Popular Culture Review 30.2
to remember , there must be a forgetting ; in order to know , there must be an unknowning . The river of forgetfulness is spilling its banks , Morton ’ s Ghost sings . And we know , then , that we are in safer hands than Hamlet ’ s father ’ s , because for this interlocutor aletheia / truth is not merely about remembering but about forgetting as well . Lethe is always only on the way toward veracity : truth necessarily spills it banks .
Though Morton draws from many sources on Offerings , from film to novels to painting , he returns always to the Greeks . Allusions to Greek philosophers , gods , and myth abound . The whole of the conceit of the song-cycle�and Offerings is a consistent whole , a continuous narrative with all of the stops and starts that the narrative of a life demonstrates�is the Platonic idea that before we were born , our souls , that part of us that is eternal and perfect , used to live in a realm populated by things that are eternal and perfect as well . Our souls , that is , were once in the realm of the Forms , hanging out with Triangle , Blue , Two , Justice , and every other universal that finds its origin in the realm of Being rather than the land of becoming . When we are born into a body , Plato argues , we forget . Lethe ’ s waters wash over us and we struggle to remember all that we knew in the realm of the Forms . In this way , birth is a kind of death . The infant awakes in a new world to start a new life , but such awakening is also like falling asleep�like a Shade entering Hades .
As a result of this complicated process , education is not really an act of writing onto a blank slate but a process of recollection . As we go through life , we don ’ t so much learn new things as remember what we used to know already . The possibility that this cycle repeats is left open , each incarnation of a soul into flesh being both an awakening and a falling asleep , a birth and
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