Friedrich Engels makes a pudding

 

It must have been a small relief for Engels, when Marx put his face down in the book on his desk and passed on. Marx the bookmark. Life had slipped, for a brief moment, back into the glove of narrative. A fitting. This thought was relayed intact at the funeral. Engels, a tall man, delivered the eulogy to the flocked red throngs. They were disappointed on the whole. He spoke haltingly, like he was waiting for Marx to finish his sentences. Marx the machine, Marx the factory, Marx the warehouse. The sun as it set laid his shadow down on the corpse. He felt satisfied attention had been paid where it was due.

 

Engels suffered then the guilty-pleasant mourning of the good-natured. He was spotted by neighbors spinning his cane up the steps of his house. It was spring. Summer. Engels held large parties. At these parties he developed an elaborate ritual to please his guests. He would invite each to bring an ingredient for pudding (eggs, milk, raisins, butter, cut apples) and dump everything into the bathtub on the second floor of his home. Then to a man (and where were the women?) they would churn the pudding with Engels’ cane, throwing their shoulders into it, as if at any moment they could be cast in bronze in the central square at Petrograd.

 

(Some details lost in the momentum of anecdote: who kept track of the proportions? was the cane cleaned, before or after?)

 

There are new ways now of talking about the Dialectic. There may be more than three steps to it. There are new metaphors too. History the cataract, history the search engine. At the universities, they argue over the death of Marx. Was it, after all, a thesis?