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"His [Duchamp's] notes and sketches of 1912 to 1915 indicate that the Bride is 'basically a motor,' in fact, an internal combustion engine. She secretes 'love gasoline,' a sort of 'timid power' or 'automobiline.' The fuel sparks a flask-shaped object called the 'sex-cylinder,' barely attached to the Bride's main body, the pendu femelle (hanging female). The sex-cylinder is the heart of the Bride's desire.
Thus it is the Bride who controls the far more complex, but far less autonomous, Bachelor Apparatus. 'The Bride has a life center,' Duchamp noted. 'The Bachelors have not.' At the Bride's command, the Bachelors' desire is activated by a burst of illuminating gas into the 'malic molds.' These nine figures at the lower left of the glass 'cast' the gas into their own forms: gendarme, priest, cuirassier, and so on. The 'gas castings' are reminded of their malic function by the melancholy dirge from the glider, which is driven endlessly back and forth by water falling on the wheel: 'Slow life, vicious circle. Onanism. Horizontal. Round trip for the buffer. Junk of life. Cheap construction. Tin, cords, iron, wire. Eccentric wooden pulleys. Monotonous flywheel. Beer professor.' To the tune of this lugubrious litany, the illuminating gas starts converging through the 12. Capillary Tubes at the top of the malic mold.
Within this schematic and utterly mechanical operation, Duchamp envisioned frustrating sexual drama, an endless, self-generating cycle of lust perpetually doomed to frustration. The Bride's 'blank desire (with a touch of malice)' activates the subservient Bachelors. The sparks from her desire-magneto set up the two-stroke internal combusion process that powers her magical blossoming. She accepts the Bachelors' splashes, then blossoms, entering the last state before fulfullment. But fulfillment never comes; she remains 'forever lovely and unravished, eternally between desire and possession.'