The Mythos in the Mirror
I’ve been trying to make sense of the enormous outpouring of grief in response to Michael Jackson’s death, as evidenced by the unending news coverage across the world.
Two things come to mind: the first is something I came across in Bewildered Travel: The Sacred Quest for Confusion. The author, Frederick Ruf, 
cites the psychologist William James who argued that we have multiple selves and that they are social and material: “we have as many selves as we have others who acknowledge us; and our selves are defined by our belongings. A few years ago, I wrecked my car, and while it may seem trivial to say that a part of me died as that VW was hauled away, I believe it is true. When we leave, when we disembark, when we – as my son used to say – ‘blast off’ on an airplane, and leave behind all those others and all those things, we leave those selves behind, too. Those selves die – temporarily.” The death of a celebrity (whose records we owned, whose videos we watched, whose songs we listened to) takes us back to a childhood that we have lost and becomes a reminder of the rites of passage.
Secondly, his death reminds us again of the power of our myths, for better or worse. In the cult of celebrity, an individual becomes an icon, a lone man becomes a larger myth and this fact may tell us more about ourselves than it does about the person who lived and is now dead.
As Neil McCormick writes in the UK Telegraph:
The death of someone so famous shakes us to the core, because it is like a death in the family. Love him or loathe him, Michael Jackson was part of the fabric of all our lives. Or maybe worse, it is like the death of a God, a sudden unexplainable absence in the mythos of the times. President Kennedy, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Lady Diana: these are the kind of deaths that confront us with our own mortality, the realisation that the end is unavoidable, death stalks us all, no matter how anointed by the fates. Such a death is usually greeted with a kind of incredulity. But this is it. This is really it.
