Lux Machina

I’m not entirely sure why I’m so obsessed with candles, but I also don’t know if it needs a deep explanation. Anything connected to nature’s primary colors (water, fire, earth, air, let’s say) implies our attachment to it by its own definition. These are the rudimentary building blocks first of our survival and second of our civilizations, so they occupy a place of permanent importance for us even if our relationship to each has become a bit more abstract. For instance, in most places or contexts we don’t have someone stay awake through the night to keep a literal fire alive any longer, but many of us do rely on pilot lights for heating our homes and powering our stoves and there is a meaningful similarity there.

I spent this morning pulling a bit on my candle obsession thread and the first thing that surfaced was David T. Courtwright’s concept of Limbic Capitalism. His summary of the idea, which operates as the gravitational center for his book The Age of Addiction, is this:

Limbic here refers to the part of our brain that controls our survival instincts and most base desires (food/sex/protection/etc). And the argument, which at this point feels less like an argument in a strict sense and more like someone pointing at the Godzilla-sized creature in our collective social consciousness and screaming, is that capitalism within the advent of modern human technology has allowed for, and then begun to obsess over, designing products that hook into our core impulses and never leave. Which, um, is bad.

The second thing that surfaced this morning is that not all of these sorts of schemes are created equal. For instance, within a system where consumption has been conflated with production and even our various conceptions of God are nailed to a subscription service, there are still things that deserve to be subconsciously bought over and over again even if we can’t explain exactly why we want them. In the case of the candle, it might be true that some sector of Courtwright’s Dark Paradise has mapped the human desire to survive and commodified that impulse into an expensive, emblematic object we buy because a deep part of us does not want to die. But on the other hand, craftsmanship might be one of the little mushrooms growing in the darkness closer to the mouth of Plato’s consumerist cave. Something safe for us to eat and an extra push into the sort of personal reflections which can help us find our way out into the post-industrial light. And there is something undeniable about the joy you can get from a little wax factory pumping your home full of strange perfume and comfy glow.

I think you’re starting to see why I’m not very fun to have at parties, but I say all of that to say I think one of the ways off the consumerist sauce is to buy things that actually matter to us, and perhaps in some more fundamental sense actually matter in and of themselves. Not everything needs to be a reference to the furnace of creation or whatever, but it doesn’t hurt to have a few reminders of our own mortality around which we also actually enjoy. If that sort of thing is what you’re looking for but you’re not sure where to find top shelf shit, you can start with the very short list below. Happy Weekend.

Candle Recommendations