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The Weddings of Narcissi
I They are shaping each other applying the bevelled edge to knock off rough corners shape their ideal romance. It is the work of many days there are abrasions when the material seems knotty resistant and suggests a form quite other than the one desired. Cunning is needed plane and sandpaper, a smoothing over, or sometimes a more violent approach, the cutting deeper more pronounced to oust the irritant trait, or unfortunate feature. Their making love is a rubbing each other up the right and wrong way an erasure of possible differences indicating a need to preserve the appropriate image. It is a way to make statues and photographs of statues; it is a way to cheat change. And so they chisel each other in successive diminutions for thirty years until the finished product is admired - how alike they are, how they'll never alter - artists of a marriage they have sculpted the perfect exchange.
II They fall for an armature the possibilities of a straight ideal fashionably thin then add the flesh of clay wet and slippery in sensuous mouldings through rub and finger palm and pressure they make each other roundly every night smothering imperfection with new invention a plastering over until fat they grow into each other's perfect lover. But it can't go on the clay dries is fixed and fired and they are chained to forms from which there's no escape though they might brush each other up with different colours or attach some metal plated armour the growing days are over, no further transformations will move beyond indifference they have become finished.