Dem Bones

It's funny, how advancing age can make you as body-conscious as an athlete or, worse, some preening gym-rat.  I've been having various age-related, wear'n'tear issues with my personal infrastructure and, after a number of sessions with physiotherapists and podiatrists, have become acutely aware of myself as, essentially, a skeleton strung together with tendons.  The posters they have on their clinic walls don't help: mainly Look and Learn-style pictures of cadavers playing tennis or lifting heavy crates.

Do you know those Dance of Death and memento mori engravings that were so popular in the days before the discovery of penicillin (not to mention soap)?  That's how I keep seeing myself, sat at this computer, self-consciously adjusting my posture to align dem bones properly.  If I look out the window, I see skeletons bobbing along the pavement, or hunched behind the wheel of a car (straighten that spine!).  It's a bit like the scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where the moonlight reveals the crew of the Black Pearl to be skeletal zombies (oops, spoiler alert).

It all reminded me of the days when I was young and nothing hurt, and I had a thing about bones and print-making.  I would spend hours carving and cutting pictures into lino and wood.  Unfortunately, my main aesthetic influences back then were album covers (remember, these were the days before the internet) so everything came out looking like Death Metal artwork.  I dug these two ancient proof prints out of a drawer, and although they are unfinished I found I was pleased with some of the touches.

I'd like to say it's something that I might take up again one day, but I know my ageing fingers couldn't hold or control those little woodcutting gouges for more than 10 minutes without screaming in protest.  Did you know there are no muscles in your fingers?  It's all done with bones and tendons...

Notes for the linguistically-challenged:  "Totentanz" is German for "Dance of Death".  The legend around the image is "Radix malorum cupiditas est" i.e. The love of riches is the root of all evil".  "Furcifer" is Latin for "one who is destined to be hung on the two-pronged fork" i.e. a "gallows-bird"...