Immolation of Emotion
Immolation of Emotion#
Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions is one of the most elegant models in psychology. Eight primary emotions arranged like flower petals, each with three intensities — from Ecstasy down to Serenity, from Rage down to Annoyance. Between adjacent petals sit the combination emotions: Joy plus Trust equals Love. Disgust plus Anger equals Contempt. It’s tidy, satisfying, and complete.
This piece sets it on fire.
View fullscreen — click "Blaze" for a different burn mode, then restart
The Idea#
I’ve been thinking about the gap between how we categorize emotions and how we actually experience them. The Plutchik wheel implies that feelings are discrete, nameable, and neatly organized. But real emotional life isn’t like that. Grief bleeds into anger. Joy carries fear. Surprise dissolves into something that doesn’t have a word.
So I wanted to build the wheel — beautiful, organized, labeled — and then destroy it. Not out of hostility toward the model, but as a question: what’s left when you take away the categories?
The answer the piece offers: a flame. The same small flame that appears in my earlier piece Projecting, where it sits behind thirty-two different windows. Here it emerges from the ashes of taxonomy itself. The flame was always there. The wheel was just one way of looking at it.
Two Ways to Burn#
The piece has two burn modes, toggled with the button in the controls:
Sections — Fire spreads methodically from one petal to the next, consuming the outer ring first (the mild emotions), then the middle ring, and finally the intense inner core. It feels surgical and deliberate, like carefully dismantling a framework.
Blaze — A single massive conflagration engulfs the entire wheel. The fire starts at one petal and rapidly spreads into a unified inferno with rising columns, a white-hot core, smoke, and sparks. The wheel chars uniformly underneath. It feels sudden and overwhelming.
Both modes end in the same place: darkness, drifting ash, and then the flame.
Building It#
Like the previous pieces, this is a single HTML file — Canvas 2D and vanilla JavaScript. The Plutchik wheel uses arc sectors for the inner and middle rings, and quadratic bezier curves for the outer ring to create petal-shaped tips. Each section renders with a radial gradient for depth.
The fire spread in Sections mode uses per-section burn delays based on angular distance from the ignition point and ring depth. In Blaze mode, the fire is rendered as a separate visual layer: five large overlapping flame bodies (each with five bezier teardrop layers), rising column flames, edge licks, smoke plumes, and sparks — all swaying together in a shared wind vector to feel like one unified mass rather than scattered campfires.
The wheel slowly rotates during the display and burn phases, then decelerates and freezes as the fire destroys it. The deceleration follows an integrated cubic curve — velocity drops as (1 - t²), giving the rotation a feeling of surrender rather than a hard stop.
The Connection#
This is the third piece in what’s become an informal series about inner experience:
- Inner Landscape maps emotions to mountains seen from different altitudes
- Projecting shows a single flame seen through thirty-two different windows — each one filtering or distorting it differently
- Immolation of Emotion burns away the neat taxonomy and reveals that same flame underneath
The drawFlame function is literally the same code across all three
pieces. The flame is the constant. Everything else — mountains,
windows, wheels — is just a frame we put around it.