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By Root 1209 0

D. W. Winnicott wrote, “It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.”2 In a different context, Freud wrote that “[t]he finding of an object is in fact the refinding of it.”3 The way we know anything is at second hand; first we meet it and don’t see it, then we come back and have a sense of knowing it. Some losses fascinate or appall because they happen so fast: one moment one world, one moment later the next. Most changes, however, are slow and awkward. Even fast changes usually take a long time: you lose your husband in a moment; you become a widow over a number of years. Life forces itself on you. Remember Kore, dragged “all unwilling” into a partial adulthood, becoming the queen of the underworld part of the year, and part of the year still her mother’s daughter. The lost child is fascinating because she is you.

Why would an “educated person” in New York need to know about a particular murder trial in California? His pregnant wife disappeared. On Christmas. We hoped they’d find her. He searched for her, crying, but it was all a grisly charade. He had killed her and thrown her body—pregnant with his baby son—into the San Francisco Bay. Does this story sound interesting to you because it is a fact necessary to know in order to understand geopolitics? Or does it seem more like myth, like its function (in being chosen out of all the things that happen) is the same function myths have: to give us a context for our fear, hope, and anger? A trillion things happen every day, and the news could have developed in a very different way, highlighting very different things. But it didn’t. The things it chooses to report, and the way it reports, have to do with what people are yearning to hear. Worrying over Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, and Princess Diana is a public way to worry for oneself. These figures, along with the parents, the abductor, the husband, the royals, and the press, are characters for a psyche. They are mythic.

Princess Diana’s husband didn’t seem to love her; she didn’t seem to have as much of her kids, or as much of herself, as she wanted. Her mother-in-law seemed cold and demanding. We all knew the photograph of Diana seeing her boys for the first time in a while and leaning down to scoop them in; and the one of her crying during a TV interview. She seemed to attempt to do charitable things. Then we watched her get divorced. We learned intimate weaknesses; she had tried suicide, practiced vomiting to stay attractive for the cameras. Then she was dead; it seemed the press had chased her into a wall, in a superfast luxury car. Dozens of the fellow human beings took pictures as she died. The last thing she saw was the strobe of camera flashes. Life must have flickered out like film from an old projector. We then learn of it by the news, like the family cat bringing in the family parakeet in its mouth, dead; the cat with a look on his face that suggests he knows it is a bad business. We had had a sense that time had been on her side, that if she waited it all out, eventually she’d be the mother of the king of England. Now it would never happen. In England it made them feel sad enough that they put down hundreds of thousands of bouquets around the palace. As the piles got bigger, some of us had a warm, hungry feeling, and wanted the flower piles to grow immense. The piles grew immense. The whole thing became an opportunity to commiserate with other people, and “show” the media how you feel, by tokens left and candles lit and milling around in the dark.

Not everybody liked it. Not everybody understood it. According to Martin Amis, in the New Yorker, no one did.

No one understood it…. And we still don’t understand it. My best guess is that the phenomenon was millennial. Human beings have always behaved strangely when the calendar zeros loom. And Dianamania bore several clear affinities to the excesses described in (for example) Norman Cohn’s “The Pursuit of the Millennium”: it involved mass emotion; it exalted a personage of low cultural level; it was self-flagellatory in tendency; and it was very close