The Vagabond's Breakfast - Richard Gwyn

THE VAGABOND'S BREAKFAST –

RICHARD GWYN

Richard Gwyn? No, I've never heard of him either. But just because we don't know the name of an author doesn't mean we should ignore him because if we did that all the time we'd still only be reading, for example, Jeffery Archer. Which raises an obvious question: What is it that attracts us to certain books? Mostly it's what's on the spine, of course, because that's all we initially see when on a shelf. So it's going to be the author's name, the title, the design, the publisher, the colour, or even the hype and a good publicity campaign. Not to mention what Jung termed 'synchronicity' – but that's a whole other story.

On pulling out the book we initially look at the front cover, then the back cover for the blurb, then we open up the book and choose a page at random (never the end) and read a snatch of it. On these things we make a decision as to whether we buy the book but more importantly, whether we are going to devote our time and attention to it. Whether we are going to give a portion of our lives to it.

And so to The Vagabond's Breakfast by Richard Gwyn. I presume it was the title that first caught my attention because I didn't know what it meant? Or perhaps it was synchronicity? The cover at a glance was nondescript and gave away no clues. The blurb on the back on scanning it said something about 'vagrancy and alcoholism in the Mediterranean, principally Spain and Crete'. On opening a page at random I fell upon the author expounding upon the imbibing of datura on Crete.

I bought the book.

Richard Gwyn is the Director of the MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing at Cardiff University, or at least he was when this book was published in 2011. Before this, however, he had spent 10 years as an itinerant worker/vagabond alcoholic in countries around the Mediterranean, some of those years being on the island of Crete.

Gwyn cleverly weaves his memoir between tales and anecdotes from those times and his present day situation where he is suffering from insomnia whilst waiting for a liver transplant due to contracting hepatitis C; all interlaced with thoughts and meditations on various subjects dear to him. It all makes for a surprisingly good and very beautifully written book.

As a teenager I also lived in Greece for a few years living the life of a traveller and for a couple of those years I too lived on Crete where I worked on building sites and farms and in saw mills and factories. I lived in pension houses, proper rented houses, in community shared houses and for long periods of time in no house at all, choosing instead to sleep on beaches, in woods and on mountains. I was a beach bum, a mountain boy, a Cretan cowboy. This, coincidentally, was at the same time as when Richard Gwyn was there.

Did I meet him? I'm not sure. We were certainly moving in the same circles and crossing paths with the same kind of people. I met so many different characters during that period that it's hard to recall all of them after all these years although the name of one of the people Gwyn talks about – a German called Hubert – certainly rings a bell.

In his book, Gwyn describes the kafenions populated by 'carousing travellers, the post-punk detritus of northern Europe and stoned hippies who had got lost on their way back from India'. I too have met these people in similar eateries. He describes hauling bags of cement up flights of stairs when labouring on so-called Cretan construction sites. He describes working in the giant green houses, picking tomatoes, cucumbers and bananas in the suffocating heat. These things I too have done.

He writes about the Romany gypsies of Crete who I too have travelled with, romantically viewing them at the time as being like gold-toothed Apache indian warriors. He writes about the kamakia of Crete, the local boys who were basically studs servicing the tourist women on holiday from Germany and Sweden. I had been wearing a Crass badge at the time – the anarchist symbol with the snapped sub-machine gun above it – and the local kamakia befriended me because of that badge. They knew nothing about Crass but they knew what anarchy was.

And he writes about datura, otherwise known as jimson weed, a wild-growing plant found in Greece that just also happens to be a very powerful hallucinogen.

Gwyn describes his experience of imbibing the seeds of the datura plant in a very open and honest manner, neither deluding himself about nor denying what occurred during his trip and neither exulting or downplaying the experience. He admits that at the time he knew very little about datura apart from the reading of Carlos Castaneda books, this being very understandable. There was no Internet back then so these kind of things were very hard to reference. Nowadays you can look up 'datura' on Wikipedia and even view footage on YouTube of Terence McKenna advising to be very wary of the plant. Back then, however, you just took the big plunge, as Patti Smith once put it.

'In terms of hallucinogenic experience,' Gwyn writes 'datura is a world apart from LSD or mescaline: recreational it is not. It will, if such language has any meaning, attempt to infiltrate the soul. Specifically, I was made acutely aware of the existence, parallel to our own visible world, of a wondrous and terrifying otherworld in which we were unwitting participants. That this otherworld was as real as the one we normally inhabit was never in doubt while under the influence of the datura plant. I still retain the vivid impression that for one night and part of the following day the veil between these worlds had been removed.'

During my time on Crete I too imbibed datura seeds but unlike Gwyn I'd never read Carlos Castaneda so knew even less about the plant than what he did. Little did I know that it was a plant that such people as Nepalese shamen and holy men specialised in taking.

Years later, I recall very little of the experience apart from a distinct feeling of levitating 15 feet in the air and seemingly seeing, sharing and experiencing other people's dreams and hallucinations. The sense of the 'otherworld' was also palpable, where every word spoken was loaded to the max and every gesture, every touch, every glance was unspoken communication conveying volumes. No Howard Marks was I but I do recall coming back to the UK with a tobacco tin full of datura seeds to distribute to interested parties though I never took them myself again. Without any doubt, datura is the most strangest drug I've ever taken and it would appear that Richard Gwyn might feel the same.

The datura episode Gwyn writes about, however, is but one very short chapter and in no way is The Vagabond's Breakfast solely a drug book. In fact, I wouldn't even say alcohol is a major theme in the book either. Richard Gwyn's memoir is instead a story about the getting of wisdom. It's the story of the author losing himself so as to be able to find himself. Above all, I would say it's a very inspiring example of how to write a very good book indeed.

John Serpico

Noam Chomsky - Keeping The Rabble In Line

KEEPING THE RABBLE IN LINE –

NOAM CHOMSKY

By denouncing their practises, methods and tactics, Noam Chomsky may have blotted his copy book with some of our black-clad brethren in Antifa but does that mean in return his whole canon should now be dismissed? Of course not. Chomsky's now in his nineties and though he may still be as sharp as a needle when compared to most, at his age we can forgive him for a few lapses in judgement because after all – he's earned it. So yes, Chomsky's still worth reading if only for food for thought and that's something he's always been a good provider of.

Keeping The Rabble In Line is another one of those books published by AK Press composed of interviews with Chomsky by writer and broadcaster David Barsamian. The first thing to consider about it is the title. Who exactly is the rabble and why is it important to keep them in line? Well, the rabble is me and you, basically. It's the general population, the general public, or as writer and political commentator Walter Lippmann put it, the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders”.

According to Chomsky, any holders of concentrated power, and that includes corporations of course, do not want any external constraints on their capacity to make decisions and act freely, so to these ends they want the general public to be mere spectators, not participants. Democracy acts simply as a way of legitimizing the power held by those whom it benefits most, which means in elections it's typically representatives of dominant sectors who stand and their actions on being elected serve only to maintain the status quo.

Democracy and casting a vote every few years maintains the illusion that concentrated power and authority can be controlled through the ballot box but as the old anarchist maxim says: 'Whoever you vote for, government wins' – and it's true. It's a very simple truth.

That's not to say liberal democracy and voting is entirely ineffectual because it does at least give the general population the opportunity to choose their prison guards and that in itself counts for something. At the end of the day, however, they're still prison guards. What would you rather have: A racist, sexist, bullying leader or representative who hates you (in either business or government) or a benign leader who is anti-racist, anti-sexist who tells you they love and care for you? It's the good cop bad cop scenario but at the end of the day they're still both cops.

As Chomsky explains, it's possible that there could one day be a colour-free society and that the glass ceiling for women is removed but this wouldn't actually change the political economy at all. For this reason you often find the business sector quite happy to support efforts to overcome racism and sexism because they know that these things don't matter much. Some white male privilege might be lost but that's not all that important in the scheme of things. On the other hand, basic changes in the core institutions would be bitterly resisted, that's if they ever even became thinkable.

So if the general public is the rabble, then who are the holders of concentrated power? Well, though they're definable it's no easy task as their faces and names keep changing. Chomsky refers to them as the 'ruling elite' though that term's been criticised for conferring too much dignity upon them. Interestingly, he shies away from using the word 'class' as in 'ruling class' due to its various associations. As he explains: 'As soon as you say the word 'class', everybody falls down dead. There's some Marxist raving again.' Or nowadays some Right-wing zealot raving.

Alternatively, Chomsky suggests they can be referred to as 'the masters' who in the words of economist and philosopher Adam Smith follow their own 'vile maxim', namely 'all for ourselves and nothing for other people.' Or at best, crumbs from the table for other people, I would say. Again, it's a very simple truth.

At one point in Keeping The Rabble In Line, Chomsky discusses Ghandi and questions whether non-violence should be an absolute principle? Apparently in 1938 Ghandi suggested that German Jews ought to commit collective suicide so as to arouse the world and the German people to Hitler's violence. Chomsky emphasises that what Ghandi was suggesting was a tactical proposal, not a principled one but at the same time finds it somewhat grotesque. What Ghandi should have been emphasizing, Chomsky says, is for the world to do something to prevent the Jews from being massacred:

'Powerless people who are being led to slaughter can't do anything. Therefore it's up to others to do something for them. To give them advice on how they should be slaughtered is not very uplifting, to put it mildly. You can say the same about other things all the time.'

And indeed you can. Just name your poison. But before you go chasing rabbits and liaising with hookah-smoking caterpillars, just make sure you're not going off on some crazy wild goose chase which is going to involve you in extremely detailed microanalysis and discussions of things that don't matter. Conspiracy theories, in other words.

'If it's too hard to deal with real problems, there are a lot of ways to avoid doing so. One of them is to go off on wild goose chases that don't matter. Another is to get involved in academic cults that are very divorced from any reality and that provide a defense against dealing with the world as it actually is.' And this, of course, can mean anything from the assassination of JFK, the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11, to the question of how modern day linguistics provide a new paradigm for discourse about international affairs that will supplant the post-structuralist text.... For example.

In amongst such food for thought as provided by Chomsky you're going to find the odd fly in the soup and the odd bite that's unappetizing (such as when he states that 'Europe is an extremely racist place' compared to America) but that's only to be expected. Overall, Keeping The Rabble In Line is a good, four-square meal and Noam Chomsky is a very, very good cook and at the end of the day, dining out with him makes a pleasant and nourishing change from McDonalds. And again, that's a very simple truth.

John Serpico