Ask Marlowe: Riddlers vs. Jokers

By Philip Marlowe

In a world full of gangsters, coneroos and whoever that manipulative femme fatale was that I found under my office radiator last night (hips like a loaded revolver on a hair-trigger, voice like gravel sliding down a chute wrapped in cigarette smoke and cheap velvet), they say a detective shouldn’t moonlight as an advice columnist. Too much risk, too many cranks, too many letters that smell like the bottom drawer where hope goes to die. The cops don’t like my looks, the mob tolerates me and the liquor store clerk calls me “sir” now, which means I’ve aged into respectability — and nothing good ever comes after that.

Thing is, folks keep spilling their problems to me anyway, usually outside a bar or inside a holding cell. So I might as well invoice the universe. Pull up a chair. Keep your hands where I can see ’em. And if you hear something skittering in the walls — don’t worry. It’s probably just that dame again — or the ghost of her no-good murdered husband. Let’s crack open this week’s haul of philosophical junk mail before the smoke alarm gets philosophical back.

1) Dear Marlowe:

They say I casually reinvented the self-referential paradox, the liar’s paradox and the entire psychology of self-esteem with this one simple observation: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” But deep down, do you think I was just trying to save myself from mandatory attendance at dull cocktail parties? — Groucho, Fake Eyebrows, Missouri

Marlowe replies:

Kid, that line of yours is a Möbius strip with a cigar stub. It ain’t philosophy — it’s a fire escape disguised as a joke. You weren’t dodging paradoxes; you were dodging some Rotary Club gambling racketeer named Eddie Mars who wants to corner you with slides of his stamp collection. A man who paints on a moustache fears only two things: intimacy and hors d’oeuvres shaped like dental equipment. Any club that welcomes you with a cheese ball on a doily is less a social institution and more a cry for help. If the club serves aspic, leave immediately.

2) Dear Marlowe:

A barber I know is “the one who shaves all those who do not shave themselves.” So … who shaves the barber? If he shaves himself, he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, her does. Oh, my nerves.

— Bertrand Russell, Brixton Prison

Marlowe replies:

Berty, baby, your barber’s a self-destruct button disguised as a man with steady hands. Who shaves him? Nobody who wants to keep the universe in one piece. You cooked up a fella who unravels reality with a morning routine. Let him grow a beard so big it qualifies as low-income housing. Better a hairy barber than a cosmic implosion before breakfast. And tell him to keep his whiskers away from that dame in my office. She nests in facial hair.

3) Dear Marlowe:

I wrote “Stop procrastinating” at the top of my to-do list, then put off crossing it off. Am I a perfect, symmetrical failure? (P.S. You don’t have to answer this right away. Take all the time you need.) — Hamlet, Elsinore Castle

Marlowe replies:

Prince, you’re not a failure — you’re a virtuoso of vacillation. You don’t cross off tasks; you turn them into five-act grease fires with soliloquies and weaponry. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to pull the trigger on this one: Are you old enough, to be young enough, to be good enough, to be bad? Are you bad enough, to be good enough, to do the thing you shouldn’t when you should?

4) Dear Marlowe:

I have no desire to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. How do you like my chances? — Woody Allen, a fancy penthouse on 935th Avenue

Marlowe replies:

Your chances? Poorer than your alibi for taking those racy pix of a teenage Soon-Yi when you were still involved with her vindictive adoptive mother. But in any case, eternity is hard to pull off unless you’re a vampire, a tax code or a Dick Van Dyke. Biology doesn’t grant extensions. Entropy doesn’t do callbacks. Your neuroses might live forever, but you won’t. Best shot at immortality is a legacy — preferably one that ages better than your interviews. Try vitamins. Or maybe a psychotherapist who still thinks you’re Wally Cox. (Ever notice, by the way, that “psychotherapist” encodes “psycho the rapist”?)

5) Dear Marlowe:

My guru told me life is a deep well; then he pulled up the rope and left me down here. I’m supposed to infer, I guess, that meaning is created, not found. And speaking of inferring, any idea where that infernal meowing is coming from? — Little Johnny Flynn, Ding Dong Bell

Marlowe replies:

Johnny, you didn’t gain enlightenment; you got ghosted from above. Any guru who leaves you in the lurch is less a spiritual guide and more a landlord of moist despair. Meaning is made, sure — but usually by the guy holding the rope, not the chump at the bottom. As for Pussy’s GPS co-ordinates, I have it on good authority that most guys don’t have a clue. Ask Tommy Stout.

6) Dear Marlowe:

My students and I revisited the trolley problem, but then everyone refused to touch the lever because they “didn’t want to be responsible.” So the trolley unionized and demanded better labour conditions. Thus the accident was avoided; the philosophy conference was not. Was this a bona fide moral dilemma? — Baba Ram Dass, Esalen Institute

Marlowe replies:

The trolley problem, professor, is that old chestnut where you get to decide whether you yank a lever to kill one person or do nothing and let the trolley splatter five. A moral choice wrapped in steel tracks and bad hypotheticals. Your students refusing to touch the lever? That’s the most moral thing they’ve done. Not because it’s right — because it’s human. You avoided carnage and still had to sit through a panel called “Utilitarianism and Snack Breaks.” In philosophy, that’s as close as you get to divine punishment.

7) Dear Marlowe:

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. Have I forgotten this before? — Steven Wright, No Fixed Digression

Marlowe replies:

Kid, you’re trapped in a mental rerun directed by an eternally recurring Friedrich Nietzsche. You’ve forgotten this before, and you’ll forget forgetting it, which should feel familiar by lunch. Confusion is life’s way of giving you a free reboot. Enjoy the ride. PBS reruns of Antique Roadshow don’t get looped this gracefully.

8) Dear Marlowe:

If the cat is alive and dead until observed, who cleans the litter box in the meantime? — Erwin Schrödinger, Many Worlds Monism

Marlowe replies:

Doc, Old Mr. Johnson’s cat doubles as a felony and a metaphor. Nobody feeds it until someone opens the box, because until then it’s both starving and writing its memoir. They thought it was a goner but the cat came back, the very next day. Still, better put a waterproof liner down just to be on the safe side.

9) Dear Marlowe:

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Philosophers say no. Lumberjacks tell me to stop asking. Is this about boundaries? — Joe from the I Am Canadian Beer Commercials

Marlowe replies:

Joe, philosophers argue about sound; lumberjacks argue with sawdust and win. They’re not pondering metaphysics — they’re trying not to lose toes to satisfy your curiosity. So yes, it’s boundaries. Respect the flannel. Men with axes don’t need or appreciate existential commentary on the job.

10) Dear Marlowe:

Me: “Another beer?” Descartes: “I think not.” Poof — he disappears faster than Norm Peterson whenever Sam wants to talk about his growing tab. Was it something I said? — Woody from Cheers

Marlowe replies:

Woody, a man who thinks himself into existence can’t think himself out of a beer order without falling through the trapdoor of his own logic. He negated himself right off the barstool. Next time, tell him to order a double and stay in one dimension at a time.

To all you Jean-Paul Sartre-chokes and Immanuel Kant-decides …

Send those unsolvable puzzles, paradoxes with cigarette burns, and letters written after your third fallacy of the night to:

Philip Marlowe Care of Dr. Lotta Hitschmanova Unitarian Service Committee 56 Sparks Street Ottawa 4

Where the neon flickers like a dying conscience, the sheets are only clean in alternate universes, and the advice is strictly cash-on-the-barrelhead. I’ll be here — same lamp, same smoke, same bottle half-empty and still sussing out dangerous dames hissing under the radiator.