Geishas and Gurus

If you fell into it, maybe you could understand her? The girl who walks you world with smiling eyes, laughing hands, who’ll give you a peaceable excursion into dark lands for a small, oh so careful fee. And you wonder, amidst her twisting, gyrating hips, if she cares a whit after all for her work. If work it be. She only offers her body up as goods, after all, something any other could do if she chose.

And yet, to move further up her skirt to the realm of mind, one gets the notion that the same principles take on different lights when offered to high bidders. There’s an idea that if one puts it to a processor’s query, it’s more meaningful that if one simply flips up a dress to reveal carefully sketched flesh for the taking. There’s an idea that her flesh, lined like sandgrains with purpose by her buyers, is somehow less valuable when marketed than lines upon lines of delicately rendered machine instructions.

There is almost a rejection of the girl for being so tenderly drawn, polygoned in the screens of real life just as the client ordered. This three-dee girl as your own, at least for a short while. There is a sense that to manipulate cold equations in brittle darkness is holier than paid images who draw themselves to your very wishes.

But they twin themselves with the issues of commonality and specificity. On one hand, any girl can lay herself out for cash ready enough. On the other, anyone can pen some passable instructions to a compiler. Now one cannot say in a ‘just anyone’ metric that in either case they’ll do it right and proper, only that they can do it well enough to get a check from an interested party. For sophistication, for walking that line of mysterious arcana, one gets more money, needs more skill. The art of appealing to a client with obscure lore, with specialised needs to match the client’s fetish is something difficult and prized for both a girl with clever hands and a boy armed with a compiler. It often takes years in both cases to assemble the necessary knowledge and practice enough to be crafty at it.

And yet, both sets advocate simplicity to draw more members in. What is that catchphrase, ‘ease of use’? And for the girls: ‘Love, you don’t even need to be pretty, just smile and nod.’ One can question whether these manwoman hours are wasted effort, but the upshot is that each day, a new set of boys and girls tries their luck wandering the world offering skin or symbols up as their stock in trade.

The boys stalk server rooms armed with scripts in foreign pearlised tongues, asking ever to be paid to adore your company’s machines for a fee, to whisper flirtations to them in their own tongues, to manipulate the nuances of the machines’ conversations with each other. And the girls walk through bedrooms, streets, boardrooms of business parties, ever wit the careful kind smile and deft figure, seeking only to be your companion for a bit, to converse, discourse with you on a multitude of levels. Seeking only to make you smile-laugh just so.

Now, is this unrespectable? Is this madness? Is this something to be ashamed of? According to the ones in their quiet houses, all locked away with warm tea and judgmental attitudes it is. They hate the girls with their crafted smiles, can’t stand the boys and their speech strewn with transistor lore and machine linguas. And the question, the question is why? Why is selling one’s skill with flesh or formulae a degraded thing? For centuries the girl’s skirted that edge between appreciation and degradation, but with the boy’s art, it is new and fearsome, and perhaps too distant from the memory of human eyes and mouths.

One gets uncertain in the face of both, be it crafted attraction that draws one in despite the artifice, or polished lines in another tongue unspoken by human lips, but murmured all the while in the machine’s humming belly. Perhaps that is the nature of the hatred, the uncertainty and ambivalent longing in both cases to have a little of that magic ability to bend others (man or metal) to one’s will with what seems commonly attainable skills. And the topic of being bent to wills brings one round to the religiosity of the two beautiful things.

The girls, they’ve other girls standing up for them, screaming for respectability, for honoured status in some cases, a return of the sacred temple meretrix. They want to be seen as haetara, as geisha lying down with you so blue. And the boys, they’ve other boys speaking of the purity of the scrolling lines, the art, the crafted beauty in their practice, the world-shifting importance in their daily efforts. They both want to be adored for their arts and talents rather than paid in secret, lowkey and deprecated in the sunlight. Their advocates sometimes, though not across a board, offer up the view of the work as sacred, to be cherished for its innate worthiness.

This can be appreciated, but it denies the flaky charm of the one-off, the backalley assignation, the hack in twenty minutes or less guaranteed. It denies that sometimes what is can only be what is, with no motive other than the moment. So these religiouslike advocates are sidelined, considered outré and half-mad by the narrow people in their cosy homes, defeating all their intent.

This could be borne if not for the boys. The boys so fond of the twittering beeps and chirps of response from the machines often deem the girls unworthy, cheapeners of a holy act between two open souls. They like to say that to spend money to see her, to hold her close for one gloried hour shames her and you both, makes the acts undertaken a shallow sadness. But the girl makes her movements out of love for her art, and a little love of her clientele. It is a general love of humanity, a ripened tenderness sharpened to a clever edge. She cherishes them all, in individual ways, and that kindness is what they fill her pockets with sacred gold for.

And those payments encapsulate. If the boys can parse their sold-off work from their for-fun work, it stands that the girls are at least as clever. It seems not only arrogant, but rude to credit the girls so lowly in brains. To pay simply takes the sum of the act and locks it in a small box, clean and safe emotionally for the girl and her client. It is the straight razor offering, honed and no less holy. And not so different from the alternate offerings of processor conversation sold to private label clients.

So please take the girl and the boy and what they lay before you as gift, not poisoned or damaged, just an encapsulated version of a more emotionally binding act. Art in a lockbox isn’t less than art given as a love token. It is just kept contained for private reasons, and those reasons should be respected, even if the arts in question are currently not widely honoured or respected. When next you chance on the girls, blow them tender acknowledging kisses. And when next you see the boys, whisper Hello Angel to their machines by way of greeting. And understand that they walk the same streets, just different ends of them.