make the boards out of it, or something else.

But there was also a woman named Julia Hill and nicknamed Butterfly - a butterfly. She received this nickname as a child, because the butterflies fearlessly sat on her palm and did not fly away. Julia had a connection with nature, a connection with animals, a connection with rivers and waterfalls, a connection with all living things. She could not allow to kill a beautiful tree. Therefore, having learned about lumberjacks with chainsaws, she urgently went to those parts, climbed into a tree and informed the surprised people below that she would live here. And so that she had an address, she gave the tree a name - the moon. And she lived on the branches of sequoia, on her beautiful moon, protecting her, while the scandal flared up in the newspapers and on TV and eco -activists pulled up to the tree.

Joan Baes, learning about the sequoia Luna and Julia Butterflya Hill, also came to the tree to protect him. She also climbed onto a tree and lived on the branches for a while. Two women, Joan and Julia, defended sequoia in different ways for six years. There, in the branches of giant sequoia, Baes learned to meditate at the height. Now she sometimes climbs a tree in her garden and meditates in his crown.

Hi, I am Joan Baez. Once she went out in a red scarf on the stage to sing with Bob Dylan in love with her; Steve Jobs once in love with her promised her to create a computer that would surpass Bach. Once, Jerry Garcia from GratEful Dead played with her in the same concert. Once Martin Luther King was her friend. Once her husband David Harris preached Resistance-resistance-and dreamed of going to jail, following those who believed him and burned the draft agenda, and his dream was fulfilled, he went into prison. And now he, an inconspicuously ill, meets with young people again to tell them about his experience of resistance. And they listen to him.

Her life contained so many events, incidents, clashes, travel and people that one day shocked by this unthinkable abundance, the journalist found only one question for her: “And it never occurred to you that you saw both Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan?” “But not at the same time,” she answered outwardly calmly, but in fact with difficulty restraining laughter.

A gray lady sits with a guitar in her hands in her huge kitchen with smoked pots, blackened skulls and ash in the fireplace. The green door behind her, leading to the garden, is always open, and light lies on the floor.