Phil Grimm's Progress

By D.E. Fraley

Ready to discover who you are? Ready to create your own story? Ready to play?

In a foreign land, the Traveler awakes from dreadful injury and embarks on a quest he doesn't understand. Magical guides instruct and deceive him as he seeks to answer the greatest question: "Who am I?" His journey to Mountain City enthralls the natives. Can he possibly be what they believe he is?

Based in current-day Pittsburgh, Phil Grimm is a spy, an energy consortium's secret weapon to crack environmental activist networks. As the nation polarizes and extremism festers, he works undercover, but an older secret defines and divides him.

Lila could be the genuine article, or she could be just another protester Phil uses to help his clients stay a step ahead. She creates alternate realities for a living and wants to invite humanity to play, but her impish nature conceals rare wisdom. Can she look beyond Phil's deceit? What can her game teach us?

We peer into alternative worlds, inspired by great sages – ancient and modern, scientific and spiritual, from Lao Tzu to Einstein. How do these realms relate to Phil's life, to the Traveler's, to the dystopian future we glimpse?

The bottom falls from Phil's world. When he loses himself, is there any way back – for him or for them? The Traveler and Lila may hold the keys.

As corporations wage biological warfare, civilization teeters. New leaders step forward to learn, but how do these pioneers serve a crumbling society? When cataclysm rocks the Earth, fragile islands of sanity form. Can anyone arrest the fall or prepare for what follows it?

In a story about stories, Phil Grimm's Progress shows us how to see the plots we inhabit and to explore others. Ultimately, it invites and inspires us to create our own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Water Way Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386998082

D.E. Fraley

Doug Fraley is the author of Phil Grimm’s Progress, a modern myth for anxious times. Doug's writing explores the space where story meets science, philosophy, and consciousness. You can find him poking beneath and behind the obvious, squinting at possible distortions between him and the apparent.  Favorite authors include Haruki Murakami, Ursula Le Guin, Eric Newby, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Alan Watts, and Iain Banks (with or without the M.). Outside reading and writing, Doug's curiosity involves a lot of play - singing, meditating, cycling and kayaking. Doug grew up near the Ohio River, forty-five miles downstream from Pittsburgh, and now lives in London, England, sharing life with a lovely girlfriend and three teenage sons.

Book preview

Phil Grimm’s Progress

A Modern Myth for Anxious Times

D.E. Fraley

Phil Grimm’s Progress Copyright © 2018 by D.E. Fraley. All Rights Reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. 

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. 

D.E. Fraley

Visit my website at www.dougfraley.me 

CONTENTS

Book One

1 Pilgrims, Stories, Worlds

2 The Stranger Without a Boat

3 The Man with a Hole in the Middle

4 A Well-Intended Intrusion

5 G0del’s World

6 Message Received

7 Names

8 Philip Grimm

9 Glasses

10 Lao2’s World

11 The Stranger's Friend

12 Lila Silversmith

13 3ckhart’s World

14 The Man Revisited

15 Dreams of Incompleteness

16 Headwind

17 1ila & Maya’s World

18 The Journal & The Bowl

19 Gathering Storm

20 The Falls

21 5chrödinger’s & 3instein’s Worlds

22 The Falls

Book Two

23 Fateful Reunion

24 Natura Egonomica

25 Relation

26 Balance

27 6autama’s World

28 The Maelstrom

29 The Fall

30 War Dance

31 Grandfather Mountain

32 The Laughing Padre

33 Ad7ashanti’s World

34 Ascent

35 Suspended Animation

36 Blind Contract

37 Raman4’s World

38 Mountain City

39 The Jester and the Sovereign

40 8arbour’s World

41 Rebirths

Book Three

42 Confluence

43 The First Dart

44 slumberfo9ey’s world

45 Bête Noir

46 Momentum

47 Rain Check

48 The Thing

49 Beacons™

50 Ur5ula’s World

51 History, Again

52 Beacons for Human Being

53 Lila’s Island

54 Lao2²

55 To Serve

56 DaisyCutter

57 Steel

58 Strike

59 Stone

60 String

61 Story

62 The Dehumanization

63 Suri V. Orter

64 Undivided

65 The River

66 Phil’s Gift

67 Y0ur world

The End

World Travel Guides

Thanks

Recommended Reading

Book One

Falls

1 Pilgrims, Stories, Worlds

You have a message from 1ila and Maya:

What a wonderfully woven world we inhabit. It conjures great characters who use their own voices or create others to entertain and enlighten us.

Tales, unfolding, shape what we see and feel. Loops of influence flow and tangle. The world begets pilgrims; pilgrims fashion stories; stories color the world.

Hence a fabric envelops us. Any thread—like any person—is partially, imperfectly traceable, in either direction, from the point at which we find it.

You find yourself here, living in the Old Story. In its day, this grand tale served us well. It was all it could be: useful, for a while, for many of us. Today, the story serves no one, not even the few on whom it bestows great gifts, for their prize comes at a price: isolation, anxiety, and—even amid this age’s richest—profound want. The story tricks the powerful into hijacking it, into believing they are its clever masters.

Worse, its plot has set, its cover closed. The pen is locked away. Listeners, the tellers in waiting, take the Old Story for truth. Ha! Its narrative isn’t the truth, no more than any new one will be. Unknowingly, we’ve sanctified the story, fortified it, and settled into it. Frozen for too long amid constant change, it has stopped working. Pilgrims bemoan the world the Old Story delivers, but do they reject the source—the assumptions the story and world sit atop?

Hark, the opportunists, the word twisters, tell us they (Only they!) can set everything right. The Old Story, they promise, will create the lives we want if we trust and empower them to make it great again. This is the way things happen when myths unravel yet continue to hold us.

How sensitive is your dogma detector? Do you know a tale is being told—sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted? Do you sleepwalk?

Are you the creator of an epic or a creature within one? An author or a character? The performer or the audience? In short, who are you?

Perhaps you are each of these. Might your plot, intersecting with myriad others, make you a linchpin that holds them together, an arc that spans the small gaps of choice separating them? What mystery!

Welcome, Pilgrim! Browse as many worlds as you wish. Step into your character. See your story.

When you are ready, create your world.

In your hands, you hold an invitation. Before you stands an open door.

2 The Stranger Without a Boat

This evening I sat an uneasy four paces from the Stranger in his blue jacket. We were alone—only hare and jackal within five miles on the plateau. The Stranger’s manner suggested no intent to harm me, but my hand rested on my stick just in case. I’d heard enough about his kind to know I must be alert.

As we spoke, I relaxed—without letting down my guard. The Stranger seemed almost normal, if dim-witted. He marveled at my boat as if it might spring to life at any moment, fearful of all the red skin stood for.

The Stranger’s question was either naïve or manipulative. Chancing the cactus wine, I decided the simplest answer was best. I drag the boat because my journey depends on it.

He gawped, dumbfounded. Need we fear these Blues? Because he asked politely, I recounted my tale.

"My travels brought me to a great river, and on its banks, I met the People. This brave tribe nursed my injuries, fed me, and shared their knowledge over more than a week of weeks.

"As a parting gift, they gave me this craft, instructed me in its use, and showed me how it made my goal attainable. With it I could progress toward my destination; the river was the only route through otherwise impassable terrain.

"After leaving them, I paddled downstream for weeks, dwarfed between white cliffs. The vessel before you was inseparable from my voyage, indistinguishable from progress. Nothing had served me so steadfastly, so flawlessly. The boat was all I had and all I needed.

"After some weeks, the Man pulled alongside me in the stream. Handing me a special fishing pole, he explained how to increase my catch—for food and tribute. After explaining color’s importance, he described how to paint my boat red, to show everyone I was an honorable man, ready to defend the good and the right. The Man promised to share tales of good and right, as part of our nascent tribute bond."

The Stranger interrupted to inquire further about the Man. One story was enough for a day, so I said he might hear the Man’s story under the next day’s setting sun, should our acquaintance survive the night. I continued.

"As my travels progressed, the boat carried and protected me. Several times natives, no doubt Blues, attacked from the bluffs dominating the route.

"Finally, the stream emerged from the canyon onto a vast plain. This signaled the next stage in my journey. I left the river, turned to ascend the chalky escarpment, and then traveled north along the high plateau, toward Mountain City.

With this boat, I’ve trekked many weeks since mounting the escarpment. Today, we stumbled upon your camp, your color, and your confused curiosity.

But, stuttered the Stranger, this is but a tenth of the distance to Mountain City.

Was this meant to surprise me?  My map, too, depicted this challenge.

Then... (The Stranger struggled to construct his thoughts.) ...why do you still drag the boat?

I explained—patiently, I think—the one truth I’d discovered: this vessel was essential to any progress. I’d gleaned this from the People’s knowledge. The Man endorsed it. Moreover, my experience confirmed it. Without the boat, I wouldn’t be here.

But the boat’s usefulness, its necessity, ended when you left the river. There is no stream between here and Mountain City with water enough for the craft to float.

Obviously, the Stranger’s information was outdated, as was the original map the People had drawn for me. After my first week of tribute to the Man, he had improved the map, showing the second river that stretched across the high plain to Mountain City. I showed the Stranger this map.

Sorry, but that river does not exist, the Stranger said. Even if it did, the land from here to Mountain City climbs, so you would labor against the stream. The current would overwhelm even heroic paddling efforts, sweeping you away from your goal.

This was my first real taste of blueness. For this Stranger had embarked on a two-fold deceit. First, he sought to discredit the Man, to whom I owed so much.

Beyond this, he invoked bizarre, false notions of nature. As if every stream must flow from high to low. Has science not proved liquid moves upward and downward, in a great cycle? The seas replenish the clouds to create rain. In plants, water from the soil rises to nourish the leaves. Precious blood reaches our heads just as surely as it does our feet.

This Stranger, ignorant of basic boat and water dynamics, spoke as if he possessed unique knowledge or a special capacity for understanding. This blue trickster implied he knew something I didn’t. The Man had warned me of such arrogant sleight of tongue. This, more than anything save their moral barrenness, defined the Blues.

I told the Stranger what I thought of his theories and attempts to sow confusion. Were I not recovering from grave injury, I might have given him a smack for his insolence. As I retired to my camp for the night, I warned of the powerful red hull in which I would rest. Surely, he knew better than to chance truth’s wrath by accosting me.

The moon painted the surrounding limestone in its own image. The stars kept their peace that night, as I did mine, in the comfort and security of my boat.

3 The Man with a Hole in the Middle

Last night passed without incident. Today was a tribute day. The hunting—alternating patient stealth and violent attack amid the craggy, low brush—occupied me until evening. At sunset, the Stranger and I again spiraled one another until we sat on either side of his fire. He placed the cactus wine near my designated stone seat. The boat remained a hundred yards away at my bivouac.

The Stranger remembered last night’s rebuke, so he avoided discussing my planned route to Mountain City. His curiosity returned to the Man, and I proudly shared my limited knowledge.

"The Man has extensive powers, most founded in his keen grasp of truth. Others, including myself, cannot always see reality until he shows us how to interpret it. The great successes these powers have brought the Man include a thriving business in boat maintenance and his related, more spiritual, tribute franchise. The Man shares abundantly in these affairs, as my personal benefit proves.

"As I mentioned, neither my boat nor my identity would be red had the Man not introduced me to color’s significance. He showed me how to paint my hull and how to make and secure my tribute bowl to it. As one aspect of our ongoing tribute relationship, he gives me further advice on watercraft care.

He gave me a unique fishing rod, one he had acquired at great personal risk and expense. This tool allows me to catch all I can eat as well as tribute fish. These I submit to him, thus playing my small part in our association.

The Stranger ventured into sensitive territory by again referring to the arid nature of our surroundings on the high plain. But the special rod has been no help for food or anything else in the days since leaving the river, has it?

I stood. The rod’s power is perhaps less direct in my current hunting for hare. The Man assures me, however—and I need no further convincing—that without its powers, I wouldn’t enjoy the predatory success I do on the high plain. And, of course, once I reach the second river, the rod will be at least as productive as it was while I navigated the first.

The Stranger was blessedly silent, so I re-took my seat. Maybe he could learn after all, despite his blueness. He asked me to explain tribute, so to that I turned.

Tribute is what I give the Man as a token of my gratitude for his selfless and priceless help. Traditionally, it’s a gift of fish. However, as you will no doubt already be thinking...when fish are unavailable, I must substitute another offering.

The Stranger smiled, nodding to thank me for anticipating his point.

These days on the high plain, I send hare. The Man is extremely flexible in this regard, happy to accept a wide variety of tribute, including gems, precious metals, and diverse currencies.

His curiosity remained. How do you know how much to give?

"The Man is especially helpful on this front. By extraordinary means I’ll explain, he’s able to suggest the correct form and size of tribute, as well as the proper times for submitting the gifts.

"For you to understand the Man’s special capacity for calculating these things, I must help you picture a unique aspect of his body. The Man has, passing from his belly to his back, a hole. This hole defies concealment, for it also acts upon any clothing the Man wears. So, when you look at the Man from the front or rear, you see through to the other side.

The hole’s size varies day by day, and the Man’s knowledge of these fluctuations allows him to divine and share the need for tribute. When tribute arrives—by a mystical process I shall describe—the hole diminishes in size, although it never disappears. Always, the hole expands with the passing days, signaling to the Man the time for further tribute. It is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a wonder.

I paused, for I’d run out of breath. A short silence might allow the Stranger to absorb this mystery. Then I would take his questions.

But he sat, impassive, nodding for me to continue. None too impressed with my unappreciative audience, I proceeded to the next miracle, which should jar him from his lethargy. "You may find the tool for transmitting messages and rendering tribute even more intriguing. The heart of this exchange is the tribute bowl, which the Man generously helped me affix to my boat.

"It is imperative—for my welfare—that I take great care of the bowl. I must make sure it has eight cups of water followed by one of dust, and I must consult it each morning and evening. The Man sends messages as his hole dictates. These form words written in the dust floating on the water, telling me what tribute to send.

When I garner the necessary tribute, I empty the bowl of dust and water, then place the tribute in the bowl. It disappears as it passes to the Man. Once, boat-to-boat with the Man during this ritual, I watched as the hole shrank, just as the tribute evaporated from the bowl. I wept in awe.

Still, the Stranger failed to acknowledge the fabulous nature of my revelations. Stupidity would explain his calm, but so would expertise in deception. Or did pride demand he remain unimpressed? Regardless, I would waste no more breath. Now, you know more about the Man, and I grow tired. My boat beckons me to rest.

The Stranger thanked me, admitted he had several questions, and asked if we might speak in the morning before I left. The nerve! I said my departure would be an early one.

Unfortunately, this dull Stranger’s belated curiosity will remain unsatisfied.

4 A Well-Intended Intrusion

Journal entry:

Traveler, please pardon my use of your notebook. Since you plan to leave with first light, I’ve taken the liberty of writing this note. I do this only to help in your quest.

You may worry I stole into the boat in the night, accessing the journal. Please rest easy: I respect your privacy. No, I left the note in much the same way as the Man sends instructions in the tribute bowl’s floating dust.

My questions are intended to enlighten you rather than to inform me. Please consider them in your own time. Your answers are only for yourself:

How did you come upon the People and sustain the injuries they treated?

Did the People wear red or blue? Did they assign any deeper meaning to these colors?

Was it difficult to catch fish before the Man gave you the special rod?

Does the Man benefit from your belief in colors and your certainty that the boat remains necessary?

Are you not curious about the hole in the Man’s middle?

Why do you travel to Mountain City?

My affairs take me to the Red Hills in the coming months. These beautiful monuments lie on your path too. With luck, we might meet there.

I sign off, with good wishes, in the role you assign me,

The Stranger

P.S. I will send cactus wine to the tribute bowl from time to time, for your health.

5 G0del’s World

Welcome to G0del’s World, which is relentlessly logical. It explores and defines the reaches of certainty, the realm of provability. Here, our logic proves its own limits, which is humbling. But it’s also beautiful because we wake to the creative power of our stories, and we open them to living adaptation.

This world is inspired by Kurt Gödel, a friend of Einstein and among history’s most famous logicians. In 1931, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems dealt a killer blow to our quest for perfect knowledge of the universe. If you imagine our race for certainty as a runner in the one-hundred-meter dash, then Gödel tripped him up as he left the starting blocks.

✽✽✽

You jump in. Fear strikes as you feel something envelop your head. When you reach to wrestle the attacker from your skull, you find Sherlock Holmes’s cap. In one hand you carry his pipe. The other holds an (empty) airplane sick bag.

You’re investigating a new tongue—the formal language of logic. G0del’s World­ uses special symbols and rules. To make your detective work easier, your visual field splits into left and right panes. On the left sit lines of abstract symbols—this new language. On the right, their interpretations, which look like arithmetic. For instance, an indecipherable line of squiggles in the left pane corresponds to 3+1 = 1+3 in the right.

Some lines are in orange text. A serious man (in your mind, you dub him Serious Guy) with a large cranium and unkempt hair explains, The orange lines are the axioms, the things we take as given, without proof. Serious Guy nods toward a button in front of you, labeled Compute. Curious, you press it. New lines appear at a furious rate, scrolling up beyond view.

Maybe I can help here, interrupts a cartoon owl with David Attenborough’s voice. Even you would sound wise with that accent. He continues in tones that comfort you, The whole point here is to ground anything that is true in certainty, to place it beyond logical doubt. Certainty is the required property of the pane on the left, and the special language is designed to ensure it. Truth is a property that lives in the right pane. We want to generate every possible true statement, while making sure not to generate any false ones along the way.

Just as you think, There must be more interesting worlds out there than this, the owl snaps his fingers to placate you with donuts and pretzels.

The owl continues, If we exhaust true statements without generating any untrue ones, then we attain perfect knowledge in the realm of this formal system and its interpretation. Alas, it’s just this goal Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems show is beyond our grasp for all but the simplest domains.

The pretzels are gone. As you tackle the donuts, you decide you’re fed up with looking at lines of symbols. Why are you showing me this? I don’t see the point. What does a bunch of symbols have to do with me?

Attenborough Owl tilts his head forward and looks at you over the rim of his glasses. "Most of us never deal with these logical systems. What we do instead is assume many of the statements we utter, day in and day out, are certain, beyond logical doubt. Are they? Oh, you don’t get motion sickness, do you?"

The floor falls from beneath you, and you plummet. You seem to be falling down a chute lined with images, memories, big decisions from your life. Then you fall past a structure, like a building, but the walls, floors, and girders are elements of your worldview, your model of reality. Those pretzels and donuts gurgle in your gut.

The descent takes you past line after line of symbols. Attenborough Owl hovers before you, calm as could be. On your left are lines of indecipherable logic language. On your right, lines of arithmetic. Many are orange. You fall forever. You spend eternity falling, but the lines just keep rushing at you from below and whizzing past. Attenborough Owl is still with you:

Gödel noticed that the lines on the right looked no less symbolic than those on the left. The numerals were symbols too. He built a decoder list that matched, at a symbol level, the numerals to the symbols of the logic language. Translating the left-side statements into numeric symbols, he created a loop in which the numbers were—I’m speaking loosely here—saying things about themselves. He made them self-referential. The numbers turned back on themselves like those pretzels and donuts in your belly.

With the unwelcome image of food turning back on itself, you stifle a belch.

Gödel thought of other quirky instances of self-reference and the tricks they played: Everything I say is a lie or This statement is untrue. Think about them...

Yes, you are still falling.

Crafty man that he was, Gödel formulated a statement that declared its own unprovability. He had used logic to prove its own limits, showing us that perfect knowledge is unattainable in any complex domain.

Can we stop falling now? I think I’m going to be sick. What’s with the whole trap door thing anyway?

"That was Serious Guy’s idea—a way to help you realize that your conceptual beliefs have no bedrock, no foundation in certainty. The beliefs may be true, but not in the certain sense you assume they are."

As Serious Guy joins in, you sense you’re no longer falling. "Certainty’s reach will always fall short of truth’s. In fact, logicians since Gödel have shown much of even our simplest mathematics is not and cannot be anchored in the realm of proof. Remember, perched atop mathematics is physics—our most fundamental scientific conception of the universe. Like tortoises on elephants on lotus leaves, our chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics rest on physics in the reductivist hierarchy."

To show you’re no slouch, you point out, Plus, any of those orange lines, our assumptions, could be untrue. Our unquestioning belief in them could be erroneous.

A superb point, human, says the owl, elbowing Serious Guy, winking, and nodding your way. We should all question our assumptions more than we do. Perhaps you’ll look more closely at your own after this.

Time to get practical. So, what do we do?

Attenborough Owl is ready for the challenge, We could cling to certainty, imagining and exploring only within provability’s narrow realms. In G0del’s World, we don’t do this, because we know it would isolate us intellectually from much, if not most, of existence. Certainty’s radius sweeps but a tiny fraction of the prosaic space we traverse daily, let alone the galaxy’s mysteries.

Before you opens a vast black space, speckled with occasional twinkles of light.

Serious Guy helps, That’s not the galaxy. It’s a visual metaphor for the realm of truth.

Uh-huh. What are the little pin-pricks of light?

The bits that are provable.

The owl takes over. "We don’t want to limit