Caroline Feldman's blog

My dog doesn't like change. She likes the same morning routine, at the same time, all the time. She likes treats to be predictable, although she won't turn one down, ever. She knows the bedtime routine of treat-sleep. There are days she won't eat breakfast unless I give her American cheese first. When I get dressed, she assumes "walk time," even when I'm wearing “dressy” clothes. I used to refer to her as, "my autistic dog." Little did I know.

Is “Alice in Wonderland” a pathological product, the result of a single man’s “nerve cells and associated molecules” running amock? The tendency to reduce artistic, religious, or philosophical achievements to bodily ailment was aptly named by William James in “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” “Medical materialism,” he wrote, “finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as a hereditary degenerate” (9). And, I might add, Lewis Carroll as an addict or migraineur.