Seventy-five ways to feel.
a periodic table of emotions
Every piece is written as a compound.
Every work in the catalog carries a formula. The subscripts record weight, and the highest number marks the lead. OBSERVATION is below. Read the symbols, then look back at the figure.
The formula, in a piece
Open the work →
The number below a symbol is its weight. Su2 is the lead; the other elements change how that weight is felt.
A weight of one still changes the whole reading. Anticipation, dread and courage turn the gaze of the audience into something the figure can survive.
The + marks a rare element at trace strength. It moves beneath the main formula like a low note you feel before you hear.
Seven more rooms, door ajar.
Three cells carry a second formula.
Plutchik argued that feelings can combine into a third feeling; in his dyads, joy and trust become love. Three cells in this table follow that logic. Their joins remain unmarked.
Beauty gives fear a shore to stand on. In Burke's sublime, the storm can overwhelm you because you are far enough away to survive it. This is the catalog's most-used fusion.
Fascination keeps the eye where fear tells it to leave. That pull is the Abject. Horror and disgust were both too broad, so the rarer name stayed.
What gets a cell, what gets turned away.
The grid names what reaches the viewer. Gluttony describes an act; Craving names the appetite underneath it. Only one of them belongs here.
Five cells stay dark because the table has not reached them yet. A future work may arrive carrying a state the current catalog cannot name. Until it does, the space stays open. The grid does not invent a feeling just to look complete.
One more secret: Ecstasy sits with the still states. The Greek ekstasis means to stand outside oneself. The volume is beside the point. The boundary of the self gives way.
Same lead. Different feeling.
Two pieces in the catalog begin with Su2. Put them side by side and the same lead opens into two different rooms. The singles make the turn.
False AwakeningOpen the piece →
The day is deceptively beautiful. Buildings burn below a suspended figure, and a hum seems to rise from the world toward him. Sublimity carries the scene while entrancement and detachment keep him hovering inside it. Dread stays underneath. He does not wake.
APOCALYPSEOpen the piece →
Ruin makes the Sublimity historical: something has already been destroyed. Empathic Pain turns that scale toward the lives inside it, while Solitude leaves the central figure alone with the witnessing. The formula becomes a vigil.
Sublimity at weight two gives both works their scale. The singles make one a dream and the other a vigil.
The table was built, then tested against itself.
The Self-Conscious family was revised after comparison with Tangney's quartet. Awe-Quiet stayed because Maslow's distinction between peak and plateau experience offered a useful parallel for the split. Research does not certify a creative taxonomy. It shows where the categories need more pressure, which is why the sources and disputed calls remain visible.