Permanent Saturday: Oracle Bone
“There are many paths leading to the top of Mount Fuji, but there is only one summit-love.”-Morihei Ueshiba
Simple pleasures for simple minds, so the saying goes. Many a joke over the years has been made at the expense of Odie’s celebrated idiocy, surely to the delight of Garfield‘s Cat Person target demographic everywhere. And truth be known Odie is not a particularly complex being: Not so much irrational or prerational as nonrational, Odie is guided by mere existence. He doesn’t stop to let his superego overanlyse his actions largely because it’s not entirely clear he has a superego. Certainly Odie will never be in any danger of being paralyzed by an overactive mind. Within Garfield‘s Funny Animal satire of modernity, Odie offers the biggest challenge by being the biggest diegetic commentary on the strip’s fundamental artifice: Odie is the one animal character who acts in accordance with stereotypical Western ideas about animal minds-Pure, unthinking, instinctual being.
Certain schools of Taoism and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism would probably find a lot of commonality with Odie. As the embodiment of pure “I Exist”, his character lends itself well to being read as a metaphor for the simple bliss of calm, unexamined presentness. We are all seeking happiness and peace and, such sages would tell us, we deprive ourselves of them both when we focus too much on our thoughts and our conscious mind. True enlightenment, they would argue, exists simply within the concept of existing itself: Being aware of consciousness and being at peace with that. Other disciplines encourage the pursuit of enlightenment through trance and meditative states of keeping one’s mind similarly clear and empty. It is tempting then to leave the analysis here-After all, what’s the point of clouding our being with thoughts when true bliss and enlightenment can only be found within the absence of such things?
Garfield, however, has always been about presentness, so the argument that Odie and Odie alone is the gatekeeper to that knowledge does not hold. This is the setup to today’s joke, in which Garfield exclaims that “Odie has discovered the secret to happiness!”. The great tragedy of modernity is perhaps not a lack of presentness, but a lack of respect for presentness and its virtues, and this is what the constantly thinking cat satirizes. Happiness is something we all claim to be searching for (the United States even cites “the pursuit of happiness” as a central ideal upon which its nation was founded), yet so few of us are engaged in practice that actually allows us to manifest within a state of genuine bliss. And if anyone has found such a secret in the world of Garfield, it would certainly appear to be the dog: Odie is very rarely depressed or upset-His grin, while vacant, is indeed one of happiness. For a strip depicting a universe of unceasing boredom and banality, Odie’s unwavering contentment with himself and his lot in life provides a tempting role model many may wish to emulate.
…
Looper
Hello everyone, 
At first glance, there are relatively few similarities between 
At long last, 
I sit down with one of my favorite nonfiction writers, John Higgs, to talk about The Doctor Falls. Then, after a brief secret message from the future, I interview him about his new book Watling Street: Travels Through Britain and its Ever-Present Past, a psychogeographic tour of the oldest road in Britain. One that, notably, runs up Shooter’s Hill and through Northampton.