Time flies – in memory of Jack Alun

Time flies. So thank goodness books remain. Possibly gathering a bit of dust, but not becoming dust. That’s what people do, I suppose. I’m reading for the nth time Jack Alun’s blog, Neither Here Nor There, written in the middle of a lockdown in the COVID time. He’s stuck in Wales dreaming of France describing writing a new collection of poems that would eventually become ‘Invisible Spaces’. He describes feelings of being cut off geographically and culturally and ‘marooned in a neither here nor there sort of Neverland.’ I am sure he spoke for many who experienced the isolation in all sorts of ways but here I am, years later, stuck in Wales, looking back wondering what happened to all that time and, in particular, how we can ever bridge the gaps that time and space increase.

Le temps passe vite. I had to look it up, by the way. French is such a slippery thing, sometimes so elegant and then sometimes, it just lets you down a bit. I remember Jack making me roar with laughter at his tales of going to Paris on a French language course and rapidly deteriorating with every passing lesson. I will never forget the finest self-mocker I have ever met who would fill every meet-up with huge gales of laughter. And yet, I’m struggling to say how much tempus has fugit-ed since he died. I didn’t want him to not be there, at the end of an email or the daftest of phone calls or the most earnest of proof-readings.

So, I turned to what is left. The Blog he wrote in lockdown, which might one day go pffffhh if the internet snuffs it. And two slim volumes of his verse. One, Vertical Horizons, the foreigner observer in a tiny French village shuffling from 1750 to the 21st C unwillingly in about a decade, and the other, Invisible Spaces, the traveller actor shrinking weeks of experience into a page of short lines. Jack loved the random and the juxtaposition and the wrong people in the right place. His writing celebrates that. There’s that magic of the best teacher in school holding a class in the palm of their hand gifted at storytelling in words, actions and shifting tones of voice. I let his voice ring in my head, at the back of the class, silently living the story:
Your taming charms
like prowling lions
made meat of me
turn men to beasts
and reason snout
in the piggeries
of human nature
the sweat of instinct
the contours of illusion
(Circe, Thorney Island, West Sussex)

The adolescent me laps it up, the older me wishes he’d known better, the critic in me swoons over the simplicity. I want to ring him up and ask him what the heck prompted that vision of Circe in Sussex? Or laughing at the tales of near-death in ‘Three times dead,’ a longish poem reliving those times when you nearly copped it, in a Bullnose Morris 8 where the door is hinged contra-logically and still opened unexpectedly on corners, until he describes his favourite aunt ‘weeping one day / at the cruel awareness / that creeping dementia / would never go away.’ There is the hint of myth in every poem just behind the truth of suffering and death.

Jack knew what was coming. He worked so hard in his final weeks to make sure that Invisible Spaces was perfect. And in the space in between it has grown into something new. At least to me. The man behind the poems is older now, he’s wiser than I knew him, he’s smiling as he watches us sense what he was really trying to tell us. Forget the drink and the food and the laughter, enjoy the travel, the drink and the laughter, remember the food, the drink and the people and the laughter, fight against the taking away of all the things you love. The little books not covered in dust.

Maybe all there is to know is that ‘Time sweats / a shaven armpit / in an off-the-peg T’

RDE