The English word ‘symbol’ is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover. In the words of Aristophanes (in Plato’s Symposium):

Arrest occurs at a point of inconcinnity between the actual and the possible, a blind point where the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be if we were other than we are.

difference. Such warfare marks the landscape of all human thought,

Paul Ricoeur calls this condition of mental tension a state of war wherein the mind has not yet reached conceptual peace but is caught between distance and proximity, between sameness and

a “split reference” (in Jakobsen’s terms), that is, an ability to hold in equipoise two perspectives at once.

shift of distance, which Aristotle calls an epiphora (Poet. 21.1457b7), bringing two heterogeneous things close to reveal their kinship.

“To give names to nameless things by transference [metaphora] from things kindred or similar in appearance” is how Aristotle describes the function of metaphor

‘metaphor.’

a point which is also a verb—moreover a verb that triangulates, haunts, splits, wrenches and delights us each time it acts.