Written By Pavlov's Few, Sad, Last Surviving Dogs

Claire, I know that you and Wally will appreciate this poem, which I'm taking the liberty of excerpting here...

Pathetic, obbedient, we sit waiting as before,

conditioned to believe in a sequence,
in causality, matter, and motion.
We're caged in a fallacy, ergo prompter hoc.
We dabble in theories, dribble on the floor.
Our silver saliva is creating an ocean.

To stop reacting correctly
must be the last and slowest thing to learn.

These lines are from the final stanzas of "Written By Pavlov's Few, Sad, Last Surviving Dogs," a poem by Susanna Roxman. She's a Swedish poet who writes in English.

A poem written from the point of view of one of Pavlov's dogs: A clever poetic conceit that could easily result in an all-too cute 'n' cuddly poem. But Roxman's chilling poem interrogates both the dogs' and the reader's nostalgiac and theoretical inclinations. Flashbacks to innocent puppyhood feasts are tainted by the aging dogs' recognition of how they and their Master betrayed themselves: by subscribing to the underlying tenants of a self-objectifying school of thought.

"We dabble in theories, dribble on the floor."
Note to self: Let this be a warning about the occupational hazzards attendant to an academic or an intellectual life.