The Lamp

On symbols, recognition, and what lights us up.

‍So let’s see … This week I bought a lamp at a thrift store and added it to my work space. It’s a heavy, articulating, decently-made desk lamp with a dimmer knob that adjusts the intensity of the light. Honestly, I have a habit of buying these metal desk lamps and carrying them home, whether or not I really need them in my space.

On the way out of the store, the man at the register commented wryly “one Toy Story lamp” as he rung it up. We all had a good laugh.

On the sidewalk outside, another stranger called out as I passed by: Hey, it's the Pixar lamp!‍ ‍

When I got home and proudly presented my find to my husband (a fellow junk collector) he took one look at it and proclaimed it: The Pixar Lamp.‍ ‍

Maybe you looked at the image and thought the same as well. And, not being super familiar with the Pixar’s mascot lamp myself, I took their word for it and rounded up in my own head … Ok, I am now the proud owner of the cousin of the Pixar lamp.

It wasn't until later, when I sat down to reflect on this past week and plugged the lamp into its new home, that I actually looked up the origin story of Pixar’s lamp. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered my lamp doesn't really look that much like the Pixar lamp at all. The real one is more complex, more robotic, more easily anthropomorphized. Mine is just a desk lamp. A good one, but (perhaps deceptively) simple in comparison.

So, I found myself wondering, what were these three individuals actually seeing? Why did this lamp light them up?

The Pixar lamp—Luxo Jr., officially—started as a two-minute short film in 1986. It was the first CGI-animated film nominated for an Academy Award, and it eventually became Pixar's mascot. Among the many reasons it works so effectively as part of the Pixar brand is that it took something completely inanimate and made it feel genuinely alive and relatable. Curious even. It is playful and emotionally present without even the most basic human features. It tells a story and it connects in ways that seem to get at the heart of the human imagination.

What brought Luxo Jr. jumping to the inner eyes (and inner-child imaginations) of those three individuals who commented on my own thrifted lamp is a little complicated to locate. Of course it’s vaguely similar in shape and function. It may possess a less tangible quality, a presence, something that recalled for them one of the most famous symbols in popular culture. More likely, it struck a chord of some inner emotional resonance, a certain feeling that several generations of us recognize immediately. The flashlight under the covers, burning the midnight oil, a searchlight of imagination in a field of darkness.

Whatever it was, they weren't wrong, exactly. Perhaps they just stopped one step short, unknowingly.

“Every time that recognition surfaces, it’s a bid for your attention from deep within yourself. Like a voice calling out of the darkness of the woods you played in as a child.”

There's something sort of fascinating about what happens when an object or image or idea calls to us the way that lamp apparently called to those three people (and to me, considering I purchased it). We feel something within, at the heart level, a kind of internal lighting up, and then, almost immediately, we look for somewhere outside ourselves to put it. We reach into our files and find the nearest cultural reference, the most recognizable version of the thing, and we link up our feeling to that experience. Oh, that's the Pixar lamp! And for a moment, there’s a light in our eyes.

But, in the moments before we very understandably seek to connect our inner recognition with outer shared experience, a little light flares up somewhere within. Yes, perhaps, studios like Pixar have given us a shared language for it in this example, but—in fact—it isn’t actually Pixar we recognize. It’s something Pixar’s creator’s point toward, namely the human imagination and its impulse to create. The seemingly endless deeply human capacity to relate and to receive stories. Our ability to surmise and communicate meaning, even in the inanimate.

This is certainly not criticism of our tendency to love and relate to objects, stories, characters, or worlds. It's a very human thing to do. Shared symbols exist because they carry real meaning. The Pixar lamp became iconic precisely because it touched something genuine in people.

But there's an invitation on the other side of recognition that has become all to easy to miss. The moment when you notice what lit up in you. Not just that something lit up, but what part of yourself just recognized itself in what you were seeing. The part that jumped up with enthusiasm and shouted for your attention, that urged you to reach beyond yourself and toward shared experience.

Every time that recognition surfaces, it’s a bid for your attention from deep within yourself. Like a voice calling out of the darkness of the woods you played in as a child.

Whatever lit up within those three individuals—whatever they all recognized—was neither the Pixar lamp as they remember it, nor the brand’s actual mascot. It was about something in them that is drawn to creativity and aliveness, the impulse to play and to explore. To find the place within themselves that allows them to reach outside, to connect, to share, and to become part of the story.