Seventy-five ways to feel.
a periodic table of emotions
I write every piece as a compound.
Every work in the catalog carries a formula: which elements are in it, what each one weighs, and which one leads. Here is one of them, read out in full.
The formula, in a piece
Open the work →
The subscript is weight. Su2 means sublimity carries the piece; everything else answers to it.
Weight-one elements shade the lead. Anticipation, dread and courage in one frame make being watched survivable.
The + element is a ghost note from the rare column. Present, faint, doing quiet work under everything.
Seven more rooms, door ajar.
Three cells are secretly two.
Plutchik predicted feelings that fuse into new ones, the way his dyads make love out of joy and trust. Three of my cells are fusions and I never labeled them. You are now one of the people who knows.
Fear fused to beauty. Burke's sublime: the storm watched from the shore, magnitude at survivable distance. The most-used fusion in the catalog.
Fear fused to fascination. The horror you keep looking at. It lives in the rare column because English never gave it a word of its own.
What gets a cell, what gets turned away.
I hold one rule with no exceptions: an element earns a cell only if it is a state a work can put you into. Behaviors, virtues and vices knock, and I turn them away.
And five cells sit deliberately dark, held rather than missed. There are states my work has not needed to name yet, and I would rather leave the room for them than pad the table out to look finished. The day a piece arrives carrying one, it gets its symbol.
One more secret: Ecstasy sits with the still states, not the rising ones. From ekstasis, to stand outside oneself. The volume never changes. What goes is the container.
Same lead. Different feeling.
If my notation were decoration, two pieces leading with Su2 would feel the same. Read them side by side. The singles do the steering, and steering is why I write feeling as chemistry instead of adjectives.
False AwakeningOpen the piece →
Sublimity steered by entrancement and detachment: an idyllic day, the buildings below going up, and him suspended over it, drawn on by a hum coming out of the world. The terror is underneath and he keeps levitating. The singles make it a dream he has not woken out of.
APOCALYPSEOpen the piece →
Same lead, steered by ruin, witness and solitude. The world burns on every screen and keeps handing it to you. Water past the fire. A figure in the middle who does not get to look away. Everything still works. Nothing is right. The singles make it a vigil.
Two pieces, one lead element, opposite rooms of feeling. Everything that separates them is written in the singles.
I built this like an argument, then tried to lose it.
I held the families against Tangney's self-conscious quartet and rebuilt the ones that failed. I tried to delete Awe-Quiet and Maslow's plateau work out-argued me, so it stayed. Open any cell and you get the definition, the word it came from, the inside of the feeling, its neighbours, and the job it does in a picture. Open any piece and every element in its formula has a written bond holding it there. None of it is asking to be taken on faith.