Anamnesis

[Adrian Kane]

Anamnesis is the recollection of innate knowledge acquired before birth, the claim that learning consists of rediscovering knowledge from within. Socrates' theory of anamnesis suggests that the soul is immortal and repeatedly incarnated; knowledge is in the soul from eternity, but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the trauma of birth. 

What one perceives to be learning, then, is the recovery of what one has forgotten.

+++

Adrian stood alongside his bed and when he looked upon the blankets he could almost see himself slumbering there, but that was another world. He looked upon himself, then, unsurprised to find his body beneath him. Every time he awoke in his home, he was in this form. When he awoke somewhere else it was within the shape of an entirely different creature. It seemed to be random how it happened.

He crossed to a window in order to peer upon the city of Moscow. As he focused through the buildings, across the river and over the cityscape, he beheld a sort of motion far on the horizon. He closed his eyes and the world shifted around him.

When next they opened, he was on the edge of a cliff. Pine trees poked up from the earth below like a spiky green carpet. A river wound its way through the valley, wide and flat in spots. Adrian was never an outdoorsman. This sort of view was unnatural for him, but for a moment, he pondered the beauty until the movement again snatched his attention, wandering beneath the canopy below.

Shift

Now beneath the trees just off the edge of the river, he stared at what had caught his attention all the way from the city, and he frowned. It was a wolf. Adrian’s eyes were wide as they stared into the yellow orbs looking back at him and in them, he saw memories. The side of a mountain. An axe dripping with blood. A feast table. Terrible lightning and endless howling.

“Lycāōn” he muttered with disdain and spit on the ground before the beast. It snarled in response, and he remembered that he tolerated the wolves. They operated among themselves; outsiders. He tolerated them because they were as much of this place as he was. All of them except this one: a rabid, monstrous creature. The first of its kind.

They circled one another, neither attacking, both wary. “Why did you summon me here?” he asked the elder wolf, but there was no response. The wolf began to back itself up, slinking into the darkness of the forest behind it until it was only a pair of yellow eyes and even those disappeared.

Adrian breathed a sigh of relief, and moved toward the water. On the rocky bank, he peered into the reflection of himself. His hair would be windswept but that there was no wind. His face was clean-shaven. His eyes cloaked with thought. Jaw firm. He wore simple clothes: slacks and a henley unbuttoned at the throat. He looked at himself as though he’d forgotten this was his form. He murmured and spoke into the bubbling water.

“Aletheia.”

He blinked at the sound that rolled from his lips. It was Greek, and he knew the meaning of its translation but not the intention behind what he sought.

So he spoke again. “Show me Aletheia,” and a second time, he cocked his head with curiosity. Was he asking to be shown aletheia, truth, or perhaps, awareness… remembering? Or was he asking to be shown something by Aletheia?

He frowned and shook his head at the futility of the exercise. When he gave himself away to the pull of the dream, strange things found him, and this must be one such moment. Perhaps nothing could be stranger than the rabid wolf.. but perhaps not.