[ No. 7 ]

Lady Cadaver

by Ishmael

Just over a year ago, Diana, Princess of Wales, died inside a twisted, mangled wreckage straight out of a Surrealist painting. Beside her sat her current amour, Dodi Fayed, a jaded jet-setter whose destiny it was to become a footnote in someone else's life. Almost immediately came the commodification of Princess Diana, wherein the death of a woman and mother was quickly swamped by chocolate-box sentimentality, cynicism, avarice and greed as tabloid newspapers and gossip magazines scrambled to make a quick buck before her memory fades into oblivion. The pharisees had flocked to town, but there was no one to overturn their wares set up beside the temple gates.

To commemorate her first anniversary on 31 August this year, newspapers of all stripes clashed with women's magazines to put out a phantasmagoria of 'commemorative portfolios' -- a shifting series of optic illusions of the princess at her most seductive and beautiful. There she is getting out of a limo, dressed to kill, shaking hands, smiling in her youthful exuberance. Here she is caught in painful reverie. There she glows in the embrace of her adored sons. Why, here she is smiling at one of her lovers. Elsewhere she is the coy, awkward 19 year-old ensnared by the Windsors to pump out future kings. In virtually every image she is legs, cleavage, patron of the arts and vulnerable sophisticate.

Even her brother, Earl Spencer, who so eloquently voiced his grief and anger over her death, and had vowed not to profit out of her death, couldn't resist throwing the gates of Althorp House open to the hoi polloi who flocked by bus and car to pay their respects -- at a price, of course. He has also negotiated a six-figure sum with a publisher for two books on the Spencer family, launched the Diana museum and released a video version of the film which is shown to Althorp visitors. And the money ain't goin' to no charity, honey! Lobster bisque anyone? Russian caviar? Dom Perignon? You can bet your tiara, the Spencers will be cannibalising Diana's corpse just like the maggots who've already made a ruin of her beautiful face. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.

No doubt, Diana is right now commiserating with Elvis Presley over a gin and tonic at the sad state of human affairs and the blunt knife that too often twists the heart. But back on earth, the media is looking for a new lamb to lead to the slaughter. What must Diana think of the fact that the vultures have alighted on her eldest son, William, hailed as the 'Royal Star' and the boy who will save the monarchy'? And what, indeed, does she think of her own unwitting contribution to the sudden modernisation of the bleak old house of Windsor? For before she skidded into that tunnel, the Windsors had cobwebs up their snatches and no amount of dusting could move them into the 20th century. Her death, however, and the overwhelming public response it elicited, scared the royal shit out of the Windsors, who are now doing their damnest to look normal. You know, doing all those vulgar things like smiling and crying in public. But they know their shit don't smell and if you cut them, their blood is blue! I always knew Princess Margaret was a body snatcher.

Shortly before her death, Diana was photographed by Mario Testino. Ironically, in these last images, she glows like a Chinese paper lantern. She is boy/girl, woman/goddess, virginal/knowing, an ethereal beauty bursting with hope and life. They are some of the most extraordinary images taken of a woman, and their remarkable prescience is to be wondered at. For a short time later, the real-life subject was dead and the process of mythologising her underway.

In hazy soft focus Testino's innate artistry captured that intermediary period between being and non-being, life and death. A saintly aura enwraps Diana's goldenness, transforming the succulence of her flesh into morning mist on the verge of melting away with the first rays of the sun. Such is her poise and grace that she appears to have wings. Seeing the photographs now it's hard to believe that her sensuality and joy could be so brutally snuffed out. Candle in the wind, indeed.

Seen as an Aaron Spelling soap opera, the brief jetsetting life of the Princess of Wales came scripted with the 'fairy tale wedding' introduction, rejection and the sex and scandal of the middle years, and a tragic dénouement, complete with a cathartic funeral against a background of grandeur equal to that of any 1930s Hollywood film. Like the best soap operas that telescope and exaggerate life's trials and tribulations, Diana's funeral served a similar ritualistic purpose. Its hierarchical tripartite arrangement passed a vast audience through the eye of grief to emerge cleansed and purified in the open air.

Watching it on television, I was reminded of the silent, reverential processions of Greek Orthodox Easter Celebrations as an effigy of Jesus is paraded through the streets on a flower-laden altar, which, in turn, evokes memories of the even older pagan celebrations held in honour of the vegetation god Bacchus and his Earth Mother, Cybele.