Love Streams: The Vacuum of Solitude

“The Soul selects her own Society, then shuts the Door.” Imagine a world teeming with the nearness of encounter, forever approaching, forever holding its shape just short of arrival.

The Vacuum of Solitude is loneliness rendered as a room you can move through: the gravitational well that the other thirty-nine playlists in the Love Streams series quietly orbit. It opens, or perhaps ends, at the moment of solitude, the still centre from which every other kind of love in the arc departs and to which each one eventually returns.

As a piece of music it is a slow, deliberate progression rather than a mood loop, a sequence of movements that carries you from the first recognition of aloneness toward something wordless at the end. Most of the series closes in instrumental dissolution, a passage that outlasts speech, and this first chapter sets that grammar.

It rewards being played whole and in order, the way you would read a chapter rather than shuffle a paragraph. The sequence is the argument.

This is the first Love Streams playlist to go live. The rest of the forty are taking shape now over in Nearing Completion, each one a different point on the long, familiar trajectory of romantic and sexual love.

In essence, love raises the feeling of one being for another to such a pitch that the threatened loss of the beloved is felt no less keenly than the threat of death. Love is the desire to live in fear of possible loss, with the beloved holding the lover on the very threshold of a swoon. At that price alone can we feel the violence of rapture before the beloved.
— Georges Bataille

We are embarking on a 40-playlist series, each one dedicated to a particular moment in the many journeys of romantic love and sexual attraction. The series is called Love Streams, after the Cassavetes film of the same name. It is a long-form map of the whole human experience of love: forty separate passes at the same subject, from radically different points on that rich and painful trajectory whose emotions we are all so familiar with.

The Vacuum of Solitude is the first to go live. It starts, or perhaps ends, at the moment of loneliness: the absence of consolidation, encounters that approach without ever arriving. It is the gravitational well the other thirty-nine quietly orbit. The rest of the series is taking shape now, over in Nearing Completion.