Death and Time
I love the old gravestones in New England, those from the period around the founding of the nation or before. They're thin and look like toast, they're hand-carved, and many of them have got flying skulls on the top. We're too senstivie for that stuff now, we think that gravestones should be all about flowers and angels and nice things, anything but death. But in the old days gravestones were about death. And why shouldn't they be? What else should we really expect for graves to be about? And so here I was in Boston at the King's Burial Ground, and here are these really old gravestones with flying skulls on the crowns of them, and there were also other depictions of skeletons coming for people or other spooky things. Then I got interested in a particular theme that I noticed on a few of them. This scene showed a skeleton about to snuff a candle on a globe with Father Time holding an hour glass behind him, seeming to be holding him off until just the right time. Of course, I like this. It's a bit related to the "Dans Macabre," a reminder that it's just a matter of time for any of us. And when that hour glass has given up - snuff. Ain't nothin' to do about it.
I made only one little adjustment, being that I used a clock rather than an hour glass. I've used the same basic design on a clock before, the one that depicts a lion's head around the face of the clock. The lion's head has Mithraic and gnostic connotations of the sun, and also of time. So I had that preference. But removed from some individual's gravestone this depiction doesn't have to refer only to the death of any one person. Especially as the candle sits on a globe, this could be understood as world destruction. So take your pick. One way or the other, it all means the same for you.