The weeping willows, on the other hand, are evocative of death. They are a little contrived, a little exaggerated, still green in the middle of all the colours of autumn, and there is a human pathos to them. Weeping willows were not created by God at the same time as the other trees, like the hazelnuts and the apple tree, but only after He had decided to allow people to die. They are a sort of second-generation tree, flora endowed with intellect and a sense of ceremony.
Joseph Roth – Schiller Park (1923).
Some years ago I was told that one of my patients had an end of life wish of listening to the song of the Phantom of the Opera at the moment of her passing. This, of course, impressed me a lot and made me reflect upon the rich ritualistic symbolism it conveyed.
As a matter of fact, the Phantom of the Opera is a reinterpretation of the myth of the rapture of Persephone by Hades, and the natural cycle of life, death and resurrection or renewal. Nature is apparently susceptible to a mother’s grief and joy. When Persephone returns to the surface, Demeter rejoices, bringing warmth, blooming flowers and bountiful harvests. When Persephone descends back to the underworld, Demeter mourns, causing plants to wither and the land to grow cold and barren.
This, obviously, only affects the emotional lot of nature. Conifers, camellias and other broadleaf evergreens do not give a damn to Demeter’s cyclothymia. And if Demeter, beyond goddesshood, seasonality and mood lability, indeed can represent a mortal mother’s grief for a lost child? Isn’t it harder to endure the pain during the coldness of the winter?
This September, 2026, on the autumn equinox, just as Persephone descends into the underworld, an event has been organized, in London, by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra and A/POLITICAL, at which the names of the Palestinians killed since the foundation of the Israeli state, in 1948, will be read. How many hours, days will be necessary to read all these names?
Shall we stop and think about the Palestinian Demeter mourning and withering every winter without the hope that she will be visited by her missed sons and daughters when the spring arrives? In reality, few people honestly care for these thousands, millions of Palestinian Demeters. I can just assume that humans scrapped the grief and suffering of colonized and dispossessed mothers off as if they did it to an old whimsical deity.
Those, nonetheless, who are blessed with the privilege of colonizing native peoples, settling others’ lands or having a very long existence may thus express their end of life wishes. Evoking the Phantom of the Opera with one’s last breath is certainly an outstanding and inspirational wish. But how shall we read the myth in modern times?
The Phantom of the Opera was written by Gaston Leroux in 1909. France definitely had a functioning underground rapid transit system in 1909, specifically the Paris Métro, which opened its first line in July 1900.
Soon we shall go farther and faster than the clouds, to the end of the world, and then you will leave me, Raoul. But, if, when the moment comes for you to take me away, I refuse to go with you – well you must carry me off by force!
Are you afraid that you will change your mind, Christine?
I don’t know”, she said, shaking her head in an odd fashion. “He is a demon!” And she shivered and nestled in his arms with a moan. “I am afraid now of going back to live with him…in the ground!
What compels you back, Christine?
If I do not go back to him, terrible misfortunes may happen!…But I can’t do it, I can’t do it!…I know one ought to be sorry for people who live underground…But he is too horrible! And yet the time is at hand; I have only a day left; and, If I do not go, he will come and fetch me with his voice. And he will drag me with him, underground, and go on his knees before me, with his death’s head. And he will tell me that he loves me! And he will cry! Oh, those tears, Raoul, those tears in the two black eye-sockets of the death’s head! I can not see those tears flow again!”
Joseph Roth, in one of his feuilletons, describes how an old man, released after spending fifty years in jail, was shocked by the modernities of the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe.
George B. remembers Berlin the way it was fifty years ago. If in the course of his long life behind bars, he thought of the city at all, then he saw before him a city with horse-drawn traffic in its streets…George B. bought himself a subway ticket and stood in bewilderment on the platform, allowed himself to be pushed onto a train, and then he thought the underworld had gone crazy too. Could the dead still sleep undisturbed? Were their bones not being rattled in their graves? Did the roar of a train not infect their silence? And what kept the upper world from collapse? How could the road fail to shatter every time a train passed below, throwing thousands of people, cars, horses, wires, and everything else to perdition?
The Resurrection (1923).
Maybe this is what Christine Daaé was fearing and talking about, in the Phantom of the Opera – the Paris Métro with its serpentine wooden carriages, its horning death’s head and hollow eyes beaming a ghostly light into the darkness of the underground tunnels.
“The experience of this century mocks human laws”, and verges on the supernatural.
I am Physalis 
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