In this chapter, the author relies upon Giambattista Vico for a point of departure. He serves as a quay of sorts at the confluence where the just mentioned streams of consciousness issue into a re-visioned theory of metaphor. The operation of fantasia is essentially metaphorical. It formulates what Danesi called "iconic signs" that allow the mind to "map mental images onto the beings, objects, and events that the senses had captured, and thus to make associations and connections among them". The principle of the poetical character, and of each of us as poetical characters, lends a metaphoric conception to the "metaphysical realities to which physical reality conforms". Metaphoric consanguinity is a phenomenon of the boundary, the vale of soul-making where diachronicity meets synchronicity. The puer-et-senex metaphor for metaphor is a pharmakon for the metaphysical double-blind, a therapeutics that reinscribes ambiguity into the binary, leaving us, as Hillman said, "in the soft light of the dusty world", the metaphoric vale.