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A general account of bonding<br />
I confess that I lack a beautiful form;<br />
Yet God prefers me as more excellent,<br />
As does a girl who is steady and not silly. 6<br />
In a proportional way, there are bonds by which those who are ugly bind<br />
because of their reputation for courage, vigour, eloquence, ingenuity and<br />
other such things, for from one type of power they can cause bonds of<br />
another type. It is not a rare occurrence that the more ugly Amazons bind<br />
in the act of love because of their reputation for their strength or their use<br />
of eloquence.<br />
21. The heterogeneity of things that can be bound. Furthermore, there are<br />
species which are bound to a different species through love, hate, admiration,<br />
piety, compassion and other such feelings. For example, there are<br />
some famous cases of such bonding, like Lesbia with her sparrow, Corinna<br />
with her small dog, Cyparissus with his doe, and Arion with his dolphin.<br />
In general, the seeds of all species are attracted to other species. I will<br />
remain silent about the sympathy between a man and a lion, and I will pass<br />
over what I know about the astonishing intimacy between a boy and a<br />
snake.<br />
22. The changing of things that can be bound. It is not difficult to change that<br />
which can be bound from one type of bond to its contrary, since the bonding<br />
agent is also changeable. And it makes no difference whether this occurs<br />
actually or only in thought. Even though I was once bound in thought by<br />
a teaching, the bonds of contempt and indignation may come later when<br />
that opinion has been studied in a better light. And the bonds arising from<br />
the fires of youth and beauty are relaxed and soothed in time when they do<br />
not agree with the bonds derived from customs and skill.<br />
23. The cause and effect of things which can be bound. What it is that bonds to<br />
love and hate or contempt is hidden to the functions of reason. Adrastia’s<br />
explanation is useless: namely, that the explanation of love, which arises<br />
from seeing a beautiful object, is a recollection by the soul of divine beauty,<br />
which was first seen as a companion to the body. If this were true, what is<br />
6 Bruno quotes these three lines, with minor variations, from the ‘Priapea’, a set of approximately<br />
eighty short Latin poems, mostly from the Roman era, which were collected by an unknown editor.<br />
The poems commemorate Priapus, the mythological Greek god of plant and animal fertility, who was<br />
depicted as having a grotesque body and an enormous phallus. The ‘Priapea’ can be found in Emil<br />
Baehrens, ed., Poetae latini minores (Leipzig: Teubner, 1879) Vol. I, 58–87. Bruno’s quotation is from<br />
#38 (70).<br />
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