Listening to a guitar is of course a purely auditory experience; watching a guitarist stimulates both your eyes and your ears. Playing the guitar adds pleasing tactile sensations, the satisfaction of musical progress, and the intrigue of communicating in a new tongue that is nonverbal like body language... and equally expressive.
Touch is a central pleasure of the guitar. Before you even pluck a string, you're taking something pretty onto your knee and putting your arms around her. That's a pretty good start, wouldn't you say?
The back of her neck is long, sleek, and smooth. If you run a hand up the fretboard lightly, you'll feel each of those metal inlays like rough bumps on a smooth road-like surface. Finally, as you begin to play, you're pinning taut wires to a hard surface with your fingers, vibrating them with the other hand until they ring pleasingly.
Even back when it used to hurt, back when I was a beginner, I loved how the wires resisted me, how they bit grooves into my skin. Slowly my fingertips hardened until I could play for hours without pain, and that was like losing some physical form of virginity. I had been initiated, I was entering another world!
Guitar continues to be a process of discovering limitations and working to push them farther out. Every time I sit down I confront myself, I struggle, and if I'm lucky that day, I overcome. Then I'm one tiny step closer to being able to express any musical idea that pops into my head; my hands are one notch closer to being "obedient."
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