And my mind has ascended:
The strip spoke to me saying its final life lesson:
Greetings everyone! Sandbox Big Brother 5: All Stars will be starting on July 28th and unlike other seasons it will be played over Discord! For the first time we also will have a Viewing Lounge/Discussion Chat so you can spectate the season more closely, getting to watch the Evictions live, as well as logs and other announcements before they are posted on EM. Specially useful since we know how often the EM servers have gone down lately!
If you haven't received the invitation to play in the season yet then it's safe to assume you won't be in it as a player unless we have a last minute drop-out. We appreciate not outing whether or not you are in the season one way or another. As an additional note, if you were an ex-player, in order to keep cast leak to a minimum, you will not be able to see any channels until the season starts, but you can join the server anyways and be ready as soon as the season starts!
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They will plug themselves into an information grid, and they will have access... They will read every Garfield comic, 80,000 years from now, a child will see a simple Jon Arbuckle, reading a newspaper. He will feel around for something, but that something is not there... He will lift his head and think...
"Now where could my pipe be?"
...and Garfield will be smoking the pipe, and Jon will yell "GARFIELD!"
...and what then? 80,000 years from now?
What is an idea? Where does it live? How does it manifest itself? Can it live forever? Will it live forever, outside of these physical husks of ours, our bodies?
...and Jon Arbuckle, and Garfield, started merely as thoughts... but they've become so much more. That old cliché rings true, they've taken on a life of their own... and life may not be what we think. Life brings to mind a beating heart, breathing lungs, blinking eyes...
...but the real life is in our imaginations... and who better embodies the definition of imagination if not a simple man... a cartoonist, who puts his ideas to paper so that they may live on, so that our children, and our children's children, and their children's children's children can access the wealth of ideas that have accumulated thus far...
...and as the specific people come and go, their physical bodies will be born, and grow, and die... but their thoughts will remain... and Jim Davis' comics, his glorious Garfield comics... are recorded ideas of his, that will still be here.
Even when the Earth is no longer inhabitable, and humanity has long since moved away to bigger planets, they'll carry with them a record, a record we all keep; mark my words... and look at what we've started, what is... What is the internet? What is the online world, if not a record? Never-ending feed of ideas, immortal ideas... forever placed in the ether of dualism.
Will he live forever?
The universe will continue to spread, and spread outward, and... entropy will turn a chaotic infinity into a homogenous, controlled system. This will take billions of years, and in that time, humans will push technology to heights we can't imagine. We'll explore and inhabit space, and occupy more and more of the universe, just as time allowed our ancestors to... multiply in numbers, and populate more and more of the Earth.
Immortality through thought, a... a major theme in literature and philosophy...
...and isn't that what Mister Jim Davis himself has achieved?
"Now where could my pipe be?"
This is his reality, this is where cognition, and the power and function of the mind take over. As Plato believed, the body is just a shell for Jon Arbuckle; yes, he can use his physical body to read his paper or cross his legs, but these inputs of touch, sight, hearing, et cetera, these senses are the triggers of the mind, as we see here, the mind... is something greater. It is the originator of ideas, and ideas are forever. Immortal.
Jon does not speak this question aloud, so Jim Davis is also exploring the mind/body duality... Jon's question operates on the level of a literal question... but it also examines the nature of reality. Jim Davis' epistemological approach tells us something about the human condition; Jon's thoughts remain the focal point of this strip.
The comic is, quite literally, centered around his thought.
Another close look at the strip, and we see that Jim Davis chose to draw Jon thinking his question.
"Now where could my pipe be?"
The Pipe Strip is just an instance in the lives of Jon and Garfield.
Perhaps Jon is not a pragmatist at all... let's look at this again. Maybe Jon is exhibiting the traits of a rationalist thinker; his question, "Now where could my pipe be?" is a clue that his thought process stems from the early rationalist questions posed by René Descartes. The well-known quote, "I think, therefore I am," attributed to Descartes, is applicable.
The comic has been running for over thirty years, and to try and boil that all down is just, well... it's impossible. I think the only way that any historian worth his salt will agree with me is to look at individual moments... isolated instances, single comic strips.
Can I discuss this one strip in the context of the entire run of Garfield? Yes, I do that just as a film historian might analyze one movie in relation to the history of all movies, or a war enthusiast might look at a single battle's impact on an entire war.
Speaking philosophically about the entire Garfield franchise, it's an incredibly accurate depiction of life. Its bold lines and bright colors are merely a facade, a... a red herring, a lie. This cartoon is not a cartoon at all, it is not a... caricature. It is not caricature despite adopting caricature as its visual style and tone.
...but I don't really like to speak in broad sweeping generalizations about Garfield.
Characters are reduced, to make them recognizable, definable; a story needs a good guy, a story needs a bad guy... but rarely is one person defined in such black and white terms. Even Garfield, with all his bad behavior, Machiavellian motivation and general ne'er-do-well attitude, can be kind and thoughtful.
You just have to find that rare strip.
...But isn't there some universal truth in this approach? How can any one man, how can Jon Arbuckle be just one thing? How can any of us be just one thing? We're... an amalgamation of ideas, of emotions... conducts and functions, thoughts and feelings... Jon Arbuckle may very well inhabit tenets of nearly every major philosophical tract known to man.
We all might.
This kind of empirical and logical thinking lends credence to the idea that Jon is, indeed, a pragmatist... Although, it is hard to entirely ignore the rest of the Garfield comic canon.
While Garfield is consistently anarchic, and embraces the chaos and absurdity of life... Jon Arbuckle exhibits an erratic, unpredictable mix of philosophical behaviors. At times, he is borderline; delusional, an idealist, an almost slap-happy version of Don Quixote. Other moments, he is rigid, nearly to the point of being obsessive... somewhat like a structuralist, and certainly has streaks of sarcasm and negativity that might classify him as a skeptic.
The first ideology that comes to mind when thinking of objects in the tangible world... is pragmatism... Is Jon Arbuckle a pragmatist? His beliefs stem from a useful, coherent view of his environment... a sort of cause-and-effect understanding of his world helps him.
A: Deduce that his pipe is missing... and B: Catches his cat, Garfield, using the pipe.
I think it's important to view the Pipe Strip in philosophical terms... We've touched briefly on the notion of existentialism; that theme is very prevalent in this strip. Garfield is, in fact, a modern existential anti-hero... but if Garfield embodies the bewilderment in a meaningless life, what is Jon? What are the telltale signs that inform Jon's philosophical standpoint? His approach, what style of thinking he represents?
Jon is depicted as being grounded in the material world... a world of things; he is surrounded by objects, and he touches these objects, he interacts with them. The newspaper, the end table, the chair... his clothes, all these physical things make up Jon's world. In some sense, even his cat Garfield is an object to him, a thing...
I have a feeling that if I see this plumber again, we'll be sharing stories like two old friends... because we've been united by art. We have a common love for Jim Davis and his characters, his writings... The humor, the drama, the... that rascal Garfield, the cat...
Oh, and by the way, if you're wondering what I was having for lunch that day, it was a ham sandwich with an apple and potato chips... in a bag, I had a soda as well.
Heh... ah, then I laughed and laughed... and he smiled, and went back into the courtroom.
I walked away, knowing that the plumber and I, two complete strangers, bonded over this Garfield comic... You see, life imitates art, becomes a common ground.
I slapped him on the back and said, "Garfield!"
He looked so confused, so I said it again... then, I said "Your orange cat took it!"
He looked at me and said, "What? I can't find my pipe wrench, " and I said, "No! No, no, say it... like how you just said it..."
He scratched his head, and repeated, "Now where could my pipe wrench be?"
"Now, where could my pipe wrench be?"
Well, at this, I leaped off the bench, sandwich still in hand, and I rushed over, I shouted, "What was that you said!?"
I noticed, and thought, "Well, that's sort of similar to the Garfield comic, in a way. Someone looks for something, can't find it,"... but, yes, that probably happens billions of times a day around the world...
...but then, this plumber... put his hands on his hips... then, he scratched his head, and he said aloud...
A few times, this happened... I thought nothing of it; just a plumber, doing some work at the Municipal Court... but then he came out, and looked through his van, and it was clear...
He couldn't find something.
