Disposable lighter.

To call it a ‘disposeable’ lighter is perhaps a misnomer. No one calls them that these days- they just ask for a lighter, plain & simple. Or with even further abbreviation, they ask “Have you got a light?” Perhaps ‘dispensable’ or 'dis-' would be a more appropriate term. Landfills must be filled with trillions of these things, and yet no one ever seems to throw one out. No one ever seems to be able to hold onto a lighter long enough for it to go empty. At least, not one that they have bought fresh & full. Because few people seem to buy disposeable lighters in the first place. We simply find them lying around, and lose them just as often. These plastic lighters are so abundant we rarely mourn the loss of them (until Murphy’s Law kicks in & we really need one that works), nor do we chastise our friends for accidentally stealing our lighters; we have often come home to realize that we have accidentally stolen theirs. But when we are out for a night on the town, we pass that torch between each & everyone. As equals, friend & stranger alike. We always have a lighter within arm’s reach, because it is the one thing we can ask of absolutely any passerby. (Perhaps that & asking the time, which is becoming increasingly suspicious in an age when we each carry multiple electronic devices that carry the time for us.)

The magic of the lighter is in its instantaneousness: fire at the snap of the finger, at the flick of a flint. In the darker times of our species’ origin, fire would have been the most precious commodity. Giver of warmth, light, cooking & protection, the earliest societies would have congregated & grown around the fires they had learned to harness. When early man looked into their first fires, they must have barely seen glimpses of blue flame. For a flame to turn blue, its fuel must be burning hot enough to overcome the perpetual residue of soot caused by the ongoing reaction. Early mankind must have seen only the briefest flickers of these blue flames, and only when their fires were at their strongest. Today, we hold in our hands the orange flame forever dancing above the blue. There is no flicker in its light, the flame is constant and can be held as long as your thumb can stand the heat transferred into the flintwheel. And between the orange & the blue (paradoxical opposites on the colour wheel), is a space of emptiness. Of pure fuel, pure potential pouring out between one flame and the next. The constancy of the flame kept alive by the perfectly calibrated rate of dispersal.

There is a million dollars of technology in this magical contraption worth only a buck. As though it really were from some otherworldly place, permanently prepared for us & we merely tap into it from time to time. Fire is one of the things that sets us apart from the animals. Indeed it was fire that the god Prometheus stole from Zeus for us as our ‘gift’, after his brother Epimetheus rushed to give birds wings & fish lungs. The thing that makes us human, that element that Prometheus spent the rest of eternity chained to a rock for, can be purchased for a dollar on every city street corner. Or simply found down the back of the couch. The dilemma is, we have since put the production of fire into the hands of others. We have each forgotten how to make fire from scratch. The ease with which we can wield fire from our hands has made it fade from our minds to the point that today, few of us would know even how to flake flints against each other. We have outsourced that role to our industries, to our machines. If some great apocalypse –be it a nuclear winter or peak oil crisis-  were to befall our planet, cigarette lighters would quickly become treasured prizes, always held close, their exact location always remembered.

Zippo’s claim to fame is that their lighters can be lit in a hurricane. Whether or not a hurricane is pushing the claim (and the lighter that holds it) too far, Zippo’s are indeed capable of staying lit (& often even being lit) during high winds – provided that wind is not coming straight down vertically. A Zippo has various parts that must be maintained & replaced by the owner: The fuel, simple lighter fluid is readily available. The flints can be purchased at any good tobacconist. The wick is much longer than it appears, coiled down inside the fuel chamber like a snake about to strike a match. When it burns down too far, you are meant to tug a little more of it up and out of that compartment. Three compartments working in a holy trinity. The fluid, the flint and the wick. The fuel source, the spark that ignites it and the material to hold it. The Zippo lighter has something to keep hold of the flame, even if you do not continue to hold it yourself.

The disposable lighter, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. The flame only lasts an instant, that moment with which you are creating it, taking it in. There is no wick on a disposable lighter. The flame is held alight & aloft by the flame itself. The fluid will not burn until it is a vapour, mixed with the oxygen upon which it ultimately feeds. Once the flint is struck, once the flame is sparked, nothing feeds that fire but the flame itself.

/mr_metaphor.