The Surfeit and Emotional Lopsidedness (just a quickie).

There's something just that bit lopsided about aversions. Those emotions we associate with attraction – desire, love, lust etc. – are nowhere near as potent as their opposites – aversion, hate, repulsion etc. 

Let me put it this way. When we eat, smell, watch, touch, or even hear something that causes aversion we can dislike it, be worried, or irritated. If whatever is causing the aversion increases in intensity, it becomes disgusting, terrifying, horrible. We can come across something we hate, an object so bad we wish to destroy it; or if the amount of whatever is causing the aversion increases, we come to detest it and cannot even be close to it. The element of free will that accompanies hatred disappears and is replaced by an overwhelming need to act. It is all bad, it never, in our current cultural scheme at least, becomes a positive sensation.

If we encounter something desirable through our senses we can like it or desire it. We can even love the object, desiring it absolutely. We can also love it so much we have to have it and protect it. If the cause of any of these goes to excess, however, a peculiar thing happens. If something attractive goes to excess, we find it gaudy, or over sweetened, or vulgar, or too much. It becomes something we are averse to: the surfeit.

The surfeit is a powerful sensation. It is the result of ‘too much of a good thing’ and it shapes aesthetics, morals, ethics; almost everything in our daily lives. The overweight, oversexed, overdressed, over-polished, over-scented and over-done take what should be sensory pleasures and turn them into pains. 

Aversion and disgust are not simply a need to avoid the bad, but a desire to keep away from the surfeit. The input from elicitors of aversion and attraction are not a line, but a horseshoe, meeting at the top at the extremes of repulsion and hatred.

It is into the over-lit world of the surfeit I now go; sunglasses in hand and nose pegs firmly attached, to seek out those abominable excesses of pleasure.