As with most mass movements, the phenomenon of Princess Diana's death says more about society itself than it does about her singular being. Yes, she was a princess, and of course that pulls into all our childhood fantasies about fairy kingdoms that never seem to> fully materialize in the real world. But Diana represented a great deal more than the shattered myth of Cinderella. As we mourned Diana we mourned the lost heroic in our collective human society.

The hero is an archetypal figure as old as humanity itself. It is not God, but on a human scale it is in some ways revered more than God. God, and the prophets and saints that represent God in Earthly life are the living tenants of Divine law. They give us a structure and code to live by. We admire them, but we do not love them as we do our heros. They are as beyond us as the distant stars. They shed light on our lives but like the stars they seem always out of reach to mere mortals.

Our heros are of us. They are made of the same fragile clay and mirror our own failings and vulnerabilities. Yet, despite their human frailties they seem to rise to the challenges put before them, and sparkle like sunlit drops in an otherwise dark ocean. They are glimmers of light we can dare to touch. They are our pearls, painstakingly coated granules of sand whose center is the very same sand that is also at the heart of each of us.

The hero is wholly mortal. They fall and fail before us and pick themselves up and carryon. They are the true bridges between what we are and what our spirits long to be. In these cynical times they are few and far between.

Our sports used to give us heros, but money bought them all. Greed long ago gobbled the heroic within them. The heroic in our political leaders was always in short supply and now in these days of lies and lobbyists we seldom turn to them with anything but disappointment in our eyes. War is too automated now to give us heros, religions too pious and judgemental. The hero always fell somewhat beyond the tight constricts of religious morality.

So it fell upon a princess to be our hero figure. A princess so very human and like all humans so filled with contradictions. She was beautiful yet insecure, a spend thrift, yet intensely compassionate to those who suffered lack. Her life seemed to offer the promise of everything and the everything fell before our eyes to the rubble of nothing. Yet, she carried on. She was stripped of the place she had been given, so she made a place of her own through the simple caring of her all too human heart.

No Greek myth offered a hero more profound or more tested than our lovely Diana. She defied the Gods, the status quo of her royal peers and the public opinion dictated by the press, and they both threw her to the winds. Yet, like Odysseus she ultimately came home to claim her kingdom clad only in her hero's heart.

The world of art like the rest of modern society has eschewed the heroic. It is not in> vogue to celebrate the heroic in our artistic works. What is chic and honored by the small conclave of New York critics and galleries that seem to dictate what art is and is not, is a rather ungallant representation of man's baser attributes. Too often our modern art is a sad regurgitation of our individual confusion and disdain. It spits out our psychological confusion, our pain and our torment. In other words, what remains in our gut when we have abandoned a search for life's meaning in our hearts.

Neitzsche said of this century that God was dead. Men no longer truly believed he explained, but had not shed their guilt. Yet devoid of God, we had no place to turn to find forgiveness, which left us loathing both ourselves and one another. You may not agree with Neitzsche's premise of cause, but the evidence of our damaged view of our collective self seems too apparent to deny.

Diana's death above all else painted a living canvas of humanity's hunger for some
representation of the heroic in our world. As we approach the end of another millennium
we find ourselves starved for beauty and desperate for meaning.

We sit in hollows of stone that we ourselves have carved with our sophisticated
cynicism. We pretend we are so icily cool, so technologically chic that we don't miss our
own withered idealism. Yet within us, our hearts are parched, gasping for some clear
breath of truth. It's a lot to demand of one dead princess when there are so many of us
with the potential to bring it forth.

(c) 1999

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