On any day, at any time, usually thoughts keep running. Some thoughts are silent, some are very vocal; some of them are active, some of them just keep on playing in the background; some fuse, some switched on or off by others. They may have a commonality, a unifying pattern. They may not have. The role of a poem is to add some scripts which mostly are commentary on the subject. Poems do not tell story, and even if they do so, — the story is known, the essence of poem lies in commenting on the philosophy of the subject matter. And the role of a Metaphor is  to  bind several seemingly unconnected scripts; its role is to bring some unifying pattern on surface.  Using Metaphor, we speak about an object by narrating the course of other objects.  Shelley’s, –

The Moon

I

AND, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The mood arose up in the murky east,
A white and shapeless mass

II

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

The Metaphor, here, is dying lady, the description is about “Moon”, yet the hint is towards a third person, whose state is the Poem’s plot.  The resemblance of things with each other need not be a replica,  their contexts echo same tone. If poem talks about an object, their is a mapping which gets created along with, for a third object. So when the poet says, “dying lady“, he is visibly talking about “Moon”, but the eventual theme of poem hints towards the state of a third person. The words – dying, lady, – do not themselves carry all meaning. In fact even in normal usage, words, are just hints to an idea. Words switch on contexts. It is one matter to get the meaning of word by consulting Dictionary, but it takes observations and time to comprehend the meaning of word used in a context. Things may look naive, but apply rigour to get their precise meaning … things fall apart.

Counting is the process of assigning symbols to the idea of enlisting objects, it is iterative in nature. An implicit mechanism is the assertion of similarity between objects. So when we are counting Books on a table, we are little bothered about what their sizes or content are. Yet it may become imprecise to define the human notion of a book. Two books share a metaphor, a context which makes them similar. In usual casual talks we may not ascertain this “context”, though in case of poems searching for metaphor is a duty. How precise is our this idea of Counting? Can we count everything ? Can we claim that we can count all objects confirming to different ideas we have ? If counting is the process of mapping symbols to objects, then is it powerful enough to capture essence of every objectives involved in the precise description of the object. Thus can we claim that with all possible scientific knowledge to illustrate the features of a Mango, we are sure we can count all its features. And further can we enlist features of two Mango and so on.

Numbers are symbolic. But are there any limitations of such Symbolism requires us to go through pages from Gödel, Turing and likes. To think numbers are naive ideas, will be too deceptive.