Vivid threads brush my thoughts since reading Memoirs of a Geisha. It's not her untamable yearning for a certain man that visits me, it is Sayuri herself, and the eyes through which her geisha culture asks me to see my world.
A geisha studies the art of filling the emptiness that haunts a man's unexamined impulses. She draws her clients out of their functionary minds with dance, music, ceremony, kimono, conversation, laughter and sometimes, if a man is worthy, the intimate touch.
Rock artist would seem as far from geisha as slug from silkworm, but look again. Performance rock elevates the listener to the region of complicit passion woven into existence, invisible to many. In the hands of the diva, her tools -- lyric, rhythm, sound, musicianship, choreography, costume -- dissolve into the audience's palpable pleasure. Like businessmen at a tea ceremony, listeners sip their own thoughts in the presence of the diva whose deference, like the geisha's, is to unquestionable beauty.
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