Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, Dec 2, 2008


Don’t talk to me about rules, dear.
Wherever I stay I make the goddam rules.

- Maria Callas, diva, born on this day, 1923


Kathleen Battle, the singer of gorgeous Mozart, had the same problem, though I’m not sure if it was for the same reasons. I knew her when she sang in the choir of Christ Church, Cincinnati. Exquisite voice ….. but “stuck on herself”. She was later fired by the Met Director, Rudolf Bing. Too bitchy and imperious and downright rude and arrogant. So it is said.

If you have to “make the goddam rules”, you’ve gotten something seriously wrong in the business of being happy – and human. Having to “make the goddam rules” radiates insecurity, and fantasy, and a kind of pathetic infantilism. Much as I could appreciate Callas for her sheer bravado (with what I still maintain was a fairly unruly and undisciplined voice - which was part of her charism!), I saw her as a person stunted in her growth. She never got beyond being an emotional child who married her “father”. Why Jackie married Onassis eludes me; was she too was a frightened child running from the World?

Callas’ statement is the exact opposite of a mature human being. A mature human being knows that “making the goddam rules” is a refusal or inability to grow up. It’s to live in the World of Unreality. It’s Hitlerian. Delusional. And terribly sad.

Needing to “make the goddam rules”, unilaterally, means you haven’t joined the human race. We Americans have had a sickening surfeit of that in the last eight years. Jesus roundly lambasted his contemporaries for the same mistake. When you lose touch with the suffering and the welfare and the happiness of others, you become a caricature of a person.

The “rules” of being authentically human filter to us from the heart of the Universe. They are built in. Their wisdom lives in the shared human Unconscious, enhanced by each generation’s experience.

Time to listen.

Brian+