The Name Will Change With The Weather

Dash Snow & Jade Berreau by Ryan McGinley

This is a little response to Fool’s link to John Steinbeck’s letter to his son Thom on love.  Some excerpts.

“There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had…

…But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it—and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it….

…Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.”

In reading about Dash Snow late into the morning (A rather interesting and conflicting figure to consider…seemingly selfish, but possessing some kind of magnet destructive quality) I stumbled on a little blog post by Heidi Sincuba featuring the above photo of Dash and his girlfriend Jade.  The post can be found here.  I’ll include some of my favorite parts:

“According to [Helene Fisher] romantic love is an addiction. After studies conducted among men and women who were in love, she discovered that the same brain systems that become active when in love are activated when one feels the rush of cocaine. One of the fundamental aspects of romantic love is that you crave union with the object of your affections. You can’t stop thinking about this person. It is an obsession and a relentless desire for togetherness…

…The precursors to love are not at all carefully decided, but miraculously aligned – a roll of the dice. It is chance and chaos that determines what is ‘in my heart’ and one change in the conditions would mean considerably different outcomes….

…How many times have you felt extreme elation because he/she called you or kissed you or held your hand? How many times have you made love to him/her and thought it would never end? How many times have you let your own heart be broken? How many times have you cried because you were not loved in return? How many more times will you fall in love in spite of it?

This is not a game, this is serious business. Love is a social and biological system, perhaps one of the most powerful we have known as a species. Like it or not, love’s what makes us tick. It is the most vital drug and we are all addicted. That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.”

That need is a powerful and scary thing.  By far the most popular topic of art across all of humanity is love—love gained, love lost, desire, unrequited love, pain, true love.  It is the key to so much of our happiness, loneliness, despair, elation, anger, fear, want, and need.  It’s been on my mind a lot lately, and truly has always been something I consider to be the most valuable and desired thing to have in my life.  How many times have I hurt someone who was in love with me?  How many times have I let someone hurt me?  Every time one of those things happens, I think I’ve learned something, some kind of lesson that I’ll never repeat.  Someone once told me, “I feel like every person I date is better than the last.”  I wished I had felt the same way, that I felt I was somehow progressing towards something when it so often felt like I was flailing in a chaotic and imperfect world.

However, how miraculous is it to be in love?  How all of those “lessons” I thought I had learned, how to protect myself and never so easily let myself be vulnerable, fade away into memories that seem like jokes.  How everything that matters to me in the world can suddenly shrink down into the small confines of legs, arms, lips, and eyes.  To feel that there’s only one thing I need to be happy, and everything else is shadows and dust.

I’m sorry about the melodrama.  I’m only writing this here because I don’t really think very many people read this; to those that do, and who aren’t the person I’m writing about, I’m sorry, try to overlook it.  To those of you reading it who are in love (I’m looking at you fool), I’m so very happy that you can feel all of the horror and ecstasy, too.

All of this is just to say, I love you Becca.

P.S. For those of you waiting for music, hold your horses, it’s on its way.