This is the last one I'll read.
"Tango 28.
Homo Ludens."
That maybe needs a bit of explanation.
Homo Ludens is a Latin phrase meaning
"man playing" or "the human being as a player."
It's also the name of a book that used to be very
well-known--
I don't know if it is anymore-- by a Dutch historian named
Huizinga, which is a history of war--
sorry, of games, and gaming, and particularly the idea of war
as a game.
And this tango takes place in Athens.
"Homo Ludens."
"Omens are, for example, hearing someone say victory
as they pass you in the street or to be staring
at the little sulfur lamps in the grass
all around the edge of the hotel garden just as they come on.
They come on at dusk.
What was he thinking to bring her here?
Athens, Hotel Eremia.
He knew very well, thinking detente and reconciliation,
let's start again.
Thinking oysters and glace fruits.
It needs a light touch.
Narrow keys not very deep.
Hotel gardens at dusk are a place where the laws governing
matter get cold inside out like the black keys
and the white keys on Mozart's piano.
It cheered him to remember Mozart,
borrowing money every night and smiling his tilted smile.
Necessity is not real after all.
The husband swallows his ouzo and waits for its slow hot snow
inside him.
Mozart, so his wife had told him at lunch,
scored his horn concerto in four different colors of ink.
A man at play.
A husband whose wife knows just enough history
to keep him going.
Good cheer is rampant in the husband
now, infinite evening ahead.
Its shoals appear to him and he navigates them one by one,
slipping the dark blue Kiel ropes this way
and that on a bosom of inconceivable silver.
Ah, here she is.
The husband can be seen to rise as his wife crosses the garden.
Why so sad?
No, I'm not sad.
Why in your eyes?
What are you drinking?
Ouzo.
Can you get me a tea?
Of course.
He goes out.
She waits.
Waiting, thoughts come, go, flow, this flowing.
Why sadness, this flowing?
The world to its end, why in your eyes?
This is a line of verse.
Where has it stepped from?
She searches herself, waiting.
Waiting is searching.
And the odd thing is waiting, searching the wife suddenly
knows a fact about her husband.
This fact, for which she had not searched,
jerks itself into the light like a child from a closet.
She knows why he is taking so long at the bar.
Over and over in later years when she told this story,
she marveled at her husband's ability
to place the world within brackets, a brackets-worth
of mirage, all he ever needed.
A man who, after three years of separation,
would take his wife to Athens for adoration,
for peace, and then telephone New York
every night from the bar and speak to a woman who thought he
was over on 4th Street working late.
And upstairs that night, which proved
to be a very long night, as he was dragging his wounded
honor about the hotel room like a damaged queen of moths
because she mentioned Houyhnms and he objected
to being written off as an object of satire.
They moved several times through a cycle of remarks like this.
What is it?
What future is there?
I thought you said we never went exactly?
Day, year name anything, who I was, who I am, who did you?
Did you or did you not?
Do you or do you not?
This excuse, that excuse.
Pleasure, pain, truth.
What truth is that?
All those kilometers.
Faith, letters.
You're right, never!
Oh, all right.
Once.
Remarks, which like the chain of Parmenides well rounded truth,
you can follow in a circle and always
end up where you began for it is all one to me where I start.
I arrive there again soon enough, as Parmenides says.
So the wife was thinking about Parmenides
with part of her mind while throwing ever and ever
a liar at her husband.
And he was holding yes and no together with one hand while
parrying the words of his wife when they stopped.
Silence came.
They stood aligned.
He had the door with his back to it,
she had the bed with her back to it.
In that posture which experts of conflict resolution tell us,
ensures impasse.
And they looked at one another and there
was nothing more to say.
Kissing her.
I love you.
Joys and leaves of earlier times flowed through the husband
and disappeared.
Presence and absence twisted out of sight of one another
inside the wife.
They stood.
Sounds reach them.
A truck, a snore, shrubs ticking on a tin wall.
His nose begins to bleed.
Then blood runs down over his upper lip, lower lip, chin,
to his throat.
Appears on the whiteness of his shirt,
dyes the mother of pearl button for good,
blacker than a mulberry.
Don't think his heart had burst.
He was no Tristan, although he would
love to point out that in the common version,
Tristan is not false, it is the sail that kills.
Yet neither of them had a handkerchief
and that is how she ends up staining
her robe with his blood, his head in her lap,
and his virtue coursing through her as if they were one flesh.
Husband and wife may erase a boundary,
creating a white page.
But now the blood seems to be the only thing in the room.
If only one's whole life could consist in certain moments.
There is no possibility of coming back from such a moment
to simple hatred, to black ink.
If a husband throws the dice of his beauty one last time,
who is to blame?
Rich proposition, drastic economy, hours, bets, pronouns,
no one.
No one is to blame.
Change the question.
We are mortal balanced on a day.
Now and then, does it not make sense to say,
save what you can?
And wasn't it you who told me civilization
is impossible in the absence of a spirit of play?
Anyway, what would you have done?
Torn the phone off the wall?
Smothered him with a pillow?
Emptied his wallet and run?
But you overlook an important cultural function of games:
to test the will of the gods.
Huizinga reminds us that war itself is a form of divination.
Husband and wife did not therefore engage in murder
but continued their tour of the Peloponnese,
spending eight more weary days in temples and buses
and vine-covered tavernas.
Eight days which had the internal texture
of the Greek word petradavki, ancient pevtros, broken,
crushed stone, road stone gravel,
but which served a purpose within the mode of justice that
was their marriage.
Waiting for the future and for the gods, husband and wife
rested as players may rest against the rules of the game,
if it is a game, if they know the rules and it was
and they did."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]