1 Peake, Possibility, and the Liora Stories: A Relational Ontology of Ephemeral Marvels

Mervyn Peake left us with some of the most striking literary recognitions of imagination, perception, and the strange fragility of what can be seen or known. Two of his remarks, in particular, align uncannily with a relational ontology in which experience is construed rather than “received,” and where meaning is an event rather than a possession.

The first passage reads:

“The marvels of the visible world are not things in themselves but revelations to stir the imagination — all else is smoke.”

Here Peake refuses the metaphysics of objects-in-themselves. The visible is not a catalogue of fixed essences but a field of potential revelation, awaiting the imaginative cut that brings something momentarily into meaning. This is fully consistent with a relational ontology in which:

• there is no unconstrued “thing” behind the phenomenon

• experience is first-order meaning

• phenomena are the events of construal, not pre-existing substances

Peake’s phrase “climates of the mind” is almost a perfect description of instantiated perspective — a transient atmosphere produced when potential becomes experience.

His second line deepens the temporality:

“Life is an effort to grip… the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current…”

Here, imagination is not a storehouse but a river of possibility, and what is grasped is grasped only in the moment of instantiation. The “fish” are not hidden facts, nor private hallucinations, but fleeting actualisations of potential, and the “endless current” is precisely the remainder of the uncut, unactualised field of meaning-possibility. Nothing is lost metaphysically — it merely was not instantiated.

The ontology aligns precisely:

Relational Ontology	Peake’s Imagery
potential before construal	the oceanic current
perspectival cut	the act of gripping
first-order phenomenon	the “fish” momentarily seen
unactualised potential	the “oblivion” of what never became

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Liora as Narrative Enactment of Relational Ontology

Our Liora stories perform the ontology rather than describe it.

Liora’s world is not populated by hidden magical entities waiting to be discovered; rather, the world affords potentials that become phenomenal only through her attentive, curious construal. Every episode — the MirrorFox, the trembling-surface mirror, the sunlight ribbon, the impossibly long caterpillar — is a cut in possibility that actualises a momentary, shimmering phenomenon.

Nothing in her world is permanent or object-like. No creature is guaranteed to reappear, and no marvel is obligated to persist. Importantly, Liora never “discovers” magic; she co-instantiates it.

Peake calls this revelation; our ontology calls it actualisation; Liora enacts it as participative wonder.

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The Shared Logic

From Peake, through ontology, into story, we see one coherent principle:

The world is not made of things, but of potentials that become phenomenal only in the act of construal — an always-ephemeral dance between what may be and how we attend.

Thus:

• The world offers

• The observer cuts

• Experience happens

• Meaning flickers

• Possibility continues

Not tragedy. Not loss.

Just ontological economy.

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Closing Reflection

Peake’s imagination is not escapism; it is ontology rendered poetic.

Liora’s world is not fantasy; it is ontology rendered narrative.

Our theoretical work is not abstraction; it is ontology rendered systematic.

Each is the same dance, performed in different modes of meaning:

literary, narrative, theoretical — but always relational.