Dem bones gonna walk around

Jack-o'-lanterns, black cats, witches, big orange moons, an occasional giant spider in a spider web.  Those are the Halloween decorations from my childhood that jump into my mind.  I looked up "1950s Halloween decorations" on Google just now, and their illustrations have confirmed my not-always-accurate memory.

Skeletons?  Maybe a few.  I remember wearing a child's skeleton costume one year.  But mainly -- as I say -- jack-o'-lanterns, black cats, witches, etc.

But today, Halloween 2020!  My extended neighborhood in Seattle has been totally inhabited by skeletons.  Ever since the beginning of October, if not earlier.  Fashionably dressed skeletons, like the couple from Seattle's North Capitol Hill pictured above. Humorous skeletons.  Skeletons sitting casually in chairs on nearby porches, perhaps with a cigar clasped between grinning teeth.  Skeletons emerging , half buried, out of flower gardens.  Gory skeletons.    

 Why now?  Why skeletons?  I associate skeletons, and portions thereof, with the medieval world.  St. Jerome, with a skull on his desk.  Artistically arranged bones in catacombs.  Memento mori in art works, reminding us that, in the middle of our happy frivolity, death is always waiting.

Who knows for sure, why now?  But if we look at art during plague years of the past, we see multitudes

Danse macabre

of skeletons.  Some are frighteningly realistic remains of dead bodies.  More frequently, however, they display a sardonic humor -- laughing at us panicked humans.  Look at us, they gesture.  This is how you're going to look tomorrow.  They wander about graveyards, carrying coffins in their arms.  They dance in a frenzied danse macabre.  They emerge from niches in the wall, struggling out of their burial garments.

They represent an effort by humanity, facing a grisly death, to visualize it in art; to better face it, perhaps, by portraying death as a sentient being.  To even whistle a bit in the dark by mocking death, while also mocking themselves for their helplessness.

Covid-19 isn't the bubonic plague.  But unlike our medieval forebears, for us death is a novelty.  We live in a time when death has been largely limited to the aged, a horror sheltered from the view of the rest of us within nursing homes and hospitals.  But Covid-19, like the plague, strikes down friends and relatives still in the prime of life.

Maybe all these Halloween skeletons represent our subconscious, primal response to the threat of an imminent, unexpected death, just as those items of plague art did centuries ago.  

Or maybe not.  Maybe all those skeletons just represent another Halloween fad that's gone viral.  So to speak.